BC Farmland Lost To Tree Planting For Carbon Credits

[Thomas]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/bri ... e23893267/

Hey, we get to be the bad guy for once.

I wasn't aware this was a problem, I can't decide whether the article is giving farmers the traditional benefit of the doubt they are usually given, or whether this is crucial. The article also mentions land being sold to foreign companies and then being planted- is this a big thing? How many contracts come from foreign vs. domestic sources?

Thoughts?

[evanodell]

I worked on one of the contracts for Reckitt Benckiser in Quesnel. The land wasn't great, it had previously been used for cattle grazing and was very hard packed clay. Can't see it being amazingly productive farmland.

I have heard of farmers in the north-east of BC quitting farming because the end of the wheat board monopoly and the growth of the oil industry meant they couldn't get their grain to market, which I think might be more of an issue than the planting of trees in mid quality former farmland.

[Mike]

Shouldn't it be a simple solution to require them to buy areas of NSR forest for other reasons (such as forest fires/beetle kill areas) rather than mediocrely productive farmland? It'd be slightly more expensive for them to plant, but not take any farmland away and deal with areas that actually need to be planted.

[Nate]

Uh oh, the market is setting the price for land! Call the NDP, quick, better give the farmers cheap access to HAY land!

What an absurd dumbing down of an incredibly complex issue. Not to mention 16,000 hectares as her scary worst-case scenario number represents about .006% of farm land in BC. There's somewhere between 2-2.5 million hectares of farm land in BC.

I'm not exactly rah rah rahing carbon programs that take reasonably useful land for reforestation, but come on, this article is a joke.

[newforest]

Never saw this one buried in the videos page. I have done plenty of farmland conversion projects in the USA, more for wetland mitigation projects than carbon capture goals. Sometimes the 'farmland' in question is so marginal that growing trees really is the best use for it, though most such sites were converted back to forest land even 80 years ago already, via hand tree planting, and are into second rotations even.

I also know that some farm land planted to trees have had the trees bull-dozed back out again as crop prices rose so significantly in the 21st century.

I would comment that planting a tree seedling into cattle compaction is straight stupid. Far too hard for the actual tree-planter, and even if done correctly and successfully (seedling survival at end of first growing season), trees planted into compaction rarely grow very well, at all. I have been pointing that out to people my entire career, but I'm just some laborer sticking a piece of steel in the ground millions of times, not a highly paid "Professional" planning complex tree-planting projects.