AS a young forest scientist, I chose to work in the farming landscape in Australia. Despite the slogans of our conservation groups, the environmental frontline was not occurring at the forest blockade; it was at the farm gate. In just 200 years of white settlement, we had cleared the native forests off more than 60 per cent of the continent to create family farms. That’s about 15 times the area of the entire UK. The result was the greatest extinction of native animals and plants seen in modern times, massive land degradation problems, the release of millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, and mounting animal welfare issues due to heat and cold stress in farm stock.
Seeing that forestry – even the act of harvesting trees for timber – had a role to play in repairing the environmental damage and helping develop resilient family farms, I set my goal to make forestry attractive to the farming community. But rather than just promote what my peers saw as ‘good forestry practices’, I could see that it was forestry, rather than the farmers, that had to change. In 1987, I purchased a small degraded farm and set about planting trees for both conservation and profit.
A CAPITAL ASSET
We started with the eroded watercourse which ran through the farm. Plantation companies shy away from creeks and streams, partly because of the buffer strips required under the code of forest practice but also because of the increased management cost associated with irregular plantation edges. Industrial forestry requires uniformity and long, straight rows. In our case, having decided to fence out the creek from grazing to improve water quality and make it easier to muster stock, the land behind the fence was free of any opportunity cost. If planting trees could shelter the adjacent paddocks, control erosion and enhance biodiversity, any timber produced would be a bonus.
This example alone led me to review what I’d learnt of forest economics. In plantation forestry, where the return from timber alone must pay for all the costs of production, including the time, the motivation is to maximise volume per hectare and minimise the rotation length. In effect, the plantation is not considered of value until it can be converted to cash. Hence the emphasis foresters place on the net present value and the optimum rotation length.
As a private landholder with agricultural, residential, financial and aesthetic considerations, I quickly learned to see the forest as a capital asset, rather than just a cash-flow investment. As such, both timber yield and rotation length suddenly seemed less important. Having decided that the land would be better under trees, the forest had a living value beyond its potential to increase our bank balance if liquidated. This meant that any concerns about the cost of time (as described by the positive discount rate used in a financial analysis) suddenly fell away. In essence: time does not weary a forest worth owning.
Of course, money still matters, just in a different way. I began looking at how I could generate income from harvesting timber without undermining the capital value of our forest. In order to be viable to harvest, the revenue derived would need to be greater than both the cost of harvesting and the impact it might have on the capital value of the retained forest. Minimising the impact of harvesting on the standing value of a forest would likely require higher-cost selective or small gap farm-scale harvesting systems. This shifted my management objectives away from reducing the rotation length and onto increasing the value of individual trees. We high pruned for wood quality and spaced for diameter growth. The reduction in yield per hectare became irrelevant as the most significant cost was not land or rotation length, but the time I had available to invest in pruning.
POSITIVE IMPACTS
Now, 30 years later, we are harvesting, milling, drying and selling furniture-grade timber from the same trees we planted for conservation and stock shelter but managed for timber (pruning and thinning). Just as satisfying is seeing how small-scale harvesting can improve the capital value of the forest. The obvious benefit is the reduced competition on the growth of neighbouring trees, but what I didn’t expect was the positive impact on the environmental values resulting from increasing the rate at which the forest transitions through the ecological stages; in our case to a more complex temperate rainforest.
The same might be said of our local farming community. In 1993, we launched a landholder group focused on promoting tree growing for the reasons that were important to farmers. The Otway Agroforestry Network now has more than 150 members. Our landholders are not given grants for trees or fences. Instead, we apply for public funds to provide education and peer mentoring support to help farmers design and manage self-funded tree-planting projects. We regularly run Australian Master TreeGrower programmes in the area. This is a flexible, non-accredited farmer education course I developed when working as an academic at the University of Melbourne. Some of the graduates are invited to participate in further training and are then paid to mentor their peers as they explore how growing trees might help them achieve their goals.
After 25 years, our agricultural landscape has changed. Integrating multipurpose forests with livestock and pruning trees for timber is now an accepted farm practice in our area. The diversity of plantings reflects the diversity inherent in the community. The activity and enthusiasm also supports local farm-tree nurseries and a growing number of contractors who operate within our community and who can provide local advice and services to farmers.
But our region is unique.
Across most of Australia, farmers still rely on public grants to cover the costs of planting trees for conservation. In fact, they have come to expect them. Very few farmers consider the prospects of producing timber from the trees they grow. In fact, in accepting most grants, farmers are denied the rights to ever cut a tree, even if doing so would enhance biodiversity or soil conservation. On the other hand, the large monoculture plantations of pines and eucalypts that are presented as the only viable commercial timber production models are spurned by farmers as being too risky: both environmentally and economically. For both the conservation and commercial plantings, especially for the larger projects, the trees are often sourced, and the planting done, by large nurseries and contractors from outside the region.
HINDERING, RATHER THAN HELPING
This summer I travelled to the UK to learn and to challenge my ideas about how we can encourage farmers to grow trees for both conservation and profit. But I also wanted to share my observations, and that meant confronting some of the apparent, to me, failings of efforts to promote forestry on farms in the UK. My tour started in Perth, Scotland, with a presentation to the Farm Woodland Forum in June. I then headed south to join the Woodland Heritage Weekend in the Cotswolds and later the Royal Forestry Society conference in Devon.
Sure, I saw lots of grant-funded forestry on farms, from spruce plantations on the bare hills in Scotland to mixed hardwoods in the South. But what I didn’t see was any diversity in the design or management of these forests that would suggest farmers were truly engaged in growing forests for the purposes that were important to them. In any community there are different aspirations, resources, interests and concerns. For forestry to work in the agricultural landscape, this diversity must be reflected in the way farmers grow trees. There is no right way to do forestry.
I can’t help thinking the provision of public cost-share grants to farmers in order to entice them to adopt particular forestry practices is hindering, rather than helping. Like the boy who pointed out that the emperor was wearing no clothes, all I see now is the negative impacts of providing grants, including that they:
•stifle, rather than drive innovation and adaptation, by only supporting technologies or methods approved by the funding agency
• actively discourage farmers from implementing alternative practices that provide the same public benefits
• support only a few of the potential recipients while alienating the majority who miss out because of the programme’s timeframes, conditions, preferred location or eligibility criteria
• reward rather than discourage mismanagement, neglect or inappropriate farming systems by supporting landholders who continue practices that are known to contribute to the problem
• encourage farmers to overcommit by requiring a particular level of adoption, such as a minimum area of revegetation
• undermine early adopters by not acknowledging or rewarding those farmers who have implemented similar technologies without having received public funds
• discourage third party investors who might have been willing to jointly fund multipurpose plantings that deliver both public and private benefit
• send a clear signal to farmers that the innovation is not worth funding privately
• encourage a welfare mindset to develop amongst farmers to the point that many assume investing in conservation practices is a public rather than private responsibility
• undermine community networks that build their own knowledge and confidence in tree growing and support the development of sophisticated and resilient agroforestry designs that are appropriate to each family and their landscapes
I appreciate that in the UK the long history and emphasis placed on the cost-share grant model makes change more difficult. But surely the fact that, even with enormous financial and political backing, multipurpose forestry remains rare suggests change is necessary. An alternative development model would redirect public support into programmes that aim to develop communities of tree growers and supporting service providers. As we have seen in our region, helping farmers meet their own needs and aspirations will deliver many of the public aspirations for trees. For example, farmers planting trees for shade and shelter will also deliver carbon sequestration benefits to the wider community. You don’t need a separate grant to support ‘trees on farms for carbon’.
Modern forestry began with the harvesting of market-ready trees from the existing native forest. Then there was the development of large-scale monoculture plantations by governments and corporations. I see a third wave rising: a suite of approaches to growing new forests on farms that are not primarily commercial but make good business sense. They don’t look like conservation, yet improve biodiversity and reduce land degradation. They are not compromises. They are not negotiated points along some tug-of-war line between two opposing ideologies. They are elegant solutions, appropriate for each landowner, their place and the time, which provide a balance of conservation, aesthetics and profit. Together they can deliver much more than can be achieved by simply dividing up the landscape between competing interests.
I remain enthusiastic about the prospects for forestry on farms, but it must be led by farmers.
Farmer and tree grower Rowan Reid has lectured in agroforestry at Melbourne University since 1991 and is now the managing director of the Australian Agroforestry Foundation. His latest book, Heartwood – the Art and Science of Growing Trees for Conservation and Profit, is available to purchase from www.agroforestry.net.au
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