Forests could provide more rural employment

After what has felt like a very wet and windy winter, a milder and calmer spell of weather in mid-February brought an awakening in the woods. Frogs began their somewhat frenzied activity of spawning and could be heard croaking in the pond and ditch. Birds started to make their voices heard. Song thrush, mistle thrush, robin and chaffinch started their springtime songs. Hazel catkins were lengthening and the tiny red flowers starting to open. Over the last month the rapidly lengthening days and the increased activity of birds and beasts have signaled the movement of our part of the Earth towards spring. I like to think of spring as beginning at the equinox (20th March this year), since this marks the transition from longer nights to longer days and is the point at which day length is changing most rapidly.

I usually stop felling trees in the wood at the end of March to let birds nest in peace. The deadline is fast approaching and I am frustrated by slow progress over the last few months. I have not been able to do as much felling as I had hoped this winter. My main problem has been finding somebody to work with. I do not work alone in the wood if using chainsaw or tractor winch due to the potentially serious consequences in the (unlikely) event that something were to go wrong. I am very grateful to my two volunteers, Steve and Adrian, who have been coming to help for a half day most weeks. However, I had also planned to pay a chainsaw operator to do a day per week with me. I made some good progress with Ruiridh and then Joss during the autumn but they stopped being able to come and I struggled to find anyone else. It seems that local self-employed woodcutters are in short supply.

The large-scale, industrial nature of modern commercial forestry in Scotland means that there is not great need for chainsaw operators (aka hand cutters). Practically all the harvesting is done by big machines, with hand cutters used for trees that are over-size, inaccessible to the machines, some wind-blow and on very steep sites where skylines are being used. Hand cutting tends to be done more in smaller woodlands, such as on privately owned estates and in small woodlands such as ours. It is often used for thinning and management of amenity woodlands. Hand cutting is also used on sites where conservation is the priority, such as for clearance of non-native trees and rhododendron in areas of native woodland or peatland. However, woodlands that are managed in this way seem to be few and far between so there is a relatively low demand for hand cutters. This means there are not many of them about and they often have to travel long distances for work.

Another issue affecting the use of hand cutters is the economics. The price that timber can be sold for often does not cover the costs of the operation if hand cutters are used. This is particularly the case for lower grade timber that has a lower financial value. Timber prices are based on the model of high output from big machines doing clear-felling, while most hand cutting jobs are for conservation or amenity purposes, often funded by grants, rather than for timber production.

Here in Comar Wood, the economics of hand felling should work. This is partly because I own, manage and work in the wood, cutting out any middle-men. We have not yet done enough felling here to test whether my optimism is justified. Last winter’s felling costs were covered by the timber sales (though not leaving much money to cover my own time input). However, this was thinning and felling small trees, which generates much less output per person per day compared with felling larger trees that yield more valuable saw logs. Once we get onto some of the larger trees the economics should become much more favourable. I also have various ideas for turning some of the timber I take out into other saleable products (e.g. through firewood processing, charcoal making and crafts), which I hope will help generate higher revenues from the poorer quality timber.

The twins started nursery after Christmas and have settled in well, so now I have a bit more time to devote to woodland work. Ideally, in the longer term, I hope to find a local person who could work with me part time in the wood. I would like the woodland to be an enterprise that can contribute (in a small way) to local employment. I would also be keen to welcome more volunteers to the woodland. I developed my own initial interest in woodland management through volunteering, where I had many valuable experiences and met lots of great people. I hope I can now be host to volunteers from near or far. I plan to build a small cabin as accommodation for volunteers or workers who come from further away.

Towards the end of winter I managed to get some days felling with a cutter called Tom, and we have a few more days scheduled this month, so have finally made some more progress with cutting the new track route. Altogether approximately 250 m of the route has now been felled. I have slowly been extracting the felled trees with Steve and Adrian, as far as can be reached with the winch while the tractor sits on the existing track. Once we have cleared all that can be reached it will be time to build the first section of track. This will allow access for the tractor to winch out the trees from the next section, and so on. It feels exciting opening up this route through the spruce, carving a channel of light through the dense trees and reaching new parts of the woodland where there is so much potential for transformation.

My trouble finding a woodcutter to work with, together with a local consultation about a proposed new national park in our area, made me start to think about local employment and how forestry, woodlands and timber contribute. As a typical rural community in the Scottish Highlands, there are limited employment opportunities here generally. Although forestry and woodlands occupy a large amount of land in the local area, they currently generate relatively few jobs for local people, and this is a problem throughout Scotland according to Douglas MacMillan writing in the Reforesting Scotland Journal¹. Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) own the largest amount of forest land in my area, while RSPB own the Corrimony nature reserve, and there are also privately owned woodlands. In my opinion, forestry has great potential to create more rural jobs that are based around using the local natural resources (and an alternative to tourism jobs).

FLS land is typically managed through contracts let via tendering and frameworks. Contractors are often from elsewhere, due to the nature of this process. Forestry workers (including machine operators, tree planters and chainsaw operators) often have to travel extensively for work, staying away in caravans or driving long distances. I am sure some folk enjoy the lifestyle of travelling about and working in lots of different places, but it is certainly not for everyone. Before having the twins I used to travel around for various tree planting and cutting jobs, sometimes staying in my van. However, now with small children, a home that I love and a garden to look after, travelling extensively for work doesn’t appeal. Driving long distances to a site on a daily basis feels wrong from a carbon emissions point of view, as well as being tiring and adding significantly to the length of the working day. I wonder whether these factors also put others off.

Compared with how most of the local forests are managed, my planned management approach for Comar Wood is in a serious minority. Small-scale, intensive, sensitive management requiring human-scale intervention is not much practised. Hence why it is hard to find people to come and work here – very few others locally are requiring the same service. If there were lots of small and/or sensitively managed woodlands in the area all needing workers, this could boost local forestry employment. I could work locally in other woodlands as well as my own and others could do the same. For this to become a reality we need much more diverse ownership and management of woodlands. Unfortunately landownership in Scotland is notoriously inequitable², while the price of rural land, including forests, continues to increase owing to the rising popularity of investments in forestry and carbon credits³.

FLS land is publicly owned and could be managed in a way that promotes more local employment in rural communities, e.g. through using local contractors, through managing parts of the forests at a smaller-scale with a low impact/ continuous cover approach requiring greater human input, and through providing woodland crofts or woodlots. Woodland crofts are a concept that is slowly taking off in Scotland, but could be developed much more widely, including on FLS land. They are woodland holdings, usually of a few acres, that allow the owner to build a livelihood using the woodland resource. With the increasing demand for sustainable livelihoods, provision of woodland crofts cannot keep up with demand⁴. Woodlots are compartments of woodland that are rented to individuals, with a management agreement.

A greater diversity of rural landownership with small-scale ownership of woodlands would allow more people to develop livelihoods and businesses using local timber and woodland resources. In Cannich (my local village) Ross Balharry has started a timber building business and has built a workshop where he can construct log cabins from locally sourced timber⁵. Other possible examples could include: wood cutting, wood processing (firewood, charcoal, sawn timber) coppicing, timber building, furniture making, crafts (e.g. basketry, wood carving) deer and wild boar stalking/ butchery, livestock rearing, mushroom cultivation. Social uses of woodlands for forest schools and nurseries, community groups, mental and physical health and rehabilitation can also provide jobs and livelihoods in rural areas. Woodlands managed in this way would be better for communities and better for wildlife. People would feel a sense of connection to their local woodlands and feel empowered to help look after them. Woodlands would be a resource that could be managed sustainably to provide useful products and support a local economy.

1. MacMillan, D., 2023, Who owns our trees? Forest ownership and rural development in Scotland, Reforesting Scotland Journal 68
2. Wightman, A., 2010, The Poor Had No Lawyers, Birlinn, Edinburgh
3. https://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/insight-scotlands-great-net-zero-land-grab-3657133
4. McIntyre, J., 2023, Woodland Crofts: where are we now?, Reforesting Scotland Journal 67
5. https://forestryandland.gov.scot/news-releases/steep-ground-trees-used-in-log-cabin-build