Branching out may put whole farms in jeopardy
Ear lie rt his month the Scottish Government proposed a target of planting 18,000 hectares of trees annually by 2024/25. This showed ambition as it is well above last year’s figure – just over 10,000 hectares of woodland planted.
If the target looks too ambitious, remember that the most recent tree planting statistics are well below annual figures for afforestation in the 1970s and 80s when 30,000-plus hectares were regularly achieved.
Admittedly some of that planting never came to anything as the trees planted by tax-avoiding celebrities such as Cliff Richard and TerryWog an in the Caithness Flow Country decided not to grow.
When it came to power a decade ago, the SNP Government said a long-term ambition was to see one third of Scotland covered in trees. There is still a considerable way to go before that target is achieved as less than one fifth of Scotland is woodland.
In the UK, the Scottish Government is not alone in wanting more land under trees. Last December, Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised that the Tories would plant 30,000 hectares of woodland in the five -year term of the UK Parliament. The only problem for him was that little more than 2,000 hectares were planted in England last year.
The political enthusiasm for planting trees does not lie in producing more timber, even although this country imports large tonnages of dressed wood. It lies in ambitions to become carbon-neutral and tree growing is largely noncontroversial.
If 18,000 hectares a year seems to be a lot of land, it is worth remembering that Scotland has just short of 8 million hectares altogether and having 18 per cent of woodland is not much when compared with countries in Europe where more than one third of their land is devoted to trees.
Why has there been such a difference between the UK and mainland Europe?
One reason has to do with historical land use. On the continent, farms included woodland so that the tillers of the soil and the herders of the livestock were also foresters. In the UK under the landlord/tenant farmer system that has operated for hundreds of years, trees and woodland belonged to the landowner, leaving the tenant farmer to grow the crops and keep livestock.
As a former tenant farmer I knew the two blocks of woodland on my rented property may have been within the farm boundar y but they were out of bounds for me even to the extent I could not pinch a Christmas tree.
There has been a gradual crumbling of the tenanted sector in the past century. Only one in three farms operates under that system when it was twice that proportion 100 years ago.
In general terms, oppo - sit ion to growing trees on farm land has also diminished in that period although planting large blocks of woodland to the point where farming is compromised and food production capacity is diminished is still bad news for agriculture.
The more recent, more mellow attitude to forestry can also be explained by the amount of cash going towards that sector. When the target acreage announcement was made a week or two ago, there was also a promise to invest about £150 million to ensure the target would be reached.
The political belief is farmers and land owners will “follow the money” and plant more trees. Supporting this view, after many years opposing more forestry being planted, NFU Scotland now has a more nuanced attitude.
Little more than 50 years ago, one prominent union member claimed the interests of farming and forestry were “too divorced” for there ever to be any compromise. Now the union points to a range of benefits from trees on farms. These include shelter belts for livestock and an additional source of income from having a few acres of trees.
The problem for both farmers and Government comes with getting a big acreage of new woodland as shelter belts and planting in difficult corners of fields will not add up to the proverbial row of beans, far less trees.
And that is where the real problem still exists between farming and forestry. It is the potential loss of whole farms under trees.