The purpose here is not to undertake an exhaustive review of agriculture and farming relative to forestry but rather to explore the possibility that farmers, the dominant land-owning group in the UK, have a particular perspective on forestry.
In the report of the Independent Panel on Forestry (2012) much is made of the lack of a ‘woodland culture’ in Britain, and this was a significant theme an interview with one of the panel members. Sangster (2004) suggested that in the farming community this lack of such a culture can be explained in part as stemming from traditional systems of land tenure for forests and woodland. Historically in England and Scotland trees were owned separately to the land and remained the property of landlords rather than their tenants unless there was a specific agreement otherwise, although the tenants retained rights over the land on which the trees grew. Today it remains rare for business tenancy agreements or co-farming arrangements to allocate rights over trees to the tenant. This is partly because such agreements are time-bound and trees are unlikely to provide income to a tenant within the timescale of a tenancy or annual crop-share agreement. As a result farmers, who until 19th and early 20thC land reforms were largely tenants, saw woodlands as a burden rather than an asset to the farm. There is thus little tradition among British farmers of managing woodlands as an economic asset or as part of an integrated enterprise. During the research this topic was discussed with a local farmer in Fife, Scotland, who agreed with the analysis and cited her own family history of farm tenancy where trees were seen as a burden on the farm. This contrasts with European
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countries where, for example in Norway, the woodlands are considered to be part of the farm enterprise and a source of employment and income in winter. (See, for example, Jeanrenaud 2001) Surveys of farmers by the Commission, summarised in a review by Turner (1997) indicate that to many farmers woodland management is not seen as farming. In consequence the financial value of their woodland is often overlooked by farmers. Although subsidies through the CAP have in recent years emphasised whole-farm approaches the fact that forestry has been outside CAP has helped perpetuate this British culture of separation of forestry and agriculture. Edwards (2010) echoed Turner and Jeanrenaud when he also reported that in the Scandinavian countries, where woodland is often over 50% of the land area and farmers traditionally own their woodlands, farming and forestry are closely integrated and farmers have a culture of woodland management. The separation of forestry and farming in Britain does seem to be cultural rather than based on the practicalities of farming.
The neglect of farm woodlands has been a long-term lament in British forestry policy. The Forestry Commission (2006, p. 11) estimates that around half of the woodland area in England is un-managed and that almost 60% of the potential timber output goes un-harvested. Most of this un-managed and un-harvested woodland is on farms. Leslie (2011), one-time head of policy in the Forestry Commission in England, quotes an area of ½ million hectares of neglected woodland in England …
‘(the resource is) almost entirely broadleaved and suffers principally from fragmentation and low current timber value due to past abuse109’.
Woodland management is not the only area where farmers fail to realise commercial opportunities. Supporting the argument for a cultural dimension in the way that British land is farmed a number of writers on rural entrepreneurship also report reluctance on the part of farmers to engage in activities other than traditional farming. This is succinctly articulated by Getz et. al. (2004, p. 125) cited in Phelan and Sharpley (2012) who, wondering why farmers fail to take advantage of tourism opportunities, observed that:
… ‘farming is supply-driven, tourism is market-led; farmers are cost-cutters, tourism
businesses are revenue maximisers; farmers produce single standardised products at a given price, tourism businesses diversify into many products and offer a range of prices’. (p. 3)
This is an echo of the productivist / post-productivist discussion in section 3 above. Drawing on Wilson’s (2001) idea of ‘mental landscapes’, where the agricultural landscape is productivist, and Turner’s (1997) argument that there is a degree of social regulation influencing farmers’ behaviour,
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Leslie is referring in part to felling of woodlands during the two world wars that subsequently were too expensive to replant because of weed growth and poor internal road access.
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we can perhaps argue that there is an embedded understanding among the farming community that a person is defined as a farmer by the things that he or she does and doesn’t do: with forestry and tourism - and possibly other service activities such as environmental management - falling into the ‘don’t do’ category.
Historic systems of tenure were, however, diverse and were also subject to sub-national modifications. The effects of this can be seen today in regional differences in land management. In Wales after the conquest by Edward 1st in 1284 the Norman feudal system was established in the border country and along the southern coastal plains. The upland country of west, central and north Wales retained its Welsh system110 of tenure. Although it was a long time ago the influences of these different institutional arrangements can still be seen in the landscape and rural culture of Wales where the estates and tenanted farms in the Norman areas contrast with the landscape of smallholdings or upland grazings common in the rest of the principality.
In Ireland the land reforms of the late 19th and early 20th C111, whose scope included what is now Northern Ireland, meant that this separation of woodlands and farms was largely ended. Nevertheless the tradition that farmers do not manage woodlands remains embedded. The influence of culture, however, should not be over-emphasised as the examples below from Scotland and Ireland illustrate.
Reporting findings that are typical of such research FRCC112 (1992) supported a study in the Scottish central Belt where:
‘… hostility to farm forestry development remains strong, and there was widespread indifference to Government tree planting programmes… (farmers) did not regard trees as a crop and all were extremely unlikely to plant trees on productive agricultural land.’ (p. 2)
The authors suggested that this reluctance by farmers is due partly (a) to the fact that they are used to annual cycles of activity and income so find the long-term nature of forestry and woodland income difficult and (b) the low returns from forestry make agriculture, subsidised through the CAP, a much better option.
This contrasts with recent experience in Ireland where rapid forestry expansion was achieved almost entirely by planting farmland. Kearney (2001) in a similar review of research into farming and forestry but in this case among Irish farmers reported that:
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From ‘Researching Historic Buildings in the British Isles’ http://www.buildinghistory.org/trefi.shtml
111 The Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903 gave tenants a right to buy their land and provided subsidies from the Government. It was one of a series of land reform acts intended to deal with political conflict over the rights of tenants.
112
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‘The expansion in the area under forestry over the past 15 years was almost exclusively due to the economic stimulus in the form of afforestation grants and annual premia. Numerous studies had demonstrated the suitability of substantial areas of the country for productive forestry, but it was not until the introduction of an annual income (for farmers) that any significant breakthrough occurred in the development of private forestry.’ (p. 1)
The difference here is that the farmland afforestation in Ireland was heavily subsidised by the European Commission through an Objective 1 programme113 that gave farmers an annual income. Although Objective 1 programmes have also run in the UK forestry has never received direct subsidy comparable to Ireland. In the UK there was a substantial incentive-driven expansion of forestry over the two decades to 1990 but the incentives were in the form of tax allowances rather than annual income. The tax incentives allowed annual net expenditure in forestry to be offset against personal income and the profits of enterprises, including non-landed enterprises. As forestry involves large initial costs and income from harvesting does not accrue for decades farmers were effectively excluded from afforestation, which was undertaken by landed estates and forestry companies acting on behalf of rich individuals and financial institutions – again perpetuating the separation of forestry from farming. Note that a key part of the Irish scheme was to deliver annual revenue tailored to fit the farming business cycle.