Beef farmer turns to forestry to secure income

Damian McCarney


A Stradone suckler farmer has become so disillusioned with beef farming that he has planted forestry on the majority of his land.
Cathal Rudden’s land is split between his home at Tierlahood, where he continues to have a suckler farm, and a second 60-acre farm in nearby Cormeen, where contractors have just planted.
A lifelong farmer, Mr Rudden reluctantly turned to forestry only because of the persistent pressure on beef prices.

‘Progessively worse’
“This past two or three years it has been getting progressively worse and this year, actually, it’s worse again. It looks like suckling and beef are going to be finished in this country.
“This year, the cost kept going up,” explained Mr Rudden, as he listed outlays: bag manure, cutting silage, diesel, meal.
Mr Rudden contacted Green Belt at end of October, having attended the Forestry Village at the National Ploughing Championships in September. Gerard Dunne, forester from the Virginia office, submitted an application for planting approval on Mr Rudden’s behalf to the Forest Service in Wexford, which took about eight weeks.
Mr Dunne said the Forest Service don’t impose tough criteria.
“The hardest criteria really is that the land is suitable for planting and ninety-five per cent of land in Cavan would be suitable for planting,” he explained.
“There is a totally different classification for what’s good for farming and what’s good for forestry. Any green land in Cavan is good for forestry, and by green land I would mean even a field that’s covered from the gate to the bushes in rushes - that’s still perfectly suitable for forestry. Farming that now, that would be a totally different level of hardship.”

‘Big decision’
From a farming point of view, Mr Rudden deemed two-thirds of the land in question as “poor enough” due to soil depth and stones. However, he did have to decide what to do with the remaining “reasonably good” area of land.
“That was my big decision but when I was planting most of it, there was no point leaving a bit of it.”
Green Belt carried out the physical work of planting approximately 1,000 trees-per-acre and the job took about two weeks. The forest is mostly made up of spruce, as it is a fast growing species. However, to qualify for the grants farmers must plant a mix. Sitka spruce, hybrid larch, Douglas fir, Scots pine, alder and birch were all planted in Cormeen to encourage wildlife and to give the forest a more natural appearance.
After 16 years, Mr Rudden will have to start thinning the spruce and thin it every four years from then on. Mr Rudden hopes that after 28-30 years the timber will be mature to cut.
“I will hardly get any benefit from the trees I’ve planted because in 30 years time I’ll probably be dead and gone but at least it is something for the kids,” said Mr Rudden.
“After 30 years is where the problem lies, we have to re-plant and don’t get a premium the second time around - that’s the big snag.”
However, his premium payment is expected to come through in the coming weeks - the first of 20 years of instalments.
“There’s no guarantee of anything nowadays but, hopefully, I’ll have it for the next 20 years,” said Mr Rudden.

Reluctant
Despite the guaranteed income, Mr Rudden still had to overcome his natural reluctance to turn his land over to forestry.
“As someone said, it’s like getting married - it’s a lifetime decision,” quipped Mr Rudden. He would “far rather” have kept beef farming on the land, if it was viable.
“You know, in farming, you just don’t like doing it either [planting forestry], it’s hard to describe. If I could have made money beef farming or suckling I would have been at that.”
Asked if he would recommend it to others, he replied with a laugh:
“Some people would die before they would do it, they would think it damages the land - it’s sacrilege.”
He added: “A lot of people have an attachment to the land and wouldn’t do it, regardless. I’ve only planted the trees, so it will take time to see how it goes.”
The 55-year-old has three grown-up children but they have their own careers and he doesn’t expect them to farm the land.

‘Pacing the floor’
“If you had a child interested [in farming], you wouldn’t do it,” he accepts.
Mr Dunne says Mr Rudden isn’t alone in wrestling with the idea before taking “the drastic step” of changing to forestry.
“I would have lots of situations where farmers would have been pacing the floor the night before we would have started. In most cases the only regret the farmers would say is, ‘I should have done this fifteen, twenty years ago and I would be harvesting some of my trees now’ - that is the most common.”
The most common situation where we farmers approach Green Belt to plant are dry stock farmers, sheep farmers and elderly farmers, who don’t have anyone to hand the farm on to as a going concern.
Mr Dunne said that there was renewed interest in planting forest because of a proposal to change the duration of the premium to be reduced from 20 to 15 years.
“In the 2014-2020 CAP scheme, there is talk of the premium being reduced to fifteen years but nothing is concrete yet.”
So is Mr Rudden happy with his decision?
“Yes, I think I am.”