With its varied landscape of hills and mountains, New Zealand has an abundance of marginal land on its slopes. This land is currently used in a variety of enterprises, such as pasture and farm land. However, marginal land is typically associated with higher rates of erosion, shallow topsoil, expensive fencing, and other issues like livestock deaths from falls. There is currently interest in deploying these marginal lands to different uses to align with several environmental and production related goals. This paper contributes to the discussion on marginal land by exploring three different scenarios related to afforestation in the Manawatu area. To analyse these scenarios we bring together several complex and spatially explicit datasets, which are linked using economic modelling tools and benefits transfer. The thin local literature and preference for local studies produce several methodological challenges familiar to smaller countries. We illuminate several tradeoffs in a large valuation exercise, in particular between current advances in international and local studies.