Farm of the Week: Success of venture that has put down its roots

YOU can buy a typical English hedgerow by the yard at Thorpe Trees – for about five pounds, including planting, if you are ordering a good few yards.

You want about 70 per cent hawthorn and 10 per cent blackthorn with smatterings of hazel, alder, field maple, dogwood, dog rose, alder, buckthorn, hazel, holly and/or half a dozen others. Thorpe Trees grows them all.

To call restoring hedges a fashion would understate the impact of all the schemes which have driven a national project comparable to that which made hedges a part of the landscape in the first place. Thorpe Trees alone has probably sold 1200 kilometres of hedge over 20 years.

Hedging has been one of the drivers which turned it into a business turning over just short of a million pounds – and well over a million trees – in a year.

Caroline Taylor's late father, Alastair, started it 25 years ago, looking for diversification on a mixed farm at Thorpe Underwood, between York and Boroughbridge.

He started with hawthorn for hedging. Then government incentives to plant trees for timber kicked in. That segued into trees as a set-aside solution, to tackle agricultural over-production. Then it was trees for biodiversity and now it is woodland against climate change and for public recreation.

Caroline, 47, has lived through all these changes of emphasis and is an expert on the grant systems which have evolved with them. Consultancy on how to plug into the money is part of her business.

You can get a grant for as little as a quarter hectare (half an acre). Planting will cost 1,500-2,500 a hectare and the Forestry Commission will pay an establishment grant of up to 4,000 a hectare under the English Woodland Grant Scheme.

After that, if agricultural land has been sacrificed, you can get up to 300 a hectare a year for 15 years from Defra, under the Farm Woodland Payments Scheme – interesting if you have land which is not much good for anything else. And if you are thinking right, the trees will fit in with something else, like game shooting.

One growing market is in trees for chicken farms. On a lot of 'free-range' farms, the hens do not actually go out much, because they are frightened of open skies. Trees give them shelter they like and 'woodland eggs' earn a premium.

Like everybody else with an interest, Caroline is waiting to see what the new government means by its talk of privatising some Forestry Commission activity. There is also a question mark over how far the recently relaunched Higher Level Stewardship scheme will replace the woodland incentives of Countryside Stewardship. However, with booming demand for biomass – not to mention plain old firewood – and a Renewable Heat Incentive in preparation, it is unlikely there will be much slackening in demand for saplings.

Alastair Taylor passed on about 100 acres of good light Vale of York loam, which drains well and will take tractors over winter. His son, Richard, grows arable crops on his share. Caroline runs the other 50 acres, on which she rotates 60 kinds of tree and shrub with wheat, barley, peas and oilseed rape. For her, the arable operations are a way of keeping the land busy. Trees are the main business – and a living for Caroline; her deputy, Richard Padgett; five other full-timers; and half a dozen extras for the peak season, which in this business means the winter.

She grows mostly from seed and for National Tree Week, starting today, she organised a local acorn collection for 10 per cent of the 150,000 acorns she is currently planting, using a drill which can also handle cherry stones and ash keys. The rest of the acorns will cost about 5 a kilo, with 250 acorns to a kilo. Collecting them costs more in sweat than it saves in money but some people especially want trees from local seed.

Some might be lifted at the end of the first summer but the main harvest will be after the second, when the saplings are two feet tall and worth 80p each. Lifting takes place in October and selling and replanting from November to March. A hard winter, like the last one, means lost business. However, some saplings can go back in the ground, to be grown on for up to another five years, when they will be 3-20 at trade prices, depending on size and species. Oak and lime are most expensive.

Some of the original plantings will be lost – to mice, squirrels, pheasants and crows, which dig up seeds; to rabbits, hares and deer, which eat seedlings and saplings; or to aphids and mildew. Operational costs include rabbit fencing, mouse-trapping, mesh over seed beds, Tubex around saplings, some standard herbicides and pesticides and a fair amount of hand hoeing.

The saplings go to farmers, landowners, council parks, golf courses, angling lakes and so on. Some poplar and willow used to go for growing for biomass but that market has dwindled thanks to competition from miscanthus and eucalyptus.

The business has a substantial national contract to supply The Woodland Trust, a charity which organises a lot of planting with funding from landfill taxes and the Lottery.

Businesses wanting to buy themselves some carbon offset are one growing market. Individuals wanting a small woodland to feed their own wood-burning stoves are another. The latter usually buy ash, alder and birch, which combine good burning qualities with a tolerance of coppicing i.e., being cut back to grow again

The business does a steady trade in commemorative trees for weddings, christenings and funerals. Oak and cherry are the favourites. Pears, plums and apples, are also in the range. So are leylandii, box and laurel, for cultivated hedging. Leylandii still play a useful role if you keep on top of them, says Caroline. But laurel is a fast-growing alternative. Laurel and holly are the only crops in her range which will consistently take successfully from cuttings, by the way.

On her own farm, Caroline uses alder to make windbreak hedges –"you can cut it and cut it and it still comes back". They only do Christmas trees, by the way, as a middleman to the trade, dealing in seedlings from Scotland. For what they do do, see www.thorpetrees.com./

CW 27/11/10