Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
inhabitants of a way of making a living from their land. Scotland has 19 per cent more
woodland than England and nearly three times as many conifers - yet its forestry industry
employs only three quarters as many people as England's.
2
If we are going to plant more trees, we therefore need to establish a number of matters.
What are these trees for? Do we want 'wild' semi-natural woodland or more intensively
managed plantations or short rotation coppice? How much woodland do we want? And
where are these trees going to go? I'll try to answer these questions in some sort of order.
Aside from the amenity and wildlife value, there are two main practical uses for trees:
the supply of timber and the supply of firewood. Let's deal with timber first. The UK cur-
rently uses about 46 million m
3
of timber, including panel board and paper and pulp (PPP)
not produce some of the high quality timber it imports, but it could in theory produce most
of the PPP, and say half of the timber currently imported, which (net of exports) comes to
about 40 million m
3
.
However, about 35 million m
3
of this would be PPP, most of it from softwood trees, typ-
ically fast-growing Sitka Spruce. It is unlikely that we would want to replant the vast acre-
ages of Sitka Spruce which we are currently keen to pull up - most people prefer sheep.
And a sustainable society, forced to steward scarce resources, could quite easily increase
recycling rates and reduce the amount of PPP currently squandered on junk mail, news-
papers full of supplements which people never read and shelving units which are so tacky
they get skipped after a few years' use. If we were intent upon making the country self-suf-
ficient in timber, 23 million m
3
(half the amount we currently consume) might be a sensible
level of home grown timber production to aim for.
This reduced amount is less than we currently grow. The annual increment in UK forests
in 1999 from timber quality woodland alone was about 21 million cubic metres, which
means that every hectare grew on average about 10 m3 of timber per year. This, as the
Forestry Commission delicately acknowledges, is 'believed to be significantly underex-
that many of the trees we planted in the 1960s are getting bigger and bigger and if nothing
alters will continue to do so, until they start falling over and dying.
5
The quality timber production only represents 2.2 million hectares, so there is another
800,000 hectares or so of amenity woodland, producing timber that is too wiggly or oth-
erwise unsuitable. As we noted above, pre-industrial construction methods can cope with
timber of all sizes and shapes, whereas sawn timber requires straight logs from trees that
grow in dense woodland or plantations. However, pulpwood and some other more modern
technologies can make do with any shapes and sizes, though they require certain econom-
ies of scale. If, as Prince Charles once claimed, conifer plantations are 'nothing more than