I was over in Wales last week, visiting my auntie on her farm in Carmarthenshire. Denny and her husband Martin moved down to Wales from London 20 years ago to farm sheep and cattle.
For the last few years they've been turning their land to tree planting on behalf of the Woodland Trust. They've planted 18,000 trees over 20 acres. And every 2 years they'll have to cull about half of what they've planted to make room for the stronger trees. Then in 20/30 years they'll have some beautiful mature trees which will add hugely to the local environment providing a rich resource for bio-diversity to thrive unchecked. All very lovely.
The Woodland Trust have advised Denny and Martin that they'll probably end up with 1000 or so trees from the 18,000 planted. Herein lies an interesting point; how can we attempt to quantify the impact that the loss of 9000 trees (the number of trees used every day around the world by the freesheet publishers) has on the environment when you consider that 18 times that number of trees would have to have been planted in the first place if the forest was being managed properly?
