The menu of choice now available to farmers who are thinking about planting is extensive.

However, the full extent of take-up of the wide range of afforestation schemes will not be known until farmers and foresters fully understand their implications.

Almost a month in to an already delayed forestry programme, afforestation licences are only just trickling through. Only one licence was issued in September, while an average of three were approved weekly in October.

Forestry companies are beginning to realise the full impact of environmental constraints, in particular bird breeding habitats, peat depth and high nature value farmland.

Undoubtedly, these will slow down licence approval and restrict land availability for afforestation, as will the current demand for even marginal land for agricultural use.

Land availability study

Given these constraints, there is still a significant land bank suitable for afforestation, as identified by Niall Farrelly and Gerhardt Gallagher in their 2015 study ‘The potential availability of land for afforestation in the Republic of Ireland’.

They identified 475,000ha suitable for afforestation, which could be planted without negatively impacting on agricultural production.

While environmental constraints may reduce this land bank, the study still holds up as a good indication of land availability for afforestation.

In the meantime, extremely innovative and well-funded afforestation programmes have been introduced, especially the Native Woodland Area (NTA) scheme.

This is not only attractive to farmers with marginal land, but also those with more productive land. The NTA scheme was not available when Farrelly and Gallagher researched their study.

Farmers’ attitudes

The NTA scheme, which is attractive financially (€2,284/ha per annum), is also flexible, as it doesn’t carry a licence requirement. It is ideal for areas requiring shelter as well as awkward field corners, setback areas from dwellings and along-water catchments.

There is now a willingness from farmers to get involved in tree-planting, according to last year’s UCD-Teagasc study ‘Irish dairy and drystock farmers’ attitudes and perceptions to planting trees’.

The authors – Rachel Irwin, Áine NíDhubháin and Ian Short – discovered that “82% of participants intended to plant trees on their land in the next five years”.

Against this background, an expectation that 5% of productive agricultural land could be converted to native woodlands and other wooded areas is not unrealistic.

It would release 119,500ha for planting (Table 1) relatively quickly as most of it would not require a licence.

In land classed as “limited agriculture” (1.1m ha) and “rough grassland currently not farmed” (0.29m ha), there is significant potential for afforestation on ecological and economic grounds.

Teagasc studies show that forestry provides a greater revenue stream than farming in these land types, outperforming all sheep and most cattle systems.

Planting 25-30% of this land by 2050 would increase the forest cover by 362,000ha, without negatively impacting on farm production. This area, in addition to the 5% of productive agriculture land, indicates that 507,000ha could be made available for afforestastion (Table 1).

“The impact on agricultural production [on this land] will not be significant based on previous experience, where marginal areas of farms have been planted and typically the same or a similar number of livestock units have been retained,” maintains the Society of Irish Foresters (SIF) in its position paper Delivering a Carbon Based Afforestation Programme.

“However, where livestock numbers are reduced, there is a further benefit in the reduction of livestock emissions from the farm enterprise,” it adds.

The success of the forestry programme depends largely on engagement by farmers. While most of the 22,000 landowners who have forests are farmers, forestry is not considered by most farmers.

Even allowing for 20,000 farmers with forests, it is a modest number in a country with 135,037 farm-owners, who own 4.5 million ha of the land, with an average holding of 33.4ha.

We propose an afforestation scheme that will leverage the carbon value sequestered by forests, and use this to reward and incentivise farmers to plant

Convincing 115,000 new non-forest farmers to convert less than 5ha of land on average to forestry should be in Ireland’s climate change targets.

This would provide the afforestation levels required to achieve net zero by 2050 and to avoid massive EU fines.

The new forestry programme has introduced a creative range of afforestation schemes, as well as attractive grants and tax-free premium payments for over 20 years for farmers.

Convincing non-farmer investors to avail of these supports is not going to be difficult, nor should it be so with farmers.

However, the schemes need to be matched by a developmental and promotional programme, to achieve buy-in from all farmers and a geographically spread-out afforestation programme, especially in Munster counties where planting has fallen dramatically in the last decade.

Carbon

“What is needed urgently is a new and innovative approach that actually incentivises farmers and other landowners to afforest parts of their land, and that concurrently acknowledges the barriers to afforestation and addresses these,” maintains the SIF study.

It states: “What we propose is an afforestation scheme that will leverage the carbon value sequestered by forests, and use this to reward and incentivise farmers and landowners to undertake afforestation.

“Up until now, the State has quietly recorded the carbon sequestered through afforestation via its national carbon accounting, while giving no reward to forest owners.”

Carbon-based scheme

SIF advocates a carbon-based afforestation scheme that acknowledges the monetary value of carbon sequestered by forests.

“This would provide an additional income to forest owners that will continue years after the premium payments have ceased,” it states.

SIF’s proposal has merit, not only because it provides an income over a long period, it would also render the replanting obligation argument redundant.

The paper maintains that a business-as-usual approach will not be sufficient to achieve viable afforestation programmes. It calls for the establishment of “a highly focussed and fully resourced independent body” or Forest Development Agency (FDA).

The SIF proposes that the FDA “should report to the Department and the minister, and ultimately be constituted as a statutory body”, and “should incorporate some non-regulatory functions of the Department”.

The FDA proposal is supported by organisations such as the Irish Timber Growers Association, Forest Industries Ireland and the Tree Council of Ireland, as well as all forestry companies and sawmills.