Voices
You reap what you sow.
The age-old adage best sums up the predicament faced by the Department of Agriculture as it works desperately to eliminate a backlog of forestry licence applications longer than it wishes to know.
The service has faced periodic struggles in the past to keep up with applications coming into it from the semi-state forestry body Coillte, commercial forestry companies, and landowners. But things became much more complicated in the early 2020s as the intray of the Forestry Appeals Committee (FAC) buckled under the weight of cases that flooded in.
Many appeals went in the favour of the appellants, in most cases coming from two prominent environmental activists and a community group in Leitrim, the most commercially forested county in Ireland. The numbers are big.
Over 40 per cent of 648 licences appealed between October 2020 and September 2023 were set aside and sent back to the department to look at afresh. Nearly all were sent back due to concerns with the environmental assessments carried out as part of the licensing process.
As I wrote recently, the department’s lack of ecological expertise played a big role in this problem and jammed up the licensing system. While the department has now hired more full-time ecologists and outsourced ecological services at a hefty price tag, the damage is done.
There is a palpable lack of confidence in authorities within the forestry industry and, importantly, among farmers who are now turning away in their droves from planting. Forestry is no longer seen as a safe investment for the custodians of the countryside.
Lost confidence
Speaking at the farm forestry conference in June, the president of the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA), Tim Cullinan, said that the amount of land planted by his fellow farmers “will continue to decline” without concrete action from policymakers to change the model.
Losing farmers from the system is a big deal for the State as the farming world has driven afforestation rates since the 1980s when the Government started offering generous grants and premium payments for planting.
Just look at the data. Eleven per cent of the country is under some form of forest. This comes in at just over 800,000 hectares. Of this, over 280,000 hectares are managed privately, and primarily by farmers. According to the latest annual forestry data released in August, the farming community is behind 82 per cent of all new forests planted since 1980.
As Thomas previously explored, there is money to be made in Irish forestry with inward institutional investment involving financial vehicles buying up parcels of land. But in many such investments, companies are buying up land with trees already firmly rooted in the soil.
This means that farmers are an important cog in the process. If there are fewer farmers willing to take the licensing leap or sell land to those who will, then the house of cards falls down.
At a distant glance, the blame would look to fall squarely at the feet of activists clogging up the licensing process. But farmer concerns are much more ingrained.
A look at forestry statistics compiled by the State shows that farmer planting has long peaked. The backlog was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back.
So what else ate into the appetite for tree-planting? Much of it comes down to kinks in the clear-fell plantation model that is central to the State’s forestry policy.
Shifting laws and expensive assessments
First, there are increasingly stringent environmental rules within the licensing system that become bigger and bigger headaches for farmers with each new requirement that comes in to keep Ireland in line with a shifting baseline in EU nature law.
Environmental assessments are not cheap, take time to carry out, and are required no matter the size of the proposed forestry plot. The nature of the clear-fell conifer system often means that more stringent ecological checks are needed and, as the trees all come down together in blocks, repeat assessments are required when you want to fell them. This can see farmers forking out thousands of euro that eat into their expected profit margin.
Speaking in June, the chair of the IFA’s farm forestry group, Jason Fleming, said that this system of checks and balances is “unsuitable for farm forests, burdening farmers with excessive regulations and costs”.
Ash dieback
Farmers also feel burned by authorities from the ash dieback debacle as the fungal disease works hard to try and wipe the native tree out of existence on the island. As the State encouraged monoculture planting of the species, once one tree goes, the rest soon follow.
Nearly 17,000 hectares have been planted since 1990 under the afforestation scheme, mostly by farmers sold a dream of good returns. The fast-growing native is the tree of choice for hurley production and has commercial value for furniture and in boat-making.
In reality, many farmers find themselves staring at dying trees unfit for anything other than firewood. Since the first case of the disease was identified in October 2012, the Department of Agriculture has received requests for assistance for almost 6,500 hectares.
Any solutions offered to farmers to clear diseased plots, including a grant of €1,000 per acre, were soundly rejected as a million miles away from what is needed to cover the cost of clearing infected trees, let alone compensate for overall losses incurred.
Going back to grass would be a better option for farmers, but they are also blocked at this avenue owing to the replanting obligations that come with forestry licences.
Following much pressure from the farming community, the Government carried out a review of support for impacted farmers, releasing its findings in October. The site clearance grant rate will now double to €2,000, there will be enhanced grant rates and extra top-up premium payments for some farmers.
While these moves were welcomed by the IFA, much like delays in solving the ecological problems, farmers were left in the wilderness for too many years as plantations failed.
Planting going in the wrong direction
And public planting is not making up for decreasing private planting rates. Traditionally, the commercial semi-state forestry company Coillte did the heavy lifting in planting.
Now, Coillte is planting very few new commercial forests and is instead focused on replanting once blocks of trees are cut down in existing plantations. It also manages forests on private landowners’ holdings through its involvement in public-private partnerships with farmers and private investors.
It stopped planting new commercial forests after a 2004 EU court ruling made it financially unviable for Coillte to plant its own new forests. The European Court of Justice ruled that the semi-state could no longer avail of grants to establish forests or receive annual premium payments under State aid rules.
The State’s latest forestry data shows how the balance has completely shifted as private planting now easily outstrips public planting. For the first time in the history of the State, there are now more privately-owned than publicly-owned forests.
So, with private planters turning away in numbers, the State’s very ambitious targets for the coming decades look very difficult to achieve. The numbers are already looking grim.
So far in 2023, the Department has issued 2,879 forestry licences of all types. Only 56 of these licences were for new forest planting, and over 2,600 were for Coillte or private felling. This imbalance, combined with the fact that Ireland’s tree-planting model is very much geared toward clear-fell monocultures, has seen a trend emerge that no one, especially the authorities, wants to see.
Managed forest land is now going to be a carbon source, if only in the short term. The EPA has warned that low planting rates are a future risk in the national forest estate remaining as a major carbon sink. Forests will return to carbon sink status over time but not until the mid-2030s, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Can farmers be tempted back?
What is clear is that things can go wrong when planting and felling rates are out of sync. The new forestry programme is looking to buck the trend, offering much more robust incentives for broadleaf woodland planting than in previous years with longer grant periods, alongside better payments for conifer plantations with stricter rules in setting aside areas for biodiversity enhancement.
The new programme will also support the planting of continuous cover forests, a model of forestry much more common in mainland Europe. Here, a wide mix of tree types are planted for multifunctional purposes, including conservation and wood production. Mature trees are carefully selected for felling over time, but the woodland itself remains standing.
There is also a new scheme to encourage farmers to plant up to one hectare of land with native trees. Planting will be outside of the licensing system and the subsidies are quite generous.
Will all this be enough to tempt the farming community back to the table? It is difficult to know at this point with the new forestry programme only kicking into gear. But the early signs are not great, making the State’s goal to see 8,000 hectares of new diverse, multifunctional and climate-resilient forests planted every year virtually impossible.
The IFA has described the new forestry programme as “a lost opportunity” over remaining concerns with environmental red tape, replanting requirements, and premiums that they say won’t fully offset costs and loss of revenue from setting aside more space for nature.
What is clear in the short term, with most of our forested land in the current plantation model under fire from all directions, is that there are too many chinks in the armour that leave the State’s lofty tree-planting goals in a very fragile position.
