Dr Terry Mabbett reports on how pressures on the nursery sector could curtail efforts to increase woodland cover across the UK, especially where farmers are concerned.
FARMERS currently peppered with publicity for tree planting and woodland creation will be inundated with even more following COP26 and the race to cover the British Isles with carbon-sequestering trees, woodland and forest. Incentives and motivation come via multiple government-backed schemes in a multiplex of messaging, with grant funding underpinning farmers’ willingness to give up on grass and plant trees.
Timing is crucial and not only for getting trees into the ground when conditions are right for prompt, speedy root growth and good tree establishment.
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Farmers signing up to government schemes and receiving payments must plant trees within an allotted time, but reports indicating a shortfall in planting material mean some grant-funded projects are unlikely to meet planting deadlines.
TIGHTENING TREE-PLANTING SUPPLY
A variety of reasons are given, mainly around labour shortages and bottlenecks from the combined effects of COVID-19 and Brexit. The pandemic has interfered with normal levels of seeding, growing and transplanting of nursery-grown trees into the field, but there is also increased red tape tied to the import of trees from post-Brexit Europe. For farmers and landowners in Northern Ireland, there has been the near impossibility of importing trees from Great Britain due to a soil-on-roots problem created by the Northern Ireland Protocol.
All that said, the tightening of strings on the supply of tree-planting material is more basic and long-term and essentially tied to nursery owners’ need to plan three to four years in advance in species selection, and in the quantity of seed purchased and sown to meet future market demand. Trees are not like annual arable crops which can be planted in autumn or spring and harvested the following summer. Trees take up to three years to attain marketable size, which requires dedicated forest nurseries, and farmers growing and selling trees for planting clearly need guidance from the authorities about what to plant well in advance.
The owner of one of England’s foremost forest nurseries made this very point during his presentation (‘Managing a commercial tree nursery’) at the recent ‘Trees for the Future – Diversity and complexity for resilience and carbon storage’ event at the University of Birmingham.
Commenting on the most recent 30-year period, with its utter lack of focus or long-term strategy from the forestry authorities on tree-planting needs, David Gwillam, owner of Prees Heath Forest Nurseries, said: “It starts with the seed, but what species and in what amount to sow? So out comes the crystal ball to gaze into the future and to guess what may be needed. Sadly, no such crystal ball exists, so it is entirely down to guesswork based on nothing more than gut feelings as to what that market may be in two, three and four years’ time.”
But seedling trees keep growing and if there is no-one to buy them after three or four years of growth in the nursery bed, then tens of thousands of perfectly good specimens will end up on the bonfire. Tree-planting enthusiasts would be appalled if they knew just how many seedling and sapling trees have been torched across the United Kingdom in the last 20 years, with millions of Corsican pine, larch, common ash, sweet chestnut and English oak among the most prominent. But back to the present time and tightening nooses around supplies of tree-planting material.
DEFRA has advised scheme-holders faced with unavailability of planting material – and unable to meet project schedules – to get in touch with the Forestry Commission grant teams for a change in detail in their agreement, which could include planting season/year and grant claim year. Amendment requests will be considered case by case.
Equivalent advice and assurance has been given by the devolved administrations, including the Welsh government, which has acknowledged supply problems exist for particular tree species. In this case, farmers and landowners experiencing problems in sourcing tree-planting material, and/or the completion of contracted work during the specified planting season, are advised to contact Rural Payments Wales as soon as possible.
FARMERS GROW TREES AS WELL AS PLANTING THEM
A Northumberland farmer growing millions of trees for sale and planting recently told Farmers Weekly how he had already sold his entire stocks of broadleaves and conifers as well as hedging material. He stressed the time lag between sowing seed and selling sufficiently well-grown trees, which means this season’s seed collection will not deliver marketable trees until 2024 at the very earliest. The time to plan and expand nursery production for today’s high and increasing demand was back in 2017, he said.
He thinks two years will be sufficient to source production from the country’s existing nurseries to meet incoming demand. However, the intervening short term will clearly cause problems for farmers trying to fulfil planting requirements for grant-funded schemes, and that’s without any unforeseen spanners in the works. Seed supplies may be affected by climatic trends, weather conditions and even intrinsic tree species-related patterns of seed production. Or by the arrival and establishment of exotic insect pests and plant pathogens, and any resulting restrictions on the planting of particular forest and woodland tree species, which may well be native.
UNFORESEEN EVENTS AND WRONG RECOMMENDATIONS
The arrival of Chalara ash dieback and the associated fallout is a classic example. Following its discovery in the wider environment in late summer 2012, the UK government imposed a ban on the movement of ash material. This effectively curtailed the planting of common ash (Fraxinus excelsior) and other Fraxinus species. Nurseries were forced to torch hundreds of thousands if not millions of ash trees without any compensation.
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I distinctly remember the superb stands of common ash seedlings dug up and piled high onto the bonfires at Prees Heath Forest Nurseries. David Gwillam lamented how it was the best-looking stand of common ash he had ever grown.
But the fallout did not stop there. The FC promptly advised that sweet chestnut was an ideal replacement for common ash. Forest nurseries and others obligingly sowed huge amounts of the chunky chestnut seed. Within four years, any excitement about sweet chestnut had soured, while nursery trees had grown beyond the point of sale with nowhere to go but the fire for a good roasting.
DEFRA claims its Nature for Climate Fund will help nurseries invest in, expand and develop their production facilities. Likewise, the Welsh government is focusing on plans to make up for and maintain supplies of planting material to satisfy the country’s ambitious tree-planting plans, including its commitment to create a new National Forest and targets set out in the UK Climate Change Committee’s Path to Net Zero. They are 43,000 ha by 2030 and 180,000 ha by 2050, which would push tree cover from its current 15 per cent up to 24 per cent.
HOW NOT TO KEEP FARMERS ON SIDE
Governments clearly need farmers on side if they are going to come anywhere close to hitting woodland creation targets, and what recently happened to a Welsh sheep farmer is a clear lesson in how not to do it.
As reported on the Forestry Journal website, David Mills, who farms in Powys between Brecon and Builth Wells, joined the Glastir Woodland Creation Scheme in 2015, in which farmers were given government grants to plant trees and maintain them over a 12-year period. David duly planted his trees, only to be told five years later, in February 2021, that satellite imagery showed he had contravened the agreed plans by siting fencing just outside the designated seven-hectare section of his 20-ha farm, where 12,000 native broadleaves were planted under the scheme. In some cases, he was out by as little as 10 cm, for which he was duly fined £15,000 by Rural Payments Wales.
More recently, the same farmer was awarded a contract to plant 2.4 ha of trees along the riverbank on his farm, but with no available supply of trees he was told the scheme would be delayed. This is just the sort of small farmer innovation and participation that Lord Goldsmith (Forestry Minister, UK government) has been banging on about for England under DEFRA’s Woodland for Water project. Not surprisingly, David Mills said the experience had put him off entering into this latest tree-planting scheme, even if the planting material becomes available.
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