- Location
- South Molton
Or you have a bad year and your carbon credits become carbon cost!!
Would anybody consider planting trees on their land?
- Thread starter Right-arm fast
- Start date
lloyd
Member
- Location
- Herefordshire
- Location
- Dumfries & Galloway
I'm not against trees per say...
But the devil is in the detail. If govt go hard on this it will not be the odd tree here and there... because that will not cut it from a serious carbon point of view - it will be govt driven giving up farmland for blanket forestry.
If it weren't for the grants, commercial tree planting is not valuable - it's questionable if it's really viable. And that comes from the guys doing it
- Location
- South Molton
And what does it do to the capital value of the land.
There was a lot planted under woodland grant scheme years ago that can not now revert back to farmland and has been devalued.
serf
Member
- Location
- warwickshire
Exactly this ^^^^^^^^ it's just devaluing ur best asset
- Location
- Dumfries & Galloway
Don't know how the rest of the UK is...
But in Scotland if land is under trees it can not be used for anything else
Although... if you own it. Clear fell the trees for your own use. Reclaim the land, at your own cost and then farm that areas without claiming any subsidies - can govt actually stop you?
- Location
- South Molton
Got to get a felling licence in the first place.
Couple locally have been pulled up on hedge laying even.
I think that will get tighter as we get pushed towards trees being the saviour
JohnGalway
Member
- Location
- Connemara, Ireland
I wasn't thinking that you were
Govt schemes are usually stupid. I often recall a piece Ronald Reagan did, the 9 most frightening words in the english language "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help".
There are a fair few people around the world doing good stuff with trees, but out of their own pockets and to their own plans. That type of mixed farming is the way forward, not doubling down on monocultures of whatever crop.
Hindsight
Member
- Location
- Lincolnshire
This article published today seems pertinent to the thread
Gardens help towns and cities beat countryside for tree cover
A survey of tree cover in England and Wales throws up a few surprises.
www.bbc.co.uk
ollie989898
Member
I don't think so.
According to this thread, the Earth should have no CO2 in it's atmosphere as the trees stole it and locked it all away. In reality, Plants release plenty of the stuff when they are alive and release yet more when they decompose. Fudging peat is an irrelevance as with climate change it may dry out and blow away in the wind.
The article in Nature published this week discusses the case for restoring particular areas on Earth and follows on from what Egbert discussed above in that focusing on one particular location in the UK is possibly a bit short sighted. As I have maintained for some time, these environmental issues need a holistic and broad approach if they are to achieve anything and actually be practical.
I don't see government being in a position to funnel yet more funny money into green schemes or landowners pockets. In fact, I would be willing to bet that governments worldwide will put environmental issues on the backburner until their economies are back in the green. Ultimately people need homes, food and energy or they get political fast. People underestimating that fact should ask themselves if there was any connection between international commodity prices and the Arab spring.
Prioritizing where to restore Earth’s ecosystems
Restoration sites that would maximize biodiversity and climate benefits.
www.nature.com
...One of the biggest challenges in prioritizing areas for restoration (Fig. 1) is balancing the benefits for biodiversity conservation against those for climate-change mitigation. Forests are usually the biomes with the highest potential to sequester carbon. However, all biomes, including non-forest biomes such as natural grasslands and shrublands, can contain ecosystems in urgent need of restoration to prevent the extinction of species found only in those ecosystems. Even areas offering similar potential for carbon sequestration within the same biome (for example, in tropical rainforests) can vary greatly in terms of potential restoration benefits for biodiversity conservation...
...Strassburg et al. show that the benefits and costs of restoring a given total area of land depend very much on where this restoration is undertaken. Prioritizing the spatial distribution of restoration using a single criterion of benefit or cost generally performs poorly in achieving desirable outcomes for the other criteria. For example, restoring 15% of the world’s converted lands by focusing solely on maximizing benefits for climate-change mitigation would achieve only 65% of the gains potentially achievable for biodiversity (assessed as the resulting reduction in risk of species extinctions) if the restoration focused instead on maximizing biodiversity benefits. Restoration focused solely on minimizing costs would achieve only 34% of the maximum potential gain for biodiversity and 39% of the potential gain for climate-change mitigation. Encouragingly, however, optimizing for all three criteria simultaneously yields a solution that would achieve 91% and 82% of potential gains for biodiversity and climate-change mitigation, respectively, while maximizing cost-effectiveness...
toquark
Member
Well I'm one of the guys doing it (in my day job) and can tell you that they definitely do pay. Grant or no grant.
The grants have certainly increased appetite, however what's really pushed it on is the streamlining and stripping away of a lot of the red tape associated with new planting. That was always the big detractor, it could take 4-5 years to get a scheme through the system now it can be done in 12 months, reducing rotation length and shortening the return on investment for the grower.
Just goes to show if there's a will there's a way in government. When they want something to happen they can make it happen, bureaucracy is often just used as a convenient excuse to put off decisions.
200 acres prime arable land going into trees here this season
Right-arm fast
Member
What was the reasoning behind such a large acerage?
We planted 7 acres last year - about 80% of that grant aided under the NI Environmental Farming Scheme.
The field in question was wet at the bottom and dry at the top. With some expense, perhaps half the area could have been reclaimed. However, we took the easy option and planted it all out.
1,400 willow
800 alder
600 birch
400 oak
400 hazel
50 scots pine
25 crab apple
25 black thorn
The numbers of each tree for the first five entries above were set by the grant terms. The latter two for colour around the edges for the benefit of neighbours. We have about 200 trees to replant this year, so will be upping the number of oaks, rather than trying to exactly replicate the original grant numbers.
Photos from May / June 2019
It was not too long before the wildlife arrived to inspect the work and see if it would do as a new habitat!
The field in question was wet at the bottom and dry at the top. With some expense, perhaps half the area could have been reclaimed. However, we took the easy option and planted it all out.
1,400 willow
800 alder
600 birch
400 oak
400 hazel
50 scots pine
25 crab apple
25 black thorn
The numbers of each tree for the first five entries above were set by the grant terms. The latter two for colour around the edges for the benefit of neighbours. We have about 200 trees to replant this year, so will be upping the number of oaks, rather than trying to exactly replicate the original grant numbers.
Photos from May / June 2019
It was not too long before the wildlife arrived to inspect the work and see if it would do as a new habitat!
- Location
- Carmarthenshire, West Wales
I love planting hedges (with trees in), or to be more exact, I hate the actual planting and no family member will help either (children are too old now to be told what to do!), but I love to see them growing, I have another 120m to do this winter, ordered the plants from the woodland trust, but there is now way I could plant trees on any areas of fields, it would just seem wrong and a waste unless it was a useless corner or bank.
Goweresque
Member
- Location
- North Wilts
I think the exact opposite. I have a feeling that the powers that be will take the covid situation as an opportunity to shovel lorry loads of printed money into the economy via eco-projects to create a 'Great Green Leap Forward' to the sunlit uplands of a carbon-free economy. Thus killing (as they see it) 2 birds with one stone, going carbon free and providing plenty of paid employment at the same time to counteract all the unemployment caused by locking down the economy. Every central bank is effectively printing money, and because of freely floating fiat currencies if everyone does the same no-one will pay the penalty of a falling exchange rate, except vs non-currency assets such as gold. And as no one demands gold for their oil (yet) thats not an issue. Thus I think the authorities see the current situation as a free pass to print money and spend it on what they like, and IMO green nonsense will be the favoured recipient.
ollie989898
Member
I just can't see it. Meanwhile China are just going to burn coal and get on with life, rather than crippling their economy with free money thrown at green projects.
If the government want to invest money in infrastructure, that would make sense but the prevalence of huge companies that suck up this cash is an issue.
The government nor their advisors are yet able to agree on what constitutes 'green'. Volvo just came out and stated that their latest all-electric vehicle will not offset the emissions caused by it's manufacture until it has done 80,000 miles.
- Location
- South Molton
- Location
- Darlington
Excellent post IMHO also, at the moment, timber is good money so may be financially viable too.