The pitfalls of planting

Winter is upon us, and in forestry, that means planting season. As with last year, there are Higher Level Stewardship-funded tree and scrub planting schemes to deliver on farms, whereby farmers get a higher level of payment for planting trees and shrubs on their land than if they just grazed it with livestock.

Firstly, this is a fine example of a perverse policy incentive. As raised by Miles King in British Wildlife recently, basic farm subsidies (based on area farmed) incentivise environmentally destructive behaviour (i.e. pervasive sheep grazing), and higher level subsidy payments then bribe farmers to stop this behaviour. So why pay the basic payment in the first place?

But beyond this, the practicalities of delivering these schemes even further exemplify ingrained cultural ideas that we must enforce our will on nature. Our pre-concieved ideas of what scrub and woodland 'should' look like can be seen in the delivery of these planting schemes.

Instead of (taxpayer) money being used to fund deer fencing in an area and letting it regenerate, the money is spent on planting often common scrub and tree species in plastic tubes, with treated timber stakes, at prescribed densities and proportions. So, instead of allowing nature to do the work for free, as long as deer are excluded (or controlled), Natural England spend this money on significant effort, introducing plastic into the environment, moving nursery stock around the country in these days of biosecurity awareness (and paying so little per tree that most schemes force the beneficiaries to source the cheapest trees), only to often plant what would naturally spring up anyway, given half a chance. And such schemes are so rigid that any creativity to see alternative species, for example, or allowing species proportions to be decided by the site rather than by the hand of a human, are often quickly quashed.

The farmer then gets ten years of extra payments for not doing what he's paid a basic payment to do - ca-ching.

Plastic tubes blow around the countryside and a legacy of treated timber needs dealing with.

Deer can still potentially enter and eat anything not in a high-enough tube - in the Lake District, that often means using 1.8m tubes with adverse effects on tree growth form, not to mention price. It's also pretty much unaffordable in most schemes, so in go the 1.2m tubes and out come the red deer to nibble off the tops. A false economy, in other words.

Of course, planted woodland and scrub is at least better than a sheep-wrecked wasteland deficit of near enough any habitat value, and in some areas environmental degradation really is so poor that planting is needed to kickstart the process. But, in many of the bracken beds and hillsides on which trees are planted, there are plenty of birch, hawthorn and rowan around to start the process. One can see 'pulses' of hawthorn regeneration all over the landscape, although from when I am not sure - perhaps the First World War and rural depopulation, or another event before then, that allowed them to regenerate? Nature is more resilient than we give it credit for; just because we don't plant trees, it doesn't mean trees won't grow.

Is this really the best that our Government agency tasked with nature conservation can come up with? Surely it is not beyond the many intelligent conservationists at Natural England, who are overworked and have their hands tied by bureaucracy, to push back and enable a more creative, natural, and efficient way of achieving increased tree and woodland cover.