Why plant trees when it means you lose subsidy?

This time last winter I was madly throwing saplings into holes when the first blizzard, of what was to be a very tough and cold winter, struck. We had just started the process of planting 3500 saplings on our dairy farm in North Yorkshire. We’re only a small farm, so why put ourselves through this torment? 

According to the International Energy Agency’s recent World Energy Outlook for 2010, we surpassed peak oil in 2006, global oil production will plateau in 2035 and energy demand will rise by 35% during that period. At the same time we are very unlikely to keep global average temperature increases to less than 2C. 3.5C seems more likely! All this means we are going to find it very difficult to continue farming our land the way we currently do. We wanted to consider new ideas and opportunities and find ways to work efficiently with existing eco-systems to become a low energy farm.

Inspired by the documentary ‘Farm For the Future’ featuring Rebecca Hosking in February 2009, we decided to explore how we might adopt some of the principles of permaculture on our farm and had an expert come out to advise us in May 2009.

Planting wind breaks along the western boundary of the farm seemed a great place to start. The wind break is mainly Italian Alder which is fast growing and fixes nitrogen; so reducing our fertiliser input, reducing the wind chill so that not only do the cows keep warmer, hence will produce more milk, but the grass will also grow quicker. Alongside the alder we also had 1000 oak, ash, silver birch, rowan and wild cherry trees donated by the Woodland Trusts MOREwoods Project.

We decided to plant them three deep so that we could have a good wind break as well as provide ourselves with future timber. Yes we lost 2.5 acres of grazing land, a bit of farm subsidy and we have reduced the number of cows by five, but long term we believe these costs will be offset by the benefits we gain as fuel and fertiliser costs increase. Who knows, the future subsidies may be low carbon based too! As well as wanting to protect our fertiliser costs from the impacts of peak oil, we also wanted to protect the trees that we were using to do this. So we used a symbiotic (mutual help for the fungus and the tree) mycorrhizal root dip before planting, which should increase the resistance of the trees to both diseases and the effects of drought.

This is only the start though. We have just taken delivery of some orchard trees and will plant up about three quarters of an acre for the orchard, with a mixture of apples, pears, plums, damsons, gages, quince, medlar and nuts.  I hope to get the beehives next year along with planting up fruit and vegetable beds between the trees.

We also hope to have installed a solar thermal heat exchanger (for the condenser unit on the milk tank) which will heat all the hot water for the milking parlour, only requiring a small electric emersion top up. Planning permission for a wind turbine has just been submitted and we’re looking forward to another action packed year.

To find out more about the benefits of woodland to your farm come along to the Farming Futures workshop in Yorkshire on Thursday 25th November or read the Forestry and Woodland fact sheet.

Ruth Simpson has a degree in Applied Biology and farms 195 acres of pasture at West Arrathorne Farm in North Yorkshire with 100 milking Friesians.