Photo by Antoine Fabre on Unsplash
22 April 2024
On 20 April, Farmers Weekly’s Michael Priestley wrote that land prices in Scottish uplands are so far above average agricultural values that “forestry interests continue to outcompete livestock producers for land”. It’s happened before—in the late 18th and mid-19th centuries.
As J.M. Lindsay wrote in Agricultural History Review in 1977, conflict between farming and forestry is “not altogether a recent development”. In the early 19th century, the tanbark oak, whose bark was used for tanning leather, often took up land in the southern Highlands.
After the Napoleonic Wars began to take shape around 1800, bark prices more than tripled—but highland woodlands mainly occupied the banks of oceans, lakes, and watercourses that livestock farmers used for winter grazing. J.M. Lindsay included a graph of estimated income from woodland sections of an estate in Perthshire between 1705 and 1833, showing a dramatic rise between 1783 and 1814.
In fact, John Smith, in his 1798 General View of Argyll, had already asserted that “the profit [from timber plantations] will be undeniably greater than what can be obtained from almost any other application of money.”
You couldn’t easily have both: when landowners wanted commercial coppiced woodland, they fenced or walled it to keep grazing animals out, depriving livestock farmers of space. Just like in the present, then, markets prepared the ground for a conflict between forestry and agriculture.
Landowners, under pressure from tenants and seeking maximum revenues, compromised. In other words, there was a social cost to converting former agricultural land for forestry. Landowners gave rent abatements; removed goats, thought to be the most troublesome grazers; created small, dense woodlands for only short periods, and in rotation; and protected only valuable tree species, rather than fencing off entire woodlands.
By the 1820s, higher rents from more extensive sheep farming began to outstrip rents from forestry. Further, from the late nineteenth century until the First World War, imported timber and tanning materials depressed the value of domestic timber, and agricultural land use once again took precedence.
On the whole, writes Lindsay, “more significant concessions were made by forestry” in this period; landowners who did enclose woodlands were “compelled to recognize that only a limited amount of wintering ground could be appropriated without disrupting the whole pastoral system.”