Forestry Now

Dermot McNally 0:00
welcome to forestry now, where we explore the forces impacting profitable and sustainable management of commercial forests and natural woodlands. I'm Dermot McNally, today I speak with Andy Dunn, and he's an agricultural consultant based in Port leash. He's also a forest owner and a member of the leash awfully farm forestry group, and he explains how he manages his own forest and his experience working with adjoining forest owners, managing their combined area through continuous cover forestry. Then we talk about his role as agricultural consultant and his experience advising farmers about their options under the current Air Force Station Program, he highlights the way forestry has been marginalized outside of farming, and how this affects the attitudes of landholders to it. Finally, he explains, with clear examples, how current restrictions around our station rarely result in the best outcome for nature, as always, links and contact details are in the show notes below. Sign up to the forestry now newsletter, and finally, enjoy the conversation with Andy Dunn,

Andy Dunne 1:07
I'm 60 plus years of age, so I've been in agriculture for all my life from a small farm in County. Leash got a good practice going fairly quickly, things expand if you're if you have an appetite beyond schemes and things, and you become an advisor, you become a trusted advisor in many, in many houses. So that's how I got into agricultural consultancy.

Dermot McNally 1:33
When you started the Agricultural Advisory Service, was that in Port leash itself, and were you still farming a little bit, or what was happening on the home farm?

Andy Dunne 1:42
Yeah. I mean, the home farm was, was 40 Acres, and this will probably segues into your question. Will segues into forestry quite close to port. Leash, leash County Council and the NRA, the national roads authority, in their wisdom, decided to put a road square up through our farm, more or less at the time, I was transitioning, if you like, from teaching into agricultural consultancy. While I was farming, the farm was subject to a CPO, and we lost, we lost a good lot of it, and was badly divided by the impact left four sides of a major roundabout, you have to kind of move on. So we got money almost by accident. There was a thing called rollover relief, which allowed you reinvest the money that you got into a similar asset. So I bought land that was marginal enough, I very quickly planted that. Yeah, it was very attractive. In comparison, though, it was quite easy to plant it. There was the complication was very low level. And, I mean, there was a good income stream, if you could look into the future at all, any little bit, which is a difficult thing to do, in terms of projecting your life for 20 years, it wasn't a bad thing to do, and I was very interested in forestry and the land use. I mean, it was a type of tillage for me, but similar, but quite different, but it was, it was a land use that I connected with at the time.

Dermot McNally 3:19
So just to say, do you still farm separately to that, or is your main farming enterprise? Then the forestry itself?

Andy Dunne 3:25
I would have a few cattle all the time, not many. So I still farm, but my main land or farming enterprise is now forestry.

Dermot McNally 3:34
No, I'm very interested to hear about the collaborative arrangement. We'll say that you have with a couple of other adjoining forest owners. I've heard you talk about that before, maybe you could explain maybe how that came about.

Andy Dunne 3:48
One of my forestry colleagues in particular was very helpful from day one me and him and I have, I suppose, progressed together. As well as being a forester, he also owns forest, and we bought some plots of forestry, adjoining plots of land which we have forested, but we probably three or four other landowners apart from us that are also joining us. We decided very early on that we had to, we had to do our best to work collaboratively with with these people. So it was a very positive decision to do that. From day one, we realized we couldn't, none of us, neither, neither them nor us, could really operate without crossing one owner's land without knowing what we were doing, management wise, with the forest, all that sort of thing. So I mean, in practical terms, it really comes down to talking and communicating and being aware. Okay, not everybody's goals are the same, but at the same time being aware. That there is a very strong mutual benefit to getting on with people and facilitating people and reciprocating their facilitation of us, you know. So, I mean, I've probably simplified things like right away is things like roading, building roads to not just thinking about yourself when the road has been built, thinking who else needs to benefit from this? And hoping that the other guy will say, Well, this is not just for me. There are other people as well as me, you know. So that sort of thing.

Dermot McNally 5:37
So in a practical sense, Andy, let's just take the roads. Then. Does that mean that you did a shared road application, and does one road come in and serve two or maybe three other forest owners? Or what does it look in in a practical because I know at times people can be slow to have to create a new right of way across their farm to give someone else access through.

Andy Dunne 6:04
I suppose the road one is interesting, because everybody gained from the cooperation. Now, there was no share of road as such. There was a road if it's almost it's not one block leading to another, but it has that effect. So the road that was built on mine connected up with the road that was built on the next guy, and that connected up with but we both then have different ways out. But one road is actually serving the three plantations or the four plantations, and potentially will serve another one that's a younger plantation, and there's no road yet. So, and to do that, we've had to trust one another first of all, and also then we've had to probably formalize it and grant each other and our successors entitled rights of way to you know, I mean, forestry will outlive us all, as you know. So, so you have to consider that the next generation, or even the generation after that, mightn't see the world the same way as we do now, but we have to try and provide for what's best. First thing we did was we made sure that everybody had fair and equitable access. Now, who fixes the potholes and all that when they emerge is another matter. But fundamentally, if everybody looks after their own, it should be okay, you know. And some problems you can't kind of address, because you don't know what's coming at you anyway, you know. But if you start with a positive perspective, so the roads are an interesting one worked really well for us, and has worked really well. And there's no problem with access. It's gone farther in the management system. In the particular block of wood you're talking about, there's a general management moving towards continuous cover forestry there change, as you probably know, is difficult to sell, so even to get people to plant, and then to get them into a system, and then to change their system, all that involves change. But it was easy enough. The other guys had confidence that we in us, that you know well, if them lads are doing it, and they've taught it through and they haven't blackguarded to so far, we're happy to kind of progress in so there's a large block now of three or four owners, not all in CCF, but all moving towards it.

Dermot McNally 8:31
Can we just expand on that? Because I'm aware of an example where perhaps someone's in CCF and genuinely making a massive effort on one side of a barbed wire fence, but the neighbor next door to them, forestry owner is in a clear fell rotation, or has decided to manage that way, and the act of clear fell on the neighbor's side could have a very devastating effect from a windstability on the other side of the fence. Was that a consideration for yourselves, are the trees planted that close over the boundary lines that you're effectively in a contiguous forest.

Andy Dunne 9:06
They're right up to one another, yeah, and it's something that you would have to consider. I've seen the effects of one neighbor, maybe with a slightly older forest whipping down the trees and exposing the new forest edge and the devastation that comes, you know, and very frustrating, we through look, I would say. But again, back to Jack Nicklaus. We worked hard at it, and we conceded things, and we were open and fair and all that. At least, we thought we were anyway. We think we have avoided that sort of a scenario. So in effect, while there are three or four owners there, it will be managed as a single unit for everybody's benefit. There's really big pragmatic benefit there in terms of forest management, if, if it can get everybody aligned. And even, and similarly, if, if, even in conventional forestry systems, I mean, if neighbors could even just make one another aware of what they were doing, so that if John's forest was going to be cut down next year, yours is two years younger beside him, you could have a chat and say, John, can you hold off for a little while? Let me mobilize. I don't want to be I need another year's growth or something like that, you know. And again, one of the difficulties of forestry is that it slipped a little bit out of farming hands into institutional hands, and institutional hands tend to just serve their own interest. And we're talking things that aren't well seen, but are very impactful on maybe John in Leitrim or paddy in leash with her 15 or 20 acre block, and the neighbor whips the institutional neighbor whips down there, and John and Patty are left very vulnerable, you know. So the benefits of collaboration are wide. I would say, you know,

Dermot McNally 11:07
yeah, absolutely no, you're right about that and who owns what. Because, as someone living in an area that the plot may have been sold twice, and it might be clear who even owns it. So in terms of interventions, then, how many thins, thinnings have you done, and how has it stood up to the wind, especially storm a when was massive in the northwest, but how did it affect us down there?

Andy Dunne 11:35
The CCF block has been turned once first tenning, pretty similar to a conventional thinning. You put in the racks and you take a small grid out, so you just kind of setting it up, really, for subsequent interventions. Now, most of it, it's in the south Midlands, leash, awfully, most of it has stood up fairly well, a bit that was tin very close to the time of the storm was affected a little bit. That was 10, maybe a year before the fall the storm was also affected. But there's a there was a complicating factor in that there was a drain blocked. We collaborated with a statutory agency to go in. They let them in to do something. They blocked the drain, and they didn't clean it, and we didn't pursue it, and an acre or two was blown down. Now you could argue that that was a MER that was marginal for the species, or it's maybe nature telling you, I don't want Norway Spruce growing there. And we lost maybe an acre and a half or two of maybe 20 year old, 22 year old Norway spruce. These things happen, you know, but it certainly wasn't the devastation that I've seen up across the west and northwest. We would hope that the CCF would be more resilient. I mean, that's the whole theory. It's, it's, it's, it's resilient to to natural events that are otherwise maybe devastating, you know?

Dermot McNally 13:15
And just to be clear, we're, we're talking predominantly about conifer plantations here, not broadleaf.

Andy Dunne 13:21
Well, where we're talking actually, is quite a mix. It's probably maybe 6040, conifer to broadleaf. There's Sycamore in it. There was ash, but that has been, has had to be removed. There's no obvious rules, a little bit of oak. So what did, interestingly, the predominantly affected species in the storm, and even the species, even the storm damage was relatively minor, was spruce, Norway spruce, yeah, you could look at it and say, Well, maybe Norway shouldn't have been there in the first place, you know. That's an argument, you know, and it like, you know, the thinking project woodland around that they were talking about the right tree in the right place for the right reason. There's a lot more to that than the glib way it was thrown out. The spruces are the cash cow of our forest industry. They're also best to fix carbon, but if they don't stay standing, you know, there are horses for courses, that's the issue. We're very complex kind of scenario, though it

Dermot McNally 14:30
is, it's a very complex scenario, and we can, perhaps we'll touch on that, because the reality is, is that once the premiums run out on the broadleaf, you're you're not getting any commercial return, unless there's some major changes on ecosystem service payments or carbon. So it's, it is, it's challenging. In other words, there's an area that's been managed, you might say, CCF, but there's also other blocks within that overall area that are clear, file planned, or

Andy Dunne 14:56
that general area, CCF, but there are other blocks. Maybe, maybe 15 or 20 Mile separations from there. I call them conventionally managed, mainly because they were quite well advanced. Some of these, I mean, there's a block 30 years old there now of Sitka spruce. It couldn't be converted at the stage it was at,

Dermot McNally 15:18
if you're interested in forestry, maybe buying, maybe selling, maybe just curious. Then have a look on for sales.ie. There's forests young and old for sale all over Ireland, including in Andy's area of leash. Awfully, get in touch with Paul at Forest sales.ie. Who will be happy to help. Now, back to Andy. Andy, want to ask you one or two other questions just about that kind of collaborative approach. So I presume you did a joint road application digest, or was that

Andy Dunne 15:48
no, the roads were separate. They were jointly planned, but the applications were individual applications. The Forest Service inspector was aware of our thinking and was very supportive of the approach. He knew that we wanted to kind of link up these and that we were all in one way, interdependent on one another anyway. So he facilitated that as best he could, within the the rules of the of the regime, you know.

Dermot McNally 16:17
And then when it came to the actual thinning licenses, Andy, again, have you, as all done individual thinning licenses with your own forester? Or is it a is is there a facility within the department to do a single application? Because, let's be honest, the you know, for a small forest owner, some of the administrative the cost of the administration and the license application fees are substantial enough they are.

Andy Dunne 16:41
In our case, we walk individually again, but we probably had the benefit that the forest sort of that's engaged is part of the group, if you like. So he doesn't have to be convinced. In fact, he does a lot of the convincing of what might be the best collective approach here

Dermot McNally 17:02
that's very helpful, because, in effect, you have the advice in house, and he's, he's a stakeholder. He is,

Andy Dunne 17:07
and he also, I suppose, the fact that he's a first and can maybe see at a high level what needs to be done for the collective Okay, he's bought into it himself. Is is beneficial you have in situations that probably more common situations, you have three or four foresters looking after eight or 10 different blocks of land, and nobody knows what they're doing, you know, and that's not helpful. And probably little bits of roads emerging and not connecting, and where there might be mutual benefit is lost. And back to that thing of nobody knowing what's their neighbors doing. You know?

Dermot McNally 17:45
Yeah, no, it's very true. Well, just on that, then you're you're living through the process of collaborating with your neighbors. What else should the state be doing at a high level to try and facilitate just clusters of owners be there, joining or nearby, to encourage them to work together. And I suppose, find ways of simplifying their own management.

Andy Dunne 18:12
You have to understand, I suppose, the way the state works, it's very linear, and that doesn't help, but that's probably, from this perspective, the only way it can work. But if I go back to our own example, where the Forest Service inspector was able to lay out on the table or on the screen the mapping and say, Well, if we put a road here and here and here, it'll benefit everybody, so that the inspectorate might adopt a more holistic approach, rather than an individual approach, to an application. It's very easy. A file comes in. You look at it, farmer, Farmer Joel wants 300 meters of a road. We give them that, and we won't take any consideration into what's going on all around them. You know, in other forests, maybe even in adjoining forests, so the value of collaboration and collective thinking would be valued and pushed a little bit more. Now, I know this is very difficult, because I know how how state entities work. You know, a file is a file, and you deal with that, but if we don't change, we end up doing the same thing, and we're not making a great job of it at the minute, you know, so more collaborative thinking as well as action. Ultimately, I suppose, we have saved ourselves, and we've saved the state a good lot of funding, you know, by by optimizing the road layout. So if, if some funding could be diverted to incentivize that kind of thinking, it probably would would help things to be fair to the Forest Service. They have supported those things and supported them quite well. Ultimately, the success of the Forestry. Program, if you like, comes down to individuals and the decisions that they make around the bit of land that they've committed to it. If you don't get down to the kitchen table with the forest owner or the land owner, the forest will be neglected. The Forest Service are well meaning, but some of the bean counters will say, Well, we're getting no dividend out of advising farmer on this without measuring it properly. You know, the measurement of the dividend from is the long, slow measurement over time.

Dermot McNally 20:37
Yeah. You know, even if there was a method to flag sites that had gone beyond a certain age, that had never had a license application on them, something like that could mobilize a lot of timber.

Andy Dunne 20:49
Yeah, and it's, I see it. I see it in the leash group, which is, you know, it's a group that's active for 10 or 15 years, and it's struggling to keep its interest and keep its attention. Because, you know, the particular challenge of forest is that it is marginalized from agriculture. It's something else. It's a plot that wasn't doing much, and the culture is not there in the farming community. Say this is a really good asset, if I look after just a little bit, you have to seed and feed that engagement in the in at an owner level.

Dermot McNally 21:28
Well, Andy, I think this moves on nicely to your role as an agricultural consultant, and how you see farmers interacting with the schemes that are in place. But maybe just to give me a bit of context, primarily, what type of farmers are you working with in a general sense, and where are they based geographically

Andy Dunne 21:48
up to now, we've we, we've dealt with quite a broad range of farm, I'd say a range very reflective of the national scatter. So about 70, 75% of the clients are what I would call cattle sheep farmers. In this part of the world, there might be four or 5% with a bit of tillage. Then there's maybe about 10% around here in daring, and then there's a few water and that's nearly it. We're well representative of the national norm. We'd be scattered across the Midlands, leash awfully north of North Kilkenny, bit of East Galway, across the general Midlands. Good land, Midland, land and poor land in the hills and on the edge of the bogs and things like that. So quite a diverse range of farmers and farming types and farming situations.

Dermot McNally 22:38
Andy, I know that back in 2023 you co authored a report called putting land owners front and center, in which yourself and your co author argued that farmers need to be encouraged, supported and incentivized to plant trees so as as a general Agricultural Consultant, may not have the same eyes on this issue that you have, but maybe you'd explain it may be drawn on that report, if it's still relevant, the ways in which the state treats forestry different from the other farm and enterprises. We were

Andy Dunne 23:10
frustrated with what's going on, with what was going on. And I had sat on Project woodland, and some of finance colleagues had said on, and we kind of use it to not so much counter it, but to give an alternative narrative, everything was and everyone, every dog and devil, if you like, was having their say, some of them having a very disproportionate say. And department, Forest Service, war, fairness, maybe trying to referee it all and trying to pull something out of it, a kind of a glaring omission was that everybody was getting supported, spoken to opinions, sort of and I know landowners opinions were thought as well, in fairness. And we felt that one of the big flaws was that forestry was something else. It wasn't farming and it wasn't proper forestry, either, because proper forestry was the domain of the state. You know, historically, the state had done all the planting and all the land purchase and all the management of forests and all that, and we felt that we needed to go back and unravel all that, not the not the ownership or anything, but the approaches and deal with some of the issues that were there. I mean, there's a lot of, I don't know whether you've come across it, but there's a lot of negative sentiment about forestry in rural communities. And it goes back way beyond present, and it goes back to the 40s and 50s, and people tell you about the Department of Lands, whoever were coming and taking the land office and given us a five or an acre, and true or false, it's there, and it lingered. And when you have that kind of negative stuff going on, you need to deal with it. The only way we could deal, see, dealing with it was, first of all, I kind of alluded to this already, that you sit down and you engage with people at a farm level. Level, rather than at a something other level, because it's a land resource, and the vast bulk of the resource that you're looking at is in the ownership of farmers. So you have to deal with it at their level, at their fireplace, at their kitchen table, and at their kind of in their mindset. And you have to do that, you have to integrate it really well, in with with existing farming. So you treat it as an enterprise on the farm rather than something else. And we have, we've done mean, it was very stark to me when I started doing reps, we had to do maps. Do maps by hand. You come across a forestry block on a farm, you put a red line around it in your market, C, F, E, X, commercial forestry excluded, and it surely was excluded, you know, from thought and mind and everything else. I mean, this is not coming from our own stuff. This is coming from, I suppose, a European model, where you have. You know, in many parts of Europe, a farm family will have a small plot of forest associated with their farm, and they'll have managed it for four or five or six or eight or 10 generations, and it's there, and they manage it as part of the farm. And they go get their bit of wood when they need it. They go on, cook down a decent if they have a big debt to pay, or a child needs to be educated, or something like that. And we didn't go with that model. We kind of shifted the state model onto the private sector, and it hasn't worked, and it's not going to work. And unless we change that model, we're going to argue just time and time again. If you stay doing the same thing, you're going to get the same results. Our remedy was to, first of all, make it a farming enterprise, put it in there with the mix, right? Don't make it something else. Don't discriminate against it in payment terms. Okay, there's a good, there's a good support system, but, you know, you put it in, you lose your disadvantaged area, blah, blah, we've changed some of those things, but we've a bit to go yet. Support the landowner the same way as we support the landowner through various schemes. I mean, there's, there's a tam scheme, there targeted agricultural mechanization scheme, you could, you could really get a handle for a sweeping brush grant for it. But if you mentioned getting something for a forest, why we haven't been able to integrate? Because if we integrate at an institutional level, we start to get the farmer Integrating his thinking around it as well. So it's, again, multi factor. You need to support him or her at ground level, but you need to support them in the systems and structures that are there in a mechanism and a way that they're already familiar with.

Dermot McNally 27:51
Am I right in saying, prior to 2008 once the forestry premium expired, there was no underlying payment for managing your forest so, and as you just mentioned, there the ANC area of natural constraint, you lose that straight away in forestry if you, if you're an active owner and you want to do a little bit of the forwarding or a little bit of the harvesting yourself, none of that machinery is generally covered under Tams, whereas for every other farm and enterprise. It would be a quick message of thanks to everyone who has listened, commented or offered feedback so far to the podcast. It's greatly appreciated if you haven't yet done so, please subscribe and rate the podcast wherever you listen. Remember, new episodes are released every two weeks, and you can sign up for the newsletter in the links below where you get occasional updates and articles. Now, let's finish the chat with Andy. But what other areas then, can the state practically change what's there at the minute? Because you say we, we do now have the best All right, you don't get the ANC.

Andy Dunne 28:56
I think the attitude is the thing. I mean, historically, the Forest Service was very removed from the landowner. I think you have to weigh the emotional attachment. Farm families have two land in Ireland, it's very deep seated. And in my 30 years, I thought it would kind of dissipate a bit, but it hasn't at all. This comes back to the to the coaching thing. I mean, Chagas have, I don't have many advisors to have. And there's a, there's a chart of private forest consultants. The private forest consultants are kind of on their own, if you like, for the Chagas guys, meet them. Might be 10 of them. I don't know what's in, but they get a budget. But there's 110,000 or 120,000 landowners out there. If you do a simple sum, and you divide the number of potential land or the number of landowners by the number of advisors, you get a very big kind of factor there. You know. So we need to really think about how we support it at that subtle level. It has to come from the ground up, you know. Has to be well incentivized. But part of the incentive is to support it at that level you get in, you sow the seed that this is a good business thing to do. This is a good farm thing to do, but it'll only be good if you engage in it and you as a landowner. The thing, the attitude where we planted it, closed the gate and came back after 15 years, is a really bad attitude to have. It encourages neglect.

Dermot McNally 30:40
So let's imagine now, in the last year since the new forestry program came in last year or two, and you get a farmer who comes into you and he's keen on planting, what are the practical challenges that you run into there when you try and show him his options and and he has a reaction to he or she has to decide whether this is practical. Is practical. Is it even possible? What are the practical things that are pushing against the decision to move the forestry then,

Andy Dunne 31:09
I mean, at the start of our conversation, I said, when I planted, it was simple. It's not simple anymore. I suppose the practical things, and I do have landowners, I have three or four of them there at the minute, despite all the negativity, wanting to plant and plant substantial areas, reflecting back a little bit how a landowner, a farmer, approaches this, is interesting. So they'll make this hard enough decision to say, I'm going to plant a bit of land. And we all know, if we come from an agricultural, a farming background that that has a lot of baggage, right? The decision itself, you then try to progress the decision. They come into me and I say, Well, I'm not a forester. I'll get you a forester, right? But I know a little bit about and I do a little bit, I look at the map, and I'll say, yeah, no, that's peace, right? Or no, there's a breeding weight or there somewhere in that square kilometer. And then you might have said to me, I don't own a square kilometer, and no, unless you will have found one somewhere in that and you have to get a board report, a board expert, to screen that out, right? And we're still in my office. We haven't gone to the forester yet.

Dermot McNally 32:21
Now, yeah, okay, but just on that screening for the bird, is that something that has to be done over that kilometer, or just his specific farm,

Andy Dunne 32:30
his specific farm has to be assessed in the context of the square kilometer half the country, literally half the country now is a breeding weight or so on. So, so I have the farmer in front of me, and I've told him or her, look at we you're in a breeding waiter, or you're this, that and other and he and I'm lost. I says I rented to the dairy farmer up the road to reclaim it for me. And he give me 350, euros an acre for five years or seven years. In short, I'll have it back after that straight away. You're, you're, and I haven't told them about appropriate assessment, or, you know, archeology or anything like that. Like the state has very high ambitions around forestry. I mean, officially, they're talking 8000 hectares a year. The research will say you probably want to be doing more, at least more than twice that, to meet our climate change targets. I think they might have fallen off the cliff edge or something. But anyway, if, if we have high ambitions and we need to get land in, we need simply and clearly to make it easy for people to do it. If you're going to make it hard, there are other choices, and people will make their choices accordingly,

Dermot McNally 33:51
just on those particular examples of schemes and screening and habitat. So let's imagine that there is a ground nesting bird or a wading bird that's that's been found in a nearby area. Are the state actively helping farmers to manage for that endangered species? Are they giving them funds to change the way they're managing, to maybe not cut at certain times of the year, or not use the land to give these birds space? Or is it that the the farmer is basically told, farm whatever way you want. But if you go to plant trees, it's just, it's, it's probably not going to happen unless you get this, this and this report,

Andy Dunne 34:36
you're, you're, you're close to the reality. I mean, there are support schemes for hen Harriers and breeding waiters in various EIPs, but they're very tight and they're very dead. I mean, I was in a place not only yesterday, and a gentleman wants to plant a good bit of his land. It's within 15 kilometers of a hen harrier site, so I've done the right or wrong of it. But if that land was there for 100 years, it would go into trees all by itself. So in, you know, and there are 5 million of us, or seven millions of us on the island, and we cannot have impacts, you know, and it's a question of managing these impacts as best we can. The answer is said to you, it's complex, and it is complex, but at a farm level, I mean it, there are many easier things to do with your land, other than planting it and going to forestry generally.

Dermot McNally 35:34
Now, yeah, and I mean, look at I had an experience of it, and it, what it seems is that the state may stop you from planting to protect a species or a habitat, but that doesn't actually protect the habitat from what type of farming you choose to pursue, other than forestry. So in the case of that gentleman, he may not be able to plant because of the hen harrier, but he's not actually being supported. To encourage the hen harrier to be on his land,

Andy Dunne 36:06
no support at all. I mean, he gets the normal farm supports the base and the eco and things like that. But he said to us, yesterday, I was there with the forester, and the forest said, No, we'll do this, this and this, the forest. There's no guarantee you'll get an approval. And he said to me, if I don't get a few dairy farmers around here and they'll take 50 or 80 acres off me, non Potter and there's the lesser of two evils at play here all the time. And the state does not seem to be able to recognize that if it went into forestry, albeit within 15 kilometers of a forest, it could be, surely could be more beneficial to the environment, and I don't want to downplay do down daring than an intensive dairy farm going on, where there was previously a relatively extensive beef farm, you know? I mean, there's choices that that have to be looked at here. The ultimate choice now is between forestry or not. If he doesn't get forestry, this land will go to dairy, you know. And we know the outcomes, you know, yeah.

Dermot McNally 37:12
And because you're close to farmers, and you're, you're and, I mean, the age profile of farmers is it, you know, predominantly stacked towards the older end of the spectrum, you have farmers, as you say, that are maybe retiring. Some of them will maybe lucky enough to have someone to come into the business with them, a family member. But also farmers who are thinking of selling or or downscaling all these rules and habitat designations. Do you see that actually they have affected the resale value of the land. Because surely, if, if I'm an intensive dairy farmer and I'm running a good business, I'm I'm keen to expand that business, am I going to pay as much for a land that has designation, or are the designations making people less willing to actually buy the land at the higher prices we're seeing in the market Asher,

Andy Dunne 38:04
it has to have a depressing if you, if you impose any burden, and a designation is a burden, whether we like it, not it, it's restricting what you can and can't do with the land. So if you, if you have a desi a burden on land, it will affect the value. Simple answer, no. I mean, that's no. Rocket science is attached to that. To me, answering that question, it annoys me. I mean, we're delivering, if you like, societal goods here for free. I mean, the logic of it would be, if society wants us to manage our land as a collective in a certain way, and that is affecting our livelihoods. Surely they have to recognize that in some way, shape or form. If you read some of the European directives and the regs and things like that, it does seem to be acknowledged. But our fellows don't seem to have kind of got around to implementing it yet.

Dermot McNally 38:55
You know, implementing any kind of,

Andy Dunne 38:58
what you would call payment for any PS, payment for Environmental Services isn't that is the broad leaves. The broad leaves, which you mentioned earlier, is a really classic example of that. You know, you're, you fall off a cliff at year 20, and that's the end of it, and you're grateful after that.

Dermot McNally 39:12
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. It's, it's, and so this is why we struggle to get the numbers, all of these combined reasons.

Andy Dunne 39:21
There's no one reason. You know there's, there's quite a number of things at play here, but, but the landowner will make their mind up fairly quickly if they see, well, it's hard to get into it. There's a lot of regulation, and there's no money over for 150 years.

Dermot McNally 39:38
Have you noticed a shift in attitude among those who have planted and maybe since the storm, or it's, how do you think they feel about their forestry? Are they happy with the decision they've made?

Andy Dunne 39:49
Andy, funnily enough, most of the ones I again, bear in mind where I am. I'm in County. Leash. We haven't, we've. We've more of a culture of Forestry and leash. And most other places. I mean, whitlaw has a better culture, but there's, I think, 16 or 17% of county leash under forest, which is a good lot compared to the I think the national average is 11. But most of the people in, say, in our group, would be positive and would know that there's a benefit. But they'd also be fairly established in that they might be planted 1520, 25 years, and they're starting to get little income streams in additional to the premium, in addition to the premiums, and also, you're you're dealing with them, probably a cohort that have put themselves forward. They're interested anyway. You know, it's not a it's, it's a biased sample, if you like, but most of them know that. Look at it's a long haul thing this, and you'll get bits and pieces of income over it, and you need to manage it to get the best income and all that. There's a cohort that are well established and well organized. There's a cohort and that aren't really bothered it was good for the premiums, you

Dermot McNally 40:56
know. And how do we engage those people? Back to

Andy Dunne 40:59
the challenge of, you know you have to you have to shake the bushes, you have to sit at their tables. But probably, if you brought the forestry in with the agriculture, you would have a better chance of engaging with them, because, to be fair, there's a much better engagement with farmers, even if it is true schemes now, than there was when I started off. Most of them are tuned into having to sit down in simple terms. Just tell the advisor what's going on on the land this year. It's one conversation you know, that might lead or create an opportunity to say, well, how you doing with that bit down there, you know, or hear about new scheme or such and such, you know. But if you don't, if you exclude the forestry from that conversation, you're talking periodic, occasional conversations, or you're engaging with the people that are already converted. So that's, that's the value of the integration to me, that you get it onto the agenda at least once a year, you know. And you say, Did you tin it? Would you think about tinning it? Did it burn? You know, did it blow down? You know, there's a forester up the road there. You give your hand with that, you know, or talk to Joe soap. He's a good contractor.

Dermot McNally 42:15
No, very good. And Andy, is there anything else we didn't touch on there that you see as important

Andy Dunne 42:21
to wrap it from my perspective, I think it's all about the landowner and getting him or her engaged. And you do it on the one to one, the human level, but you also do what you support, what he or she is doing, where there's a gap, you know, you financial gap, you support that with incentive, and you don't, you don't be deliberately exclusive, you know, and simple as that, you know, things fall off from that then, you know, if you start to think about

Dermot McNally 42:49
it, yeah, brilliant. Listen, Andy, thanks very much for making the time. You're welcome. So that wraps up my interview with Andy Dunn. Thanks for listening, and please feel free to get in touch with queries or suggestions until the next time you.

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