Into the woods

Meet the new foresters, people who plant trees for fun, for fuel and for the future, writes MANCHAN MAGAN, who has gathered in a decade's worth of logs from his own patch of woodland

A mountain of firewood looms outside my house – enough logs for me and a few other households for a decade. This is the just the thinnings of the two hectares of oak and larch that I planted in 2000. It turns out that Ireland is the Goldilocks Zone for trees: they grow bigger, faster and better here than almost anywhere else on earth.

I wish someone had told me that within a decade of planting I would never need to buy oil again. My only problem now is what to do with all this excess heat – an aluminium smelter, perhaps? We all know that someone (you know who you are) stripped our land of trees, but until recently no one seemed to think of going out and replanting a few more.

The truth is that Ireland can easily produce vast amounts of sustainable bioenergy in the form of firewood and timber building materials if we choose to. In 1981 there were 400,000 hectares of forestry in the country. That figure has now doubled to 800,000 hectares thanks to grants that cover the cost of planting and annual tax-free payments for the first 20 years.

While most forests were owned by Coillte 20 years ago, now 50 per cent of them are private – small farm-foresters catching up with the knowledge and experience that European foresters have gained over centuries.

The big surprise is that, in many respects, our climate and terrain is more suitable than any of theirs.

Seeing my gorse and reed strewn fields metamorphose into a complex multi-layered woodland with pheasants, badgers and mushrooms in so short a time has been miraculous. It was largely an aesthetic transformation, until I thinned the forest – now it’s an economic one. To my neighbours who warned that foresting grazing land halved its value I now flaunt the valuable harvest, my little firewood mountain.

It is hard to over-emphasise the pleasure these two hectares have given me so far, from the anxious first years when the saplings were snapped by hares and bark-stripped by rabbits to the first time I saw a moorhen land in the wood’s marsh pool.

While the firewood will keep me warm for a decade, it has already warmed me three times before. First, when I was out stamping down weeds and routing rabbits in the early years after Coillte had planted it, then again last year when I began felling and debranching the 2,500 larch and Scots pine that were planted between the 6,600 oak to help them grow straight. It now warms me again as I gather in the trunks and chop them. The oak are 6m tall, and the larch were 9m before I felled most of them. Learning to use a chainsaw was an anxious period, especially after other foresters had shown me the nicks and tears from near misses in their own protective gear. But I took guidance from an expert and, by now, have internalised a safe set of movements. I received £6,000 (€7,300) to plant the 2 hectares and €1,500 for thinning it, as well as €350 annual payment (as a non-farmer), but the real reward has been the joy of working among these heroic trees as they devour carbon dioxide and pump out fresh oxygen.

In another decade there will be valuable thinnings of oak and the remaining larch to sell to the saw mills and use as firewood. After that I look forward to my big payday in 120 years’ time, when my oak will be ready to harvest.

By then, of course, my little woodland will be a precious local amenity and my descendent would never have the gall to clear-fell it. (Do you hear me, heir?!)

Pat Lynch

I planted 65 acres in 1996 – a mix of ash, sycamore, oak, beech, some alder, little bits of horse chestnut, cherry and walnut. I was at dairying and beef before, but gave it up for health reasons. This isn’t as hard, you wouldn’t have as many bills with it. The price of timber is going up the whole time, and getting scarcer, with forests abroad being cut down and burnt.

If every farmer had 10 or 15 acres we’d never be short of fuel. The ash is fit for thinning now and there should be hurleys in it in three or four years.

We had a problem with grey squirrels. They did a fair bit of harm, but the pine martins came in then and they deal with them.

I love going through the wood. It gives me great pleasure. I’ve heard a tree will generate enough oxygen for 30 people for a day, and a large tree can use 500 gallons of water a day. I often come down of a Sunday, and bring the pole saw with me – you’d come across a tree that looks bad and you’d make a good tree out of it.

Pat Lynch is based in Reynella Wood, Co Westmeath, and is the winner of the RDS Farm Forestry Award, 2003

Nuala Price

When I was 21, my parents gave me £435. My mother wanted me to buy clothes, but my father (Aodogán O’Rahilly) offered to sell me half of a forestry plantation he had bought in Leitrim. Every time I had a little bit of money I put it into forestry.

I now have two hundred hectares built up over five decades. You might earn a higher return by investing in stocks and shares but at least you have the security of knowing your money is safely locked away in trees and every time it rains those trees are going to grow.

You are not at the mercy of a fund manager acting without your input and for whom you are only a tiny part of his portfolio.

With a small enough holding you can manage it yourself without any additional expense. It can be a pleasant way of spending a Sunday afternoon, pruning your trees, digging the grass from around the trees, tending to your investment. At the end of 14-16 years you’ll have something ready for its first thinning. It is a commodity, so prices will vary, just like gold or tin or silver, but with forestry you can delay or advance the thinning by 10 years to take advantage of market conditions.

That said, you won’t put bread on the table for 35 years with the profits from the first thinnings, but at least you’ll have something tangible.

I could be playing bridge or golf, but I love forestry.When you look after something like that yourself, it’s like a child: no matter how ugly the child is, you grow to love it over time.

(The ash die-back and other such diseases are a real concern. The fear is that they might jump species to conifers. The plant nurseries in Holland are a particular concern as, with so many different plants in close proximity, diseases can easily interbreed and spread. )

Eamonn Morrissey

It’s been a dream of mine for 40 years that at some stage I would have a renewable source of energy, and it’s happened. I planted them 20 years ago. There’s sufficient wood for the winter for here in Dalkey and my cottage in Aughavannagh, although, I can’t use the chainsaw now as easy as I used to. Apart from cutting the trees and logging them and looking after the forest, just the sheer experience of being in the trees is wonderful.

There is that magical moment when you turn off the chainsaw and are surrounded by the silence of the wood. It certainly pays back more than you put into it.

It’s almost a soulful, spiritual thing, that side of the forest. There’s a pleasure, a satisfaction when you light the woodstove here in Dalkey and it is fuelled by wood you’ve grown and cut down yourself.

Anybody with a bit of land should plant trees on it, and now with the cost of other forms of fuel it is really becoming a valuable crop. I certainly won’t see the end of my forest. It will be there after me and I tried to design it to be as attractive as possible. I want to leave something looking well and well cared for. A forest is a long-term thing.

Kristo Dawson

I studied radio and television production in college and worked in construction in Dublin, earning good money, before coming back to Longford to build a house near the forest my parents planted in 2,000 around the Shawbrook Dance School.

When the trees were ready for thinning, I realised that the ash and larch were worth far more as firewood than as pulp for a mill, and so I set up Shawbrook Wood, supplying sustainable, seasoned firewood from our own trees. It is labour-intensive, but I only do it for half the year. A day in the forest is a special experience. It’s exciting to see the results from season to season, to feel part of nature’s cycle.

It’s a great way to earn, selling a natural, sustainable, carbon-neutral product that lessens Ireland’s dependence on oil. Each load of wood I sell helps Ireland deal with its Co2 issues, leaves behind a healthier forest and keeps money in the economy.

People should ask if their firewood is local, and if it comes from clear-felling or managed forest, where removing individual trees actually helps the surrounding forest. Heating your house with timber is now extremely efficient thanks to improved stove design, and it provides safe, healthy work for local people, while also beautifying the countryside and benefiting wildlife.

In the summers I travel to forests in Europe, and we run festivals in our own forest. I’ve built a dance stage here and a sound booth. Last year Liam Ó Maonlaí­ played; the year before it was Gemma Hayes.

I also hold nature trails.

On any day you might stumble upon a ballet dancer doing warm-ups in the wood or a forestry researcher measuring bark growth.

Billy Connell

My one love was livestock, but I couldn’t cope with the hassle of TB tests, brucellosis, John’s disease, etc. Every week there was a new disease that was contagious or deadly dangerous. That was the principle reason I planted forest.

It’s a seriously pleasant way of life, but a hard one. I have a son managing the forest now, and I feel for him every day. All the old men I know who were foresters are bent like pocket-knives now, where they damaged their backs, or were crippled with arthritis. It’s an all-weather life, which doesn’t lend itself to longevity.

There’s certainly great potential because of the phenomenal growth rate we have in Ireland, and a high demand for timber. It could be a wonderful lifestyle if you integrated it with other techniques: in France they’re planting the trees 30m apart, and growing wheat and grazing livestock down through them. In the future, one of the oak woods I planted would have great potential for pig-rearing, producing oak bacon, ham and pork in the ideal habitat for swine.

The wildlife has increased phenomenally with the growth of my trees. It’s a diverse environment and attracts diverse species. My cardiologist tells me to keep walking in the wood for my health.

It’s calming, relaxing and you’ve far have higher oxygen levels there. It is definitely aesthetically beautiful.

That said, I wouldn’t encourage a young farmer to go into forestry now unless he had a vast area of land to plant and was prepared to be a total slave for 30 years, when he might then reap a certain amount of benefit.

(If the ash die-back takes off here it would be absolutely devastating. Our trees would be wiped out. Also, many of the older ash trees are covered in ivy which provides enormous amounts of honey to my hives in October. All that would be lost.)

Mike Collard

The recent large-scale foresting of Ireland’s mountain valleys in spruce, pine and larch is one of most significant things that have happened in Ireland in 4,000 years. Managing this forest in a healthy, sustainable way depends on fostering and empowering a new generation of well-informed, intelligent foresters.

I established the sawmill at Future Forests mainly because I couldn’t bear to see all the fine local oak and ash burnt as firewood, rather than being processed into lumber. I’ve now handed the Future Forests nursery on to the next generation and in my dotage I am establishing a mule pack and training people in how to extract timber and manage forest in a low-impact way. The goal is to maximise local employment and ensure that local timber benefits the community in which it is grown.

We need to ask what do we want in 500 years’ time? If we’d like to have some 500-year-old oak trees we need to start creating this now, establishing the next generation of sacred trees. It is vital that we mix native deciduous forest, with faster-growing conifers. Having both is imperative, and neither is necessarily better than the other. It distresses me that in the last 20 years forestry has focused almost entirely on supplying the large mills at the expense of fostering local communities to do small-scale, low-impact timber extraction from local woods, for processing at small sawmills to supply local markets for local building.

Forest grants

Our rate of forest cover is one of the lowest in Europe, at 10 per cent. In a bid to encourage more tree-planting, the Department of Agriculture runs several schemes to compensate for the cost of establishing a forest and for the loss in income from the land.

Forest grants and the yearly premium payments are exempt from income tax, but the premium payments are reckonable for payment of PRSI and the universal social charge.

The afforestation grant and premium scheme encourage commercial timber production in an environmentally sustainable way. Under the rules, plantations must be managed as a commercial crop for the realisation of a profit.

It is open to farmers and non-farmers alike and includes planting and establishment grants and an annual premium. The planting grant ranges from €2,000 to €5,000 per hectare and is paid in two instalments over a four-year period.

The forest owner also receives a premium ranging in value from €126 to €515 per hectare per year. Farmers receive the payment for 20 years while non-farmers receive it for 15 years.

The department operates a native woodland establishment scheme, to encourage people to plant native species such as oak, alder, hazel and birch, depending on the soil type. Grant aid for the planting of ash trees was suspended last week, in a bid to halt the spread of the ash tree dieback disease. The grant aid and premium payments are the same as those available in the afforestation scheme.

A third scheme, known as the forest environment protection scheme, is restricted to farmers in the rural environment protection scheme. Farmers receive the afforestation grant and 20-year premium as well as an annual payment ranging from €150-€200 for a five-year period.

See agriculture.gov.iefor details of forestry schemes.

Alison Healy Food and Farming Correspondent