DEAR EDITOR

Commentators often say it’s a challenge to understand and deal with the reluctance of farmers and landowners to invest in forestry. It begs the question: have they ever asked farmers why they are not planting? Perhaps I can answer on behalf of at least some farmers.

Let’s start with money, as many commentators do. The premium payments are indeed largely tax-free and substantially increased in the current forestry programme. However, they are not index linked and their value has already been eroded by inflation. Given the current economic uncertainty, they may be worth very little when they expire after 20 years.

An index linked 20-year period would probably be adequate for conifers because they have a clear ongoing market value and, after the first rotation should leave a satisfactory financial return without further support. However broadleaves have little or no commercial value. They are effectively a public good which may give value to society as a whole, but little or none to the farmers who grow them. Economists agree that public goods should be paid for by the State.

Currently, a farmer approved to plant commercial conifers will have to leave one-third of the area either unplanted or planted with broadleaf trees. The owner is effectively donating this area free of charge to society as a whole, in perpetuity. Why would a forest owner gift this proportion of land for public benefit with no private gain attached? The 20-year premium paid for this is derisory. The obligation to maintain and replace those trees and areas of biodiversity lasts forever. Farmers will not plant while this, in effect, theft of land continues.

Replanting

The requirement to replant trees in perpetuity is a barrier to afforestation which is not well understood by non-farmers. Most landowners will be very reluctant to limit the right of their heirs, ad infinitum, to use the land for what they see fit at the time. In reality, most of these will replant even without this coercion, but the replanting obligation is a major psychological barrier for the original owner. Introduced in the 1946 Forestry Act when forest levels had hit a very low level, it is no longer required and is entirely counter-productive. The archaic and cumbersome overly bureaucratic system of forestry regulation which requires licences, consultations and harvesting time limits is a major deterrent. It must be within the wit of the forest service to devise a more streamlined system.

Trees, particularly spruce, are excellent sequesters of carbon but no market exists for forest owners to realise the value of credits arising. The proposed voluntary market for these credits apparently won’t happen until 2030 and will most likely not apply to forestry planted before that date. The whole uncertainty around carbon credits and forestry needs to be rectified urgently.

Farmers will plant trees if it is financially attractive to do so and if it fits in with their inter-generational view of inheritance. Clearly, neither condition is being met. I write as someone who planted my first trees in 1973, who was founder chairman of Limerick and Tipperary Woodland Owners Ltd and who, over the years, profited from afforestation and advised others to become involved. Under current circumstances, I no longer advise people to plant their land. They are not doing it anyway.