Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The Livestock Permaculture model allocates six million hectares, nearly a quarter of the
UK's countryside, to woodland. The main reasons for this decision are that this hinterland
does not currently produce much food, nor does it need to, while trees supply fibre and en-
ergy, the second of which will be in short supply. The UK, with just 11 per cent of its land
under trees, has one of the lowest levels of tree cover in Europe.
It used to be even lower: at the end of the 19th century trees covered barely five per cent
of the country. In Scotland this may have been a result of clearances, while in populated
areas it was a result of the availability of coal. Landowners and farmers preferred to have
coal, sheep and high concentration of landownership is a disaster for tree cover, and some
areas such as Southern Lancashire were almost completely denuded.
When we hear the government talking about increasing the area of woodland, warning
bells ought to ring, since it would not be the first time they've tried it. In the 20th century
the area of woodland doubled, not to provide fuel, but as a strategic reserve of timber,
pulpwood, and pit props. There was some logic in this programme. High quality softwood
timber is hard to grow in Britain (because it grows too fast) and it seemed to make eco-
nomic sense to grow low value pulpwood trees which are relatively expensive to transport,
and import high quality timber, whose value better justifies the expense of shipping. But
the result was many hundred thousand hectares of dense conifer monoculture, disliked by
nature conservationists and the public alike. On top of that it did little to improve the rural
economy of the uplands - few things provide less in the form of human livelihoods than
pulpwood plantations. Timber is trucked from the hills of Scotland and Northern England
down to pulp mills in the Midlands, close to the market, depriving thousands of upland
