Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The advantages of doubling the size of our woodland are enormous, so much so that
some might be tempted to enlarge its area still further by eliminating sheep entirely, and no
doubt many vegans would be keen to do so. However, before committing ourselves to any
further woodland expansion, it would be well to assess how biomass forestry compares to
animal production - which at present, for the sort of rough and permanent pasture we are
talking about, mostly means sheep. A hectare of average land in these categories produces
about three tonnes of dried firewood, or alternatively perhaps 100 kilos of meat. The calor-
ific value of both meat and dried wood is roughly 3,000 kcal per kilo, so 28 times as much
energy is produced by the woodland as by the sheep. However, sheep calories are eaten,
while wood calories are burnt: a kilo of wood will keep you warm for an hour or two, while
a kilo of mutton will keep your inner fire burning for a day or more.
The other convenient way to compare their value is by price. At the time of writing, up-
lamb is worth a lot more retail - but so is the firewood if you stick it in fertilizer bags and
sell it at the local garage. The woodland frequently has no export value (sawlogs are of-
ten worth no more than firewood). It has some amenity value, whereas the more intensive
sheep pasture has less - but if there were more woodland and less sheep pasture, the values
would be reversed. The woodland has more value as a carbon sink. Grazed land is neces-
sary if you want to erect wind generators. The sheep also produce around five kilos of wool
per year, which may have little value at the moment, but would have if the price of oil rose
significantly. The woodland may provide some secondary products, such as mushrooms,
game, pig grazing etc.
There seems to be little difference in value between pastureland and woodland used for
fuel. But there is one other crucial difference. £350 worth of wholesale sheep weighs about
100 kilos, and can easily be carried to Manchester, London, or even the South of France
where it can be sold for a profit. £350 worth of firewood weighs about three tonnes, and
has to be consumed locally. Since the areas we are talking about tend to be depopulated
(a fact which is largely due to enclosure for sheep) there is no market for all this potential
firewood (which explains why the preferred land use activity is still sheep). The clearances
created a vicious circle which it is hard to get out of.
The other economic problem for fuelwood is that it can't compete with the cheapness of
fossil fuels. This partly comes back to the transport costs due to its weight, but also because
it is awkward. Firewood from semi-natural landscapes varies from the huge and immov-
able to the small and fiddly and is not amenable to mechanization; a machine can cope so
much more easily with a SRC monoculture on flat land. These problems may help to ex-
plain why the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution gives such a low estimate of
the amount of available firewood. They write:
