Tas Farmers Matters: Forestry lessons from the past

MANAGING the Tasmanian forest landscape is not a new concept and certainly not one exclusively undertaken since European settlement. 

It is well understood that Tasmanian Aboriginal people have been managing the landscape on this magnificent island for a very long time indeed. 

Furthermore, there is a very strong argument that the sensible and prudent management of the native forest estate has gone backwards in recent decades, paradoxically through pressures from conservationists – or as some might term them, preservationists. 

It is quite illuminating to explore colonial art from the early 1800s, including the sketches of explorers and surveyors to get an idea of just how extensively aboriginal peoples used fire to manage the landscape. 

A quick Google search of the work of John Glover will reveal plenty of evidence for forests with a relatively light under story free from what we would call now a heavy fuel load. 

Explore further the All port, Calder, Evans, Hellyer and many others and one can quickly see that Tasmanian Aboriginals were highly adept at managing the landscape for the benefit of all – for food, shelter and ultimately safety from the ravages of unrestrained wildfire, all with the judicious use of fire. 

Managing forests is not just about the harvesting of trees for wood fibre or sawn timber products, it is clearly about the management of forests as a valuable resource for eco nomic, ecological and community benefit. 

The science tells us that sim ply leaving a forest alone is not good forest management: the impact of non-action is the increasing fire risk and the social, environmental and economic impacts of devasting and large-scale bushfires. 

Forestry plays a pivotal role in the Tasmanian agricultural landscape – not just for fibre as with some plantation eucalypts, but as a clear value-added product that over time will yield excellent financial returns. 

Plantations of shining gums, (eucalyptus niten), harvested after 20 years might return $200 a tonne for the pulp industry, but shining gums logged after 50 years might return $5000 a cubic metre in high value manufactured timber products. 

Not all soil types on prop erties can allow that, and not all farmers want to do that, but long-term forest management to produce high-quality timber is a significant advantage for Tasmanian farmers that other states don’t have. 

Significant amounts of native forests in Tasmania are held on private land and by landholders. 

Farmers have an incredibly important role to play in the active management of those native forests. 

Farmers will increasingly look to a diverse portfolio of economic and community returns from this native forest estate across carbon offsets, single-stem harvesting for high-value manufactured timber products, sensible fire risk management that protects not only the immediate landholder but the surrounding community and the symbiotic relationship between active forest management and higher yielding grazing properties. 

Some in the community will see farmers as profit first and to hell with the rest, especially with respect to forest management, but those engaged in forestry will know that the reality is quite the opposite. 

Forestry on Tasmanian farms is critical to the state’s long-term ecological and eco nomic future – the two are certainly not mutually exclusive, but farmers must be allowed to manage forests on their farms without unnecessary impediment. 

No one knows a farm better than farmers themselves and farmers intrinsically understand the imperative to farm on a sustainable basis – it is after all, in their best interest. 

The increasing narrative from green groups is to ban native forest logging without ever providing details on what that really means. 

Their rhetoric was once ending old-growth logging but now it’s ending native forest logging.

Selective logging/ harvesting in native forests is an incredibly important tool for the active management of native forests – science and history both prove it to be so. 

To call for a complete end to native forest logging demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the science of forests. 

The active management of native forests essentially guides a continually evolving forest into something that delivers economic returns for those who invest in managing it, protecting the community from large scale and destructive bushfires at the same time.

Active native forest management works to conserve and protect an environment that was managed very well long before the first Europeans set foot on this island. We should take note of the science and learn from history.