Denis Hocking: Forestry outlook not as gloomy as painted

Perhaps the best way of growing forests in New Zealand is to integrate them with pastoral farming, writes Denis Hocking. Photo / Gerard O'Brien

Opinion

I read the Chronicle (May 11) over lunch with a noisy forest harvesting operation a couple of hundred metres away. If I believed the forestry articles I was reading I should have been very gloomy. But I wasn’t.

The nearby harvest will still return several times what is achievable with sheep and beef, both for me and the country through export earnings. It will not put any slash into streams, rivers or beaches. The on-site stored carbon will return along with the silvicultural jobs, while much of the harvested carbon should be locked up for many years in various structures.

Why the difference? Why is my forestry operation still humming along while it’s supposedly all gloom in forestry? Well, unlike [Forest 360 director] Marcus Musson I am not obsessed with the log export trade, which has been a bonus over the last decade but has never, in my case, been a long-term target worth chasing.

My target has always been high-quality pruned logs, sawn locally and, more often than not, exported for treatments such as acetylation, which makes the timber very durable and stable. Our acetylated radiata clearwood was used to refurbish the Whanganui cycling velodrome.

Believe it or not, Norwegians come to New Zealand to buy our knot-free clearwood, which their much longer rotations make unrealistic. In fact, New Zealand has a very significant advantage over most forest growers and there is a strong demand for clearwood globally. The Europeans see treated clearwood as the best substitute for tropical hardwoods.

Unfortunately, few of the corporates seem to recognise the virtues of pruning (they are using misleading models in my opinion) and most forestry commentators, such as Musson, seem to be unaware of the pruned/clearwood trade.

I am not a fan of carbon forestry but production forestry, where wood can be used to substitute for high energy and carbon-intensive alternatives, is a real asset in my opinion.

Several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports argue production forestry is a much more effective way of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions than long-term carbon sinks. And I agree with Beef & Lamb chief executive Sam McIvor that perhaps the best way of growing forests in New Zealand is to integrate them with pastoral farming. However, do remember that good forestry is relatively labour intensive.

I accept that production forestry can cause major problems with slash but in many cases, notably most of Hawke’s Bay, slash came from non-production trees including willows and poplars planted to stabilise stream banks. While there are trees in the landscape and flood events of recent scale there will always be slash in waterways unfortunately, and if all the trees are removed then our hillsides will collapse even more dramatically and turn into silt.

So please don’t try to write off forestry. Yes, it does need to lift its act but then so do all land uses.

* Denis Hocking is a Bulls farm-forester and former NZ Farm Forestry Association executive member.