By the end of the 1960s I had been planting trees in sizeable numbers at Lanark for the best part of ten years, so the appearance of the place had begun to change—at least in certain areas. I did not keep count, but I probably planted around 1500 trees a year on average up to 1967, the year of the famous drought, so there were now maybe 15 000 trees growing on the property that had not been there before. The trees were radiata pines (Pinus radiata), various eucalypts and a mix of indigenous habitat trees and shrubs. I was still following no set plan: I planted trees where and when I felt my sheep and cattle needed shelter and shade. I had not forgotten, though, my visit a decade earlier to the farm in New Zealand where Ian Young had begun to dabble in farm forestry. This had seemed a good idea then, and it seemed a better one now, because I had heard through my contacts in New Zealand of the progress farm foresters had been making there.
On my return from that visit I had taken out a subscription to the magazine New Zealand Farmer. The articles that interested me most, and which I looked forward eagerly to reading in each issue, were written by a farmer named Neil Barr, a pioneer in farm forestry in New Zealand, and the founding president of the New Zealand Farm Forestry Association. His articles were full of practical information about farm forestry, and I was enthused by them. I could not have guessed then that Barr would visit Lanark one day to inspect my trees. In fact, in 1989 he conducted a field day there on farm forestry. It was during that day that he performed the first culling of a Lanark tree. Until then, I had not poisoned or chopped down a single tree on the place. Ever since I have always said that Neil Barr fired the first shot in anger at a tree at Lanark.
Inspired by Barr’s articles, I planted what was really a farm forestry woodlot as far back as 1961. These were the radiata pines that I planted both as a windbreak and as a screen to shield our house from the sight of the steam trains that passed along the edge of the property. Altogether, I planted 640 pines in five rows, leaving 2.4 metres between the rows and 2.7 metres between the trees in each row, the spacing recommended at the time by the Victorian Forests Commission. Although I surrounded the plantation with a netting fence to keep out rabbits and went to some trouble to prepare the ground properly, more than a third of the trees died in the first year. In 1962, I planted 250 replacement trees.
The purpose of the planting was not merely to screen the steam trains. I was also keen to see how well radiata pines, then the most common species of timber tree planted in Australia, would grow at Lanark. Knowing what farmers in New Zealand had already achieved, I was confident that growing radiatas for timber could become a profitable enterprise at Lanark. The early results were promising and I would have liked to keep going, but establishing pine plantations is an expensive undertaking and at that time I did not have the money to do it.
I approached my bank manager in Hamilton to increase my overdraft, explaining I wanted to plant timber trees at Lanark that would generate an income for the farm down the track, but he hardly seemed to know what I was talking about. I then approached the Victorian Forests Commission, which had recently begun offering long-term, low-interest loans to finance forestry plantings, but it said no, too. It did agree a few years later, in 1968, to provide a loan for a 100-acre plantation of radiata pines that I wanted to establish at the property I had at Mount Richmond, not far from Portland, but that was because 100 acres was judged to be a genuine forestry-size block. It seemed the commission’s loans were designed then to fund fairly large-scale forestry projects, not the relatively modest, multi-purpose plantings I had in mind—shelter belts consisting of maybe five rows of high-pruned pines.
The truth is that at that time the commission simply did not understand the concept of agroforestry. It certainly did not understand the concept of combining forestry plantings with shelter belts, which was then new in Australia. Moreover, according to the generally accepted view at the time, the kind of soil we had at Lanark—heavy clay close to the surface—was not ideal for growing radiatas.
The commission also turned down an application I made for a loan to grow clear-wood hardwoods—specifically, river she-oaks (Casuarina cunninghamiana), sugar gums and spotted gums (Corymbia maculata)—on a long-rotation basis. The commission said it could not be satisfied that the area was suitable for trees of this kind. Meanwhile, I continued to gather information to demonstrate that the area was completely suitable. I have often thought that if that forestry loans scheme had survived—and if it had been made freely available to farmers like me who wanted to do farm forestry plantings in shelter belts and the like—Australia’s rural landscape might look very different today. More importantly, graziers’ incomes might be augmented in a long-term, sustainable way.
All things considered, it is no wonder that farm forestry took a long time in Australia to get off the ground. Even the inheritance laws were against it. After the second Landline program went to air in 2006, someone posted the following comment on an ABC online forum. ‘My father wanted to plant trees to mill back in the 1950s,’ the writer said. ‘He was advised not to do so as they would be valued for probate should he pass away. I am told that timber caused some people to be bankrupted in the Ravenshoe area because they planted trees.’ If this were true, which I assume it was, death duties must have been a huge disincentive to a farmer interested in growing timber, although it was something I was not aware of at the time.
So for the time being my farm forestry plans had to be put on hold. My interest in the subject was revived by a trip Cicely and I made to New Zealand in 1978. We stayed for a few days at Ian Young’s farm, and while we were there Ian suggested we visit a neighbouring property where the farmer, Peter Smail, had been doing big things in farm forestry.
I found it interesting that Smail was not growing his pines in plantations but, rather, was incorporating them in his working farm. He was planting wide rows of them as shelter and shade for stock, although he was also making sure they would become high-quality timber eventually by pruning them carefully. Smail later came to be regarded as a leader in New Zealand’s farm forestry industry. He may not have been the first there to recognise the dual potential that tree planting offered—a more productive farm in the short term, a valuable timber harvest in the long term—but he was one of the first to try to make that potential a reality. I liked Smail. He was a busy man, and physically strong. He must also have been extremely determined, as pioneers in every field of endeavour need to be, because he had to overcome quite a few early obstacles.
I returned to Australia fired up about the potential that farm forestry offered, but my enthusiasm was rather dampened the following year, 1979, when the Victorian Forests Commission informed me in writing that it had decided farm forestry was simply not viable in our part of the Western District. Nevertheless, I continued to apply to the commission for a forestry loan. Indeed, I lodged an application just about every year, but, one by one, they were all rejected. I was told that I did not qualify.
At that time I was starting to become interested in pine plantations for another reason: I could see a lot of potential in using early pine thinnings to make treated-pine posts, then a fairly new product. It seemed to me that this would provide some income while the trees were maturing. I was one of the first farmers to use treated-pine posts in our area, as fence posts at Lanark instead of hardwood. My interest in treated-pine was to a large extent environmentally motivated. I could see that if enough Australian farmers began using them instead of hardwood posts it would significantly reduce the demand for hardwood and thus the need to log our hardwood forests. My thinking here was realistic rather than moralistic. I simply felt we ought to stop cutting down our native forests since there were so few of them left.
In 1984, finally, the Victorian Forests Commission decided that I did deserve some help with my farm forestry plans. I wanted to create a shelter belt of pines, and the commission agreed to provide me with the pine seedlings and to help with the planting. It decided to become involved after doing another inspection at Lanark. In fact, I suspect that it relented in the end not because it had really changed its mind about Lanark’s suitability for forestry but, rather, because I had been badgering the people there for so long. Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that by doing this, by incessantly knocking on doors, I did, in a small way, help pioneer the idea of farm forestry, at least in my part of Australia. Certainly, very few other people seemed interested in the idea at the time.
The pines were planted in early spring 1985. To some extent, it was a trial exercise. The commission wanted to compare the growth of pines planted as seedlings with those raised from cuttings, so it planted them in four sections in a row about a kilometre long. Two sections were planted: one with cuttings and the other with seedlings from a couple of sources. This row of pines formed half of a 3.5-kilometre shelter belt along Lanark’s southeast boundary. We later planted the other half with hardwood trees at our own expense.
The commission sent a small team of forestry students to help plant the pines, one of whom, a girl aged about twenty, left me with an enduring memory. The students were each issued with a forestry spade, which had a narrow blade specially shaped to create a V-shaped hole for each seedling. Now, planting trees by the hundreds can be tedious as well as tiring; this girl probably found it to be both. Whatever the reason, she fell asleep standing up and leaning on her spade. I was keeping the planters supplied with trees, and as I looked along the row I saw her. She had both hands on the handle and one foot on the blade, and she was apparently in a deep sleep. I suspect she had never planted trees before.
After the 3.5-kilometre shelter belt was finished in 1988, we erected another fence along its entire length and planted a single row of trees and shrubs to provide both habitat and low shelter. They included indigenous melaleucas, tea-trees and drooping she-oaks. My regret now is that we did not plant two or three rows instead of one. As farmers often do, I erred on the side of trying to ‘save’ grazing land. Today, the habitat is permanently fenced off, but sheep are allowed to graze beneath the maturing agroforestry trees. This is standard practice in wide-spaced, high-pruned agroforestry plantations: fences protecting the trees are removed, and stock allowed in, as soon as the trees are too big to be damaged by them.