Oz wrote:
Jim Webster writes

Planting
for other uses is uneconomic unless you have hundreds of acres to go at and
can budget over 60 to 120 years.

I was chatting to a casual worker who worked for Blenheim Park sawmills,
yes THAT blenheim park (Churchill etc) with a thousand+ ac of woodland.

He was made redundant because they couldn't compete with imported timber
and now use imported timber for their sawmill.

Rather like dumping food in Africa.

All sorts of cheap products have been sold in New Zealand - putting our
locals out of work. Car plants have closed down, and now workers do not
have the money to buy houses which are getting bought by overseas people.
We have some cheap imported goods, but food is dearer in the main, and now
both Mum and Dad have to work to support the family, so there is less time
for fun.

Don't suck up to that system.

Much of the woodland was beech, the rest pines.

So if they can't compete, with their own sawmill, how do you think
farmers elsewhere can compete?

Only by getting some research into what specialty timbers can be grown in
the climate, and collect a good price.

Violins need fairly slow growing timber, fine grain and I don't know what
the extra water about would do. The economics of violin making is quite
interesting. Timber had to be seasoned in a dark room for 25 years my
music teacher, who also had learnt violin making in Czeckoslovakia, told
me. So you would have to be getting enough ready for your successor. As
Jim has explained `modern' economics has trouble with such a concept.

I haven't been on a tramp in the New Zealand bush walks since the 60s. But
then you would tramp for half a day or more from one little hut to the
next. You would arrive tired and wet maybe at the unattended little hut,
and start a fire with the dry wood collected by the previous visitors.
Then before leaving you would collect wood for the next trampers. You did
not have to pay to use the huts. I don't know if people can co-operate
like that these days, but in many areas they can't can they?

Now I fear that the plant stock and agriculture we have inherited is
not being replenished by us for the next comers. They will be cursing
trying to collect the equivalent in the analogy of wet wood to light their
fire.

OK farms where Jim is have hedges. Tell me, do they soak up a bit of water
and stop the fast run-off somehwat? Lots of places in the world have
flooding problems and erosion following removal of trees higher up in the
catchment. Gordon Cougar please take note.