Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
they will be advising their employees to 'cut the old gorse and deliver to the village bakery'
- that is if the bakery workers haven't already harvested it.
We are looking at a substantial supply of biomass fuel, even if we need to let a proportion
of it remain on the ground to assist biodiversity. The next matter to consider is: how much
of this woodland do we want? The UK officially has one of the lowest levels of tree cover
in Europe at around 11 per cent - about 2.8 million hectares out of a total of 24.5 milli-
on hectares. On top of this there are the 872,000 hectares classified as 'other agricultural
land including wood land', and all the trees in gardens, streets, parks, and hedgerows. It
seems reasonable to assume that total tree cover might be nearer 3.5 million hectares, or
about 14 per cent of the entire land area. When the Tory government advocated a doubling
of the amount of woodland, both for the environmental benefits and as a carbon sink, few
forestry coverage or the 14 per cent tree cover? Let us go somewhere in between and pro-
pose an increase in tree cover to a quarter of the country. This would not be particularly
drastic: we would still have a lower proportion of our land under trees than France (27.9
per cent), the EU (40 per cent) or the entire world (29 per cent).
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Twenty-five per cent of the UK's land area is a little over six million hectares. Allowing
for a firewood harvest of three tonnes or five cubic metres per hectare per year this would
produce 30 million cubic metres. In theory (since there is an increment of ten cubic metres
per year currently achieved on 2.1 million hectares of timber quality land), this would still
leave in the region of at least 10 million cubic metres for timber (which is what we harvest
at the moment), or up to 20 million cubic metres if we opted for more fast growing planta-
tions - most of which would also become available as fuelwood when it reached the end of
its economic life.
The next question is: how much fuel do we need? The average three bedroomed home,
occupied, typically, by a family with two children, requires about eight tonnes (roughly 13
cubic metres) of air dried wood per year to be self-sufficient in heat to the currently ac-
million cubic metres, we could currently heat up to 2.25 million homes, housing nine mil-
lion people.
However, eco-builders are now constructing houses which are so well insulated and
passively solar heated that they can maintain a constant temperature of 20 degrees without
any extra heat source at all. This is highly commendable, but a home without a hearth or
a living flame is a sorry affair (and possibly dependent upon some other source of energy,
like flying off to the Gambia in December, for spiritual nourishment). It seems reasonable
to assume that a family of four, in a well insulated home, could heat themselves and main-
tain their hearth happily on the three tonnes of firewood per year which traditionally could
be obtained off a hectare of well managed wood.
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