Co-operation may be key to making money out of trees

More than a quarter of all trees in Scotland are on farms, but forestry has never been seen as an integral part of the business. As such, areas under woodland are often under-managed.

Too often, the operations linked to growing trees such as planting, thinning and marketing the timber have been seen as adding to the bureaucracy and complexity of running the farm.

However, with a rise in the price of timber, especially for wood fuel, a number of farmers are now involved in a project to co-ordinate forestry operations, reduce paperwork, link up marketing and organise specialist training linked to forestry.

Speaking in Aberdeen this week, Bob Yuill from SAOS, the umbrella organisation for Scottish farm co-operatives, said he was staggered by the level of interest from the members of the Ringlink labour and machinery sharing co-operative.

Ringlink has more than 2,600 members from the Moray Coast to the Tay and Yuill said the response to the project was coming right across the area. “We have, as we expected, a number of farmers with a few acres of trees, but we are also getting interest from growers with larger blocks of forestry up to 200 hectares.”

“There are grants for planting trees, but the application forms are not easy. I believe that by linking up applications, we might be able to reduce the bureaucratic hurdle.”

Yuill also said that while the market for wood fuel had risen, so had the wider value of timber. Farmers should be aware that the value of their timber could be much more than just that of a pile of logs.

Yuill was speaking at the annual meeting of Ringlink where chairman, Mark Ogg, reported that the throughput of the co-operative had risen 27.5 per cent in the past year. The core business of supplying labour and machinery also continued to grow. He stated that in the past 12 months, the business supplied almost two-thirds of a million man hours between the members.

But Graham Bruce, managing director raised a warning light over future labour availability saying that without more young people coming into the industry, there would be no industry.