What is a forest actually for?
Richard Prideaux is joined by Nick Adams, forestry contractor, SideCountry writer and a man whose family has been following each other into the woods for generations. This episode was recorded at the 50th anniversary APF show at Ragley Estate on 24th September 2026.
Surrounded by chainsaws, woodchippers and some extremely expensive machinery, they start with the less visible side of forestry: the people who actually plant, manage and harvest Britain’s woods, and the strange disconnect between our enthusiasm for trees and our understanding of timber as something we use every day.
They discuss the competing demands placed on modern woodland, from producing timber and storing carbon to supporting wildlife and providing somewhere for people to walk, ride and spend time outdoors. Can a forest really do all of those things at once, and should it have to?
Richard and Nick then sit down with Andrew Sowerby, President of the Institute of Chartered Foresters, to look at the bigger picture.
The conversation ranges from Britain’s reliance on imported timber and the very long timescales of forestry to labour shortages, apprenticeships, woodland management, public procurement and the challenge of attracting people into careers that might shape landscapes they will never live long enough to see mature.
And with technology changing work across almost every industry, there is one fairly reassuring conclusion: however clever AI becomes, somebody is still going to have to go outside and plant the trees.
In this episode
- What the APF show tells us about modern British forestry
- The people behind the machinery
- Why timber is an everyday resource we rarely notice
- Balancing timber production, wildlife, carbon and recreation
- Why productive forestry and biodiversity do not have to be opposites
- Public perceptions of felling and woodland management
- What makes a Chartered Forester
- Britain’s reliance on imported timber
- Forestry, resilience and national security
- Planning woodland on timescales measured in decades
- The forestry labour shortage
- Apprenticeships and bringing new people into the industry
- The challenges facing contractors and small forestry businesses
- Why forestry could offer opportunities in a changing jobs market
- What AI cannot replace in the relationship between people and trees
Links
- RFS Branching Out Video
- APF Exhibition
- Forestry Contracting Association
- Institute of Chartered Foresters
- Royal Forestry Society
- Support SideCountry
Credits
Presented by Richard Prideaux and Nick Adams
Produced for SideCountry by George Browne and edited by Amy Green.
DISCLAIMER
Views are those of individual speakers and do not necessarily represent SideCountry, its presenters, contributors, partners or sponsors. For general information and entertainment only. Laws, seasons, access and guidance change; check official sources, obtain permission and act within your competence.
This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.
Richard Prideaux: We're here at APF, which is, what is it, Association of Professional Forestry.
Nick Adams: Yeah, foresters.
Richard Prideaux: Foresters.
Nick Adams: Association of Professional Foresters.
Richard Prideaux: Not professional forestry.
Nick Adams: No, professional foresters.
Richard Prideaux: So the other voice you've heard there is not. Side Country's George Brown. This is Side Country's Nick Adams. Say hello, Nick.
Nick Adams: Hello, Nick.
Richard Prideaux: So just if you give people a brief rundown of who you are so that all of this makes sense.
Nick Adams: Right. So I am Nick Adams. I'm A forestry contractor and a forest of Dean.
Richard Prideaux: Forest of Dean is the edge of Wales.
Nick Adams: No, it's between Wales and England, but actually in Gloucestershire. Between the white and between the Severn.
Richard Prideaux: If you don't know anything about the Forest of Dean, I highly recommend listening to Mark Steel's In Town on BBC Sound.
Nick Adams: Oh yeah, it's amazing.
Richard Prideaux: The episode from the Colford.
Nick Adams: No, he's at the Speech House, which is, it was a hunting lodge actually. It's a very, very interesting place. And it was like a meeting place for the last few 100 years. And he did it there.
Richard Prideaux: We need to be more content on this at some point because genuinely the Forest of Dean is like nowhere else. It's like its own little kingdom within Gloucestershire.
Nick Adams: Yeah, I mean, there is thousands of areas of things to talk about in the Dean and none of it is forestry.
Richard Prideaux: And it is basically backwards Appalachia for England.
Nick Adams: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: Right. OK, I'll leave that there. So Forest of Dean, forestry contractor, family trade.
Nick Adams: Yeah, so my dad was in it, my granddad was in it. Probably his father was in his while we were on way back in the 1800s, but yeah, there was nothing else I was ever going to do.
Richard Prideaux: So, in your family, when a male becomes of age, you just go into the woods and stay there?
Nick Adams: No, that's just my family. I think that's forestry family. Forestry family is loads of people follow their dad into the wood.
Richard Prideaux: Right, OK, and that's the term, follow into the wood.
Nick Adams: Yeah, into the wood, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So it's like going down the pit, kind of.
Nick Adams: Yeah, exactly. It's like down the pit, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: OK, what's your role here today?
Nick Adams: Well, as of today I am. We represent the Forestry Contracting Association, of which I'm a director. We have a stand here and I'm also looking after the Forest Workers, which has Small Woods Association, FISA in it, Focus on Forestry First are in it. And those just represent forestry workers, you know, all types of people who plant trees like me, right through to coppice workers, harvesting drivers, the whole lot really. We have 350-ish members of every forestry occupation you can think of. From what I do, agricultural, everything. is represented by what we do.
Richard Prideaux: And this show overall, I mean, you can't really move without hitting some kind of expensive equipment, can you, somewhere?
Nick Adams: Yeah, I mean, it's a showcase for everything in forestry.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, like every wood chipper you've ever thought of.
Nick Adams: From the tiny little gravity-fed ones, where you can get a bit of stick in it up to the ones that we just went over there, watching the self-propelled, basically a lorry, and it's just you put a log in it like 2 foot across. Six metres long and it just munches through in a minute.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, if you've never seen one of these things, if you put a tree in one end and a huge pile of wood chip comes out the other.
Nick Adams: Yeah, in about 30 seconds.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, it is terrifying.
Nick Adams: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: It's great fun.
Nick Adams: Oh yeah, I mean, I think it'd be great. It'd be quite a fun, amusing job for a small amount of time. I think you'd get bored of it quick.
Richard Prideaux: And with all that kit on show here, there's lots of stuff to buy and I'm sat next to a pile of stuff that I've bought today. It'd be very easy to overlook the human in this, wouldn't it?
Nick Adams: This, everything else is about people, because the connections you make here. I mean, I've seen people I haven't seen since I last came to the show two years ago. I've seen, you know, a friend of our show, Matt Biddle, I've spoke to him, you know, every day probably for the last year or so, but I've never actually met him until today. And that is the thing worth coming to the show for, is meeting new people, but meeting the people that you you might only ever see when you come here or accidentally meet him at a different show somewhere else.
Richard Prideaux: Because that's what I'm trying to get my head around with this, because I don't work in forestry, I just play with chainsaws for work occasionally. But there's the scale of forestry is weird because it's what, 13% of the UK landmass is forestry, worked forestry.
Nick Adams: It's tree cover.
Richard Prideaux: Tree cover, right. So that includes all sorts of corners of fields and might have a tree in it and things like that.
Nick Adams: Yeah, I think it's. I think you can take it as a very good educated guess. I would put half a percent either way on that maybe. But yeah, it covers all forestry. Whether it would cover like what's in a hedge or anything, I'm not sure. I think it's just every block of wooden has been mapped and it comes out to 13 and a half percent. However many hectares it is, I can't remember off the top of my head.
Richard Prideaux: And within that, there's a lot of competing uses for it because unless you're coppicing, unless you're coppicing hazel, you can only cut a tree down once, can't you? So you can grow it and cut it down and then you've got to do something with that wood or something has to happen to it.
Nick Adams: Yeah, So the point of timber is it is a product at the end of the day and we have to.
Richard Prideaux: So the chainsaw just started.
Nick Adams: Yeah, I know. I'm not saying that put me off or anything or the dog. But yes, we need to make timber, but there are also other benefits that of forestry, which we've probably in the past maybe neglected a little bit. Habitat, biodiversity, recreation. So there are probably, I would say, four things that forestry has to look at and has to do their best to amalgamate those four things in the same piece of wood or the same little area. That can be difficult. There are competing theories on what should be happening and what should take precedence. My personal view is not one thing should take precedence. If you can make forestry multifunctional, that's the best way forward, considering serving everybody, aren't you? And yeah, it's that three it's a three-legged stall thing, isn't it? But I think they're 44 legs to the stall.
Richard Prideaux: So, I mean, there's a chair, but you've got this thing of the landscape itself and what people want to have there and use it for. So you mentioned a few things there. There's a recreation. Some people want, we want to store our wildlife there because it's a habitat. There's the carbon element of it and sort of using trees as a place to store carbon. They create our oxygen. You know, there are lots of things that trees and woodland does for people before you cut it down and make it into a useful object. And it's sometimes The forestry element is not just cutting trees down, it's also woodland creation, it's woodland planting, woodland management, keeping woodlands healthy or accessible or making it do what someone, whether it's the landowner or the government or whatever, wants it to do.
Nick Adams: Yeah, I mean, forestry is both very complicated and very simple at the same time. It's very simple to say that the point of other grown trees is to then cut them and turn them into something else. There is a hell of a lot of value in that, because if we want sustainable housing, for example, we, I mean, we can grow trees over and over again. You can't get quarry and stone all the time. You know, making bricks is extremely carbon intensive. Steel, the same. With a tree, you can keep growing. And we have the technology now is moving on to such an extent. If you go to, you know, just Google it, because that's what we can do. Look at Scandinavia and look at the building. They're doing 15 story buildings made entirely of wood. Because in the last 15 years, the technology has moved on so far that we can do that. To do that, we need sustainable timber industry. And we probably don't have that in this country, but we can. What we need is that realization that all these things can't work together, but not necessarily on that same piece of grain. So if we're in, you know, you're I was going to say typical, but a sicker plantation in the uplands. Well, best one in the world, that's going to be timber and a little bit of habitat if you manage it right. Very little... Yeah, with a rule, you know, I mean, there will still be, you might displace the curlers a little bit, but then you will get nitrals. You will get raptors.
Richard Prideaux: Something will live there.
Nick Adams: Something will live there, yeah. It's not a dead zone as people would like to call it. It's just stupid. So you've got that in that space. But in another space, you could say, actually, the best bit of news for that land is just to leave it. Let it go wild. Because we can't get a decent timber crop out of it. We can't let people go in there with a mountain bike because it's too flat, it's too steep, it's too rocky, it's too whatever.
Richard Prideaux: There's too many fallen trees in there.
Nick Adams: It could be anything. But what it can do is still have regen birch and gorse and bramble. annual weeds can grow. I say weed. It's not a weed if you want it to grow, is it? All of these things will come together to make that a habitat for something. And we can still manage it. We can still say, well, that brambles or that gorse has taken over 2 minutes. We'll knock that bit back over there. And we'll make a nice little open area because that will suit Graham Nest and Bird.
Richard Prideaux: Do you think, because we talked about this about The Royal Forestry Society have a campaign at the moment about sort of mental health and perception of the work that foresters do and the public perception of that. And there's a film, we'll encounter it, but it's one that was part of the panel discussion this afternoon about what the public say to people working in forestry about cutting down trees, you know, tree murder and stuff like that. As I was watching that, this time around, because I've seen that a few times before, it struck me that maybe one of the things is that the public, when they see a woodland, or when they go for a bike, they go on a bike in the woods, or they go for a walk in the woods, or they're going camping there, whatever they're doing, they see a value in it being woodland. They don't, in their day-to-day lives, sort of see a value in timber. Unless they work in joinery, or unless they work in something involving timber, or they have a wood-burning stove or home. they don't feel an easy link to, oh, timber, that's a resource.
Nick Adams: Yeah. And I think, I've got to ask something you can blame. I mean, we talk a lot about educating people about what we do and how we do it. And that, I think that's got to come almost from the cradle. I mean, we need to start saying to people, actually, this is the way we do these things. I think another part of it, which during that discussion I was sort of thinking about is actually the things that we produce for timber, mainly off your house. So it is the floorboards, the skirring boards, the architrave, the doors. Well, people don't see those things. They use those things, but you walk on the floor, you open a door, you don't look at the nice bit of architrave that just finishes that a little bit off. You don't see the timber. And I think some of the connection is there is lost. Much in the same way as you drive a car, but you don't necessarily know how it works. I mean, me, you do, because we drive old cars and have to fix more times. Most people don't.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, I get it. So it's, particularly if you think about new build houses now, there's actually more timber in a new build house than a house from the mid 90s, because houses of the mid 90s were often double skin brick, a lot of hard materials, whereas now they're often timber frame with a brick skin. And that is the modern construction technique, but you have brick on the outside of that timber. and you have plasterboard and everything on the inside of the timber, so you don't see the timber.
Nick Adams: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: But even down to MDF and for things like kitchens, there's what Chronospan up at Cherk, they are buying huge amounts of timber from UK and EU sources and some overseas, I think, that are all going into making MDF, even though it's a manufactured board, the fibre that they used to make it is still coming from a tree somewhere.
Nick Adams: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: When it's the side of your kitchen or whatever.
Nick Adams: Yeah, again, you don't, you don't see it, you'll see the thing on top of your workshop, on your workshop, which is laminated, but inside that is what we're just talking about the big huge chippers.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah.
Nick Adams: You know, that's what they're producing a lot of the time, as well as biomass. They're producing, you know, that does go and that's how chip is made. It's basically chipped up, glued and pressed.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. So it's. There was this campaign a while ago that if you had breakfast today, thank a farmer. It's that if you're sat on a surface today, thank a forester.
Nick Adams: Yeah, thank a forester because you can sit and eat the thing that the farmer has made for you.
Richard Prideaux: So there's that there. I mean, there's loads more to talk about the education of it and the education of the public, but I think that's something we can do anyway. And we're going to be doing more of that with Side Country, hopefully, and a few other projects. But Tannoy in the background as well. I think now we should go and speak to somebody that can tell us a little bit from the other side of things. So maybe not from a sort of a higher level organisational levels.
Nick Adams: Yeah, so we've talked to my mate Andrew Sober, who is the president of the ICF, the Institute of Charred Foresters. Known him a long time, very knowledgeable man, and he comes from a different place than I do. So I am very much on the ground. He is very much, he started somewhere around, but he has moved up through and he informs policy for Welsh Government amongst a host of other things. He has fingers in every pie and yeah, one of the good guys I would say.
Andrew Sowerby: My name is Andrew Sobey. I live in Pontypridd, I'm from Yorkshire originally. I'm the director of Bromman and Abbey Limited, one of the directors there. We're a woodland management company that cover Wales and West England. And I'm here at the APF today because I'm also the president of the Institute of Chartered Foresters and I've been meeting some apprentices today and yeah, just meeting people in the industry.
Richard Prideaux: So I've got a burning question to start off with. What is the difference between a forester and a chartered forester?
Andrew Sowerby: My view on this is that a chartered forester is one who is publicly accountable for the work that they do. So they go through a process of assessment by their peers, which is set and transparent, and their peers judge them to be competent. And then as they practice their work, they're essentially, they're open to complaints and there are consequences if actually they're found not to be meeting the professional standards. So you can be a forester and not be chartered, but I think if you're demonstrating public accountability, then you're meeting a much higher level of competence and standard, along with all the other benefits and opportunities that come from being a charter body.
Richard Prideaux: Maybe the difference between being a doctor and a first aider?
Andrew Sowerby: There are lots of good foresters out there with lots of knowledge and we can all learn from each other, but I think If we're not publicly accountable for what we do, then society is less likely to trust us to do more. And what we've heard consistently over the last 20 years is that we need to be better at using wood, we need to be better at growing more woodlands and we need to be better custodians of our forests. And if we need to meet that challenge, we need to be accountable to the people that are prepared to pay for it.
Richard Prideaux: We're here at APF. We're here in the, I think it's around the Ragley estate. So this is 50 years of APF. How long have you been coming here?
Andrew Sowerby: So I've been coming to the APF really since I went into the private sector 10 years ago. In fact, my first APF was September 2016 and I've been a week into working for Primary Rickets Silviculture. So yes, it's great just to see what's really special about the APF is all the people that practice forestry in the woodland day in, day out and all the arboriculturalists come together and they share all their knowledge and experience because professionalism isn't just about the managerial choices or the policy choices. It's about those hugely important day-to-day, minute-to-minute choices that people make that take skill, that take judgment, and that's all underpinned by integrity. And the ICF actually has a technical membership for that it developed over the last 10 years to make sure that aspect of all of our work is covered.
Richard Prideaux: So we've got several things in the news at the moment where, depending on when this episode comes out, we may or may not be a war with Russia.
Andrew Sowerby: Indeed.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, we've got that. We've got, I think Trump announced yesterday, today that they're going to not explore diesel for the next 90 days. So possible fuel issues, we've got the war in Iran, all sorts of resilience issues. And one of the things that's being discussed is how we get what we need for the nation, you know, food, fuel, all resources. how we sort of, we get that together from what we have already in the country. Where do you think we are at the moment with forestry and the products that come from forestry? How are we self-sufficient? Do we have, are we on track for being self-sufficient? Where are we up to?
Andrew Sowerby: So the general view of UK government and the bodies around forestry such as Confor and the wider sector estimate that we're 20% self-sufficient in timber consumption. And that 20% self-sufficiency is coming from a forest base that takes up 13% of our land area. And what we know about our history, particularly in relation to conflict, is at the end of World War I, we established the Forest Commission because we needed that strategic reserve of timber because our forest cover was down at 5%. And then by the end of World War II, and having had the Forest Commission for 20, 25 years, we were down to 2% forest cover. Wow. So that's on record and that's what very much drove the Forest Commission in the 20th century. Where we are now is there is, you know, Britain is, we're also saying that Britain is 80% urban, 20% rural in terms of its population distribution. So you have, most people are concerned about the environment and understand that their needs come from the environment, but they don't understand the nuance of how food is produced and how the environment is protected. And the gap in my my view is that what we've lacked is consistency. There's been a lot of, you only have to go back to the early 1980s where there was the concern about the changing land use and how afforestation had happened in the 20th century, the enthusiasm for broadleaves and the restoration of native woodlands which was needed and ultimately we've, there's been And with devolution as well, we've had different initiatives in different places that haven't stood the test of time. And what really brings that to a head is like we've had, the worst summer since 1976 in over 50 years. And we're in a place now where we've had wildfires in farmland and in forests that probably could have been prevented or reduced the damage by having fire breaks and having better equipment and drills and organisation in the countryside, but that's not been supported. And what I would suggest, speaking for forestry, for private owners and for the public forest estate, we need that baseline level of doing the fundamentals, which is fencing, ride maintenance and all that basic management. And I would suggest farming needs that as well to make sure we've got that resilience Because if you've got the resilience, you've actually then got options to experiment with things and try different things. one of the things that gets talked about is agroforestry. And it's something that farmers are interested in. It's something that foresters are interested in. But it sits out with most people's day-to-day expertise. But actually, if we can get that right, we can see a huge increase in the amount of trees that we manage well across the countryside. But it's just very difficult to do it. And sometimes the processes that are set up discourage experimenting and the inevitable failure that comes with experimenting. So that's part of the picture in my view.
Richard Prideaux: And you said in a couple of different roles within forestry, within that sort of spread of experience, how... How well do you think the public, do you think the government, do you think industry understands the difference in pace of forestry? Because you cannot make a forest overnight. You can't, it's not like wheat or something like that or oil seed rape where you can plant it now, you know in so many weeks you can harvest it. A forest is decades. So how well do those organizations, those people, those stakeholders understand that, do you think?
Andrew Sowerby: Very few understand it at their core and people will encounter it in their lives. I think it's everybody is busy living their own lives and we're very privileged in a society that we're all relatively wealthy and pursuing our own goals. So people bump into forestry in the same way that they might bump into life and death in their own lives and it's only when it slaps them in the face that they have to process it. So our role as professionals particularly senior professionals in bodies like the ICF and Con4 and Royal Forestry Societies, is to tell our story and to talk about, well, this year I'll probably create 10 or 15 hectares of new woodland and they are woodlands that will really be at their maximum value at the beginning of the 22nd century. And the trees that I cut down this summer were planted, you know, when my parents were being born. And that's my span of control. And my duty in the day-to-day is I don't get hung up in, will it be all right in 80 years? I just make sure that this year's stuff is as good as I can make it. And the people that really make a difference in that are the people that work in the forest, planting trees, harvesting trees, setting up fence lines and things like that, because they deliver the high quality and they deliver all those on-site judgements that society really benefits from.
Nick Adams: So you've led me brilliantly onto the question I wanted to ask, which was, So you're here partly because you've got apprentices from the Forestry Commission and you just said that it's the guys who plant the trees, it's the guys who fell the trees, it's the guys like you who go out and get all these plants. We have a massive labour shortage. How do you think we overcome that?
Andrew Sowerby: Do you know the best thing I've seen in recent years is actually all the practitioners out there that already put themselves out onto social media. So for example, the person that sticks out in my mind is Mditch84. So Mditch84, I found out Mditch84 because on my Facebook, which isn't particularly forestry, it's all mates and stuff like that, it came up, oh, today I'm building a floating rd for a forest. And I was like, You are. People have talked to me about floating roads for the last 25 years and they talked about it in unit, I've never seen it. And this guy just did a five minute video on how you build a floating rd. And I was just like, my word, that's incredible. And then you link into he's following five different harvest operators and then there's a tree planting contractor that's doing it as well. And we just have to keep testifying and keep getting that message out there. So I do a YouTube channel now and it was off the back of being elected president We had a conference where it was all about telling our story and it's like, I've got to lead by example. I'm A relatively young president, it's not like I've been head of hundreds of people and all that kind of stuff. But actually what I can do is go, right, let's do, we've always talked about this, now I have to do it. So, you know, I started, and then you start searching and people are out there doing it. It's fantastic.
Richard Prideaux: And if you are a sort of a millennial in your 40s now, because that's all the millennials have.
Andrew Sowerby: Millennials are in their 40s now, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: But we've got.
Andrew Sowerby: Apparently I scripted a jag.
Richard Prideaux: Just ex-ennial, I think. Is that what they say? If you didn't work in forestry, if you didn't work in that, that's our world, you worked in an office, the footer of every e-mail said, save a forest, don't print this e-mail. There's always been this perception that any use of timber, any use of paper or any of the products from forestry is effectively a negative because you are removing a tree. Whereas what I can see now, what I can see from my other projects outside of side country, there is a lot more interest, as you just mentioned, from social media driven examples and sort of examples of you can have a life planting trees all winter, you can spend all winter planting trees and then the rest of the summer recovering or something like that or you can work in forestry, you can work doing this. There's just walking around the show here, so the average age seems to be dropping down to younger and younger people. Are you finding that with the ICF? Do you know what sort of your average age is or is the ages getting younger or older? Where are we going?
Andrew Sowerby: So with the ICF, I have seen that graph. I'm pretty sure I'm still on the just under the average age of the ICF. But it is changing. And we meet planting gangs where the average, you know, some of the people that run the contract teams are in their mid to late 20s. What's the right way to put this? I think, well, there are two things in my mind as answering that question. One is it's the circular economy. That's the thing, that's the idea that should really drive us. And what I mean, what I mean, there's a great book called Donut Economics and the author's name escapes me, but I've read the book. And it talks about the role of the commons in a circular economy and how fibre works in a circular economy and how we design. it's all right cutting trees down for paper if we know what we're going to do with the paper afterwards. That we should feel very comfortable with that and so should agriculture and all the other industries. In terms of like young people coming through, We just cannot operate if we don't recruit new people. And I've been in this position. I think anyone who's a thoughtful, responsible manager of people or a team leader should be always working on the basis that at any point someone in my team can drop out. They might win the lottery, they might have a change in family circumstances or something that's less pleasant to talk about. Ultimately, We should, if we're responsible managers with ambition, we should always be on the lookout for recruiting people. And that's not dangling silly jobs and crazy money at people. It's about just talking authentically about what it's like. You know, you were talking about tree planting there. You know, tree planting is hard work through the winter and then you'll go on to spraying and weeding and that's hard work through the summer. And what you want to do is bring, and also it's not just young people. We want people to change career because if we are about increasing what we're doing, we need to offer people jobs and it's where Nick and I have always remained in touch partly because I would have contracted Nick in for services and things like that. But it's always been hard to recruit and it's hard to recruit to get people to stay and also how to recruit to get people to just actually keep up to the physical work of your niche of the sector. And you need to be able to offer, you know, one of the firms I work with, you know, they set up so that if their newbies are planting 5 or 600 trees A day, that's not killing them economically. And there's huge amounts of data that go into allowing them to do that. And it's really not economic for them in the first year, but actually they've built a very versatile team so that as one person leaves, it's not the end of the world. And that works. So we have a duty to be fair to our contractors. We have a duty to advocate for the industry at large and empower people like Nick, practitioners like Nick, who are out in the forest day in, day out. They don't have that kind of space just to nip off and do this and that, whereas managers we have the privilege of being a bit more flexible with our location and time.
Nick Adams: I think there's two sort of things there. One, there is the salaried role, which is yours and forest managers, people who work for state bodies. And then there is the non-salaried or self-employed or contractor owner role. And that generally is what it is, less it's less easy to work at that. There's not so much security in your work. It's a problem I've come across and we've spoken about it for the last 10 years on and off. Is there a way forward that you, where we can improve that kind of, what a contractor or what someone who works on the ground, is there a way we can improve that, maybe improve the offer for them, change, is there room to change that what has been essentially a 50-year mechanism for what your job is, what my job is?
Andrew Sowerby: Yep. So I think there are two tools that we, well, I think we should do. We could say explore, but we should just get on and do. The 2 things I think we should do are, one is that we need a consistent level of woodland management grant for private sector woodlands and that the public sector forests should be funded at that basic level. And that's important because the basics, ride cutting, good restocking, cleaning and respacing, doing fencing work and things like that, they're all, it's all work that tends to attract entry level people into forestry and it needs doing up and down the country for matters of resilience, national security and environmental protection. So that's, we need that. In terms of public procurement on the public forest estate, actually there needs to be more flexibility. So my experience of being working on the public forest estate for the first 15 years of my career through the noughties and mid-teens is that procurement scaled up and scaled up and scaled up. And actually those processes could take six months to a year. They would be big contracts and small companies that are field based coming in on an evening after having been out 11, 12 hours of fresh air, you're not of a mind to concentrate. It made it really hard. Now, some of that is evolving back and you've got framework contracts with smaller jobs and all that kind of stuff. But the public sector, for all the complaints it gets, it's very good at doing big procurement and pushing prices down hard. and ultimately there isn't that much room for manoeuvre. So it's quite high risk for people to start companies and work at a local level as a micro business and succeed. So actually, if there was some grace given within procurement to allow that, and it's the same, you know, one of the hats that I wear is I chair the industry leadership group in Wales that advises Welsh Government on its timber industrial strategy. And we don't only just look at what I've just spoken about there, but how small organisations buy timber from Natural Resources Wales. Because when Natural Resources Wales answer to that question, they say, well, our role is to put volume on mass out to the market and then actually secondary sellers then pass it on through. And that's okay and that's efficient, but it's not necessarily the thing that really stimulates micro businesses and gives communities reassurance that if they want to do something nuanced, They can work with the public sector. So consistent woodland management grants across the board and that flexibility for micro businesses to actually get them started.
Richard Prideaux: So just before we started recording, a lady came over here to ask you a question. It starts me thinking, based on what's happening now in this current year, what do you think motivates young people to want to come and get a career in forestry now? That's his fault he asked this question.
Andrew Sowerby: It's a really good question because do you know what? I've got two teenage sons and I think I know what motivates them, but I don't really know. I almost don't want to answer it. I will try and answer it because everyone's so different. I want to say, if I was to judge the generation, I'd say they're much more interested in environmental matters. And people are aware of it. They're aware of deforestation. They're aware of their consumer choices. And actually coming to forestry is a way of pushing back against that. The irony is the engine of forestry, that growing of timber, it's at its best when you're managing things consistently, regimentally and annually in a way that's deeply unromantic. You know, the best tree planting contractors I know They might talk about the environment, but they're interested in is the site going to be worked efficiently and are they going to win their coin at the end of it? That's not criticism, that's real. Because people draw sustenance from that. I mean, my experience was, I was a youngster in the 80s, news round had the hole in the ozone layer and Amazonian deforestation, and I was in Cubs and Scouts. So that led me to forestry. By the time I'd gone through university and understood what forestry was about, All I wanted to do when I was in my early 20s was just to be relied upon to do a good job. And actually having a role where you were broadly doing something positive was really fulfilling. And probably most people that are thinking about forestry want to be in a role where they're around peg in a round hole and what they're doing isn't a detriment to the planet. And I'm dead keen to meet them, frankly.
Richard Prideaux: So it might be a case of agency by taking a career in that field, they're actually able to take some control of themselves. They're not just sat in the background or even just campaigning or doing something in that sense actually. They're working at the coalface.
Andrew Sowerby: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the thing that, you know, if you'd have asked me 15 years ago, would I be in debates, you know, in countryside debates about are trees a bad thing? And, you know, because forestry, forestry's got a checkered history or it's seen as challenging to some parts of the country in terms of the status quo. And I find myself trying to be a positive advocate and listening to people's worries and concerns about the changing countryside. I never, there are times I walk into the room and you go, am I the bad guy here? Am I the bad guy in this room? And what I do is I just lean into being civil and informed and refer back to statistics that aren't mine. And I'm trying to advocate for that. People that come into forestry now, they might come in thinking, oh, I've got a degree, I've got kind of like an office background, and they might actually be thriving doing planting, but you've got to create the journey and the connections and hope that they've got the mouse to navigate it for themselves.
Richard Prideaux: So what do you think then is something that maybe people aren't paying attention to, but is actually something quite important for the future of forestry?
Andrew Sowerby: It's the opportunity for employment throughout the country. And what we have is We have a fairly small workforce doing a lot across 13% of the area of the United Kingdom. But the opportunity of the 21st century is that we need to build more houses out of wood and we grow that wood in the UK already and we grow that wood on shorter rotations. We have that the public forests of the United Kingdom are the urban commons and actually COVID showed that more and more people are going to use the urban commons and they need to be safe and they need to be guided and we need that interpretation that people value it. And with the AI revolution, where actually lots of jobs are going to change in nature and people are going to have to change careers, forestry is something that you can come into because forestry by definition, forestry and aboriculture I should say, is the relationship between people and trees. And AI is not going to define the relationship between people and trees. People interacting with each other and interacting with trees is that definition. And we will always need people to do the work on the land, to do the social interpretation of all the data information that we get in. And forestry can do more of that because we need the houses, we need people to Value their environments and we need thriving biodiversity while we're also harvesting father.
Richard Prideaux: Perfect. Good way to end. Andrew.
Andrew Sowerby: Thank you very much. Cheers.
Richard Prideaux: We're here at APF, which is, what is it, Association of Professional Forestry.
Nick Adams: Yeah, foresters.
Richard Prideaux: Foresters.
Nick Adams: Association of Professional Foresters.
Richard Prideaux: Not professional forestry.
Nick Adams: No, professional foresters.
Richard Prideaux: So the other voice you've heard there is not. Side Country's George Brown. This is Side Country's Nick Adams. Say hello, Nick.
Nick Adams: Hello, Nick.
Richard Prideaux: So just if you give people a brief rundown of who you are so that all of this makes sense.
Nick Adams: Right. So I am Nick Adams. I'm A forestry contractor and a forest of Dean.
Richard Prideaux: Forest of Dean is the edge of Wales.
Nick Adams: No, it's between Wales and England, but actually in Gloucestershire. Between the white and between the Severn.
Richard Prideaux: If you don't know anything about the Forest of Dean, I highly recommend listening to Mark Steel's In Town on BBC Sound.
Nick Adams: Oh yeah, it's amazing.
Richard Prideaux: The episode from the Colford.
Nick Adams: No, he's at the Speech House, which is, it was a hunting lodge actually. It's a very, very interesting place. And it was like a meeting place for the last few 100 years. And he did it there.
Richard Prideaux: We need to be more content on this at some point because genuinely the Forest of Dean is like nowhere else. It's like its own little kingdom within Gloucestershire.
Nick Adams: Yeah, I mean, there is thousands of areas of things to talk about in the Dean and none of it is forestry.
Richard Prideaux: And it is basically backwards Appalachia for England.
Nick Adams: Yes.
Richard Prideaux: Right. OK, I'll leave that there. So Forest of Dean, forestry contractor, family trade.
Nick Adams: Yeah, so my dad was in it, my granddad was in it. Probably his father was in his while we were on way back in the 1800s, but yeah, there was nothing else I was ever going to do.
Richard Prideaux: So, in your family, when a male becomes of age, you just go into the woods and stay there?
Nick Adams: No, that's just my family. I think that's forestry family. Forestry family is loads of people follow their dad into the wood.
Richard Prideaux: Right, OK, and that's the term, follow into the wood.
Nick Adams: Yeah, into the wood, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So it's like going down the pit, kind of.
Nick Adams: Yeah, exactly. It's like down the pit, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: OK, what's your role here today?
Nick Adams: Well, as of today I am. We represent the Forestry Contracting Association, of which I'm a director. We have a stand here and I'm also looking after the Forest Workers, which has Small Woods Association, FISA in it, Focus on Forestry First are in it. And those just represent forestry workers, you know, all types of people who plant trees like me, right through to coppice workers, harvesting drivers, the whole lot really. We have 350-ish members of every forestry occupation you can think of. From what I do, agricultural, everything. is represented by what we do.
Richard Prideaux: And this show overall, I mean, you can't really move without hitting some kind of expensive equipment, can you, somewhere?
Nick Adams: Yeah, I mean, it's a showcase for everything in forestry.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, like every wood chipper you've ever thought of.
Nick Adams: From the tiny little gravity-fed ones, where you can get a bit of stick in it up to the ones that we just went over there, watching the self-propelled, basically a lorry, and it's just you put a log in it like 2 foot across. Six metres long and it just munches through in a minute.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, if you've never seen one of these things, if you put a tree in one end and a huge pile of wood chip comes out the other.
Nick Adams: Yeah, in about 30 seconds.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, it is terrifying.
Nick Adams: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: It's great fun.
Nick Adams: Oh yeah, I mean, I think it'd be great. It'd be quite a fun, amusing job for a small amount of time. I think you'd get bored of it quick.
Richard Prideaux: And with all that kit on show here, there's lots of stuff to buy and I'm sat next to a pile of stuff that I've bought today. It'd be very easy to overlook the human in this, wouldn't it?
Nick Adams: This, everything else is about people, because the connections you make here. I mean, I've seen people I haven't seen since I last came to the show two years ago. I've seen, you know, a friend of our show, Matt Biddle, I've spoke to him, you know, every day probably for the last year or so, but I've never actually met him until today. And that is the thing worth coming to the show for, is meeting new people, but meeting the people that you you might only ever see when you come here or accidentally meet him at a different show somewhere else.
Richard Prideaux: Because that's what I'm trying to get my head around with this, because I don't work in forestry, I just play with chainsaws for work occasionally. But there's the scale of forestry is weird because it's what, 13% of the UK landmass is forestry, worked forestry.
Nick Adams: It's tree cover.
Richard Prideaux: Tree cover, right. So that includes all sorts of corners of fields and might have a tree in it and things like that.
Nick Adams: Yeah, I think it's. I think you can take it as a very good educated guess. I would put half a percent either way on that maybe. But yeah, it covers all forestry. Whether it would cover like what's in a hedge or anything, I'm not sure. I think it's just every block of wooden has been mapped and it comes out to 13 and a half percent. However many hectares it is, I can't remember off the top of my head.
Richard Prideaux: And within that, there's a lot of competing uses for it because unless you're coppicing, unless you're coppicing hazel, you can only cut a tree down once, can't you? So you can grow it and cut it down and then you've got to do something with that wood or something has to happen to it.
Nick Adams: Yeah, So the point of timber is it is a product at the end of the day and we have to.
Richard Prideaux: So the chainsaw just started.
Nick Adams: Yeah, I know. I'm not saying that put me off or anything or the dog. But yes, we need to make timber, but there are also other benefits that of forestry, which we've probably in the past maybe neglected a little bit. Habitat, biodiversity, recreation. So there are probably, I would say, four things that forestry has to look at and has to do their best to amalgamate those four things in the same piece of wood or the same little area. That can be difficult. There are competing theories on what should be happening and what should take precedence. My personal view is not one thing should take precedence. If you can make forestry multifunctional, that's the best way forward, considering serving everybody, aren't you? And yeah, it's that three it's a three-legged stall thing, isn't it? But I think they're 44 legs to the stall.
Richard Prideaux: So, I mean, there's a chair, but you've got this thing of the landscape itself and what people want to have there and use it for. So you mentioned a few things there. There's a recreation. Some people want, we want to store our wildlife there because it's a habitat. There's the carbon element of it and sort of using trees as a place to store carbon. They create our oxygen. You know, there are lots of things that trees and woodland does for people before you cut it down and make it into a useful object. And it's sometimes The forestry element is not just cutting trees down, it's also woodland creation, it's woodland planting, woodland management, keeping woodlands healthy or accessible or making it do what someone, whether it's the landowner or the government or whatever, wants it to do.
Nick Adams: Yeah, I mean, forestry is both very complicated and very simple at the same time. It's very simple to say that the point of other grown trees is to then cut them and turn them into something else. There is a hell of a lot of value in that, because if we want sustainable housing, for example, we, I mean, we can grow trees over and over again. You can't get quarry and stone all the time. You know, making bricks is extremely carbon intensive. Steel, the same. With a tree, you can keep growing. And we have the technology now is moving on to such an extent. If you go to, you know, just Google it, because that's what we can do. Look at Scandinavia and look at the building. They're doing 15 story buildings made entirely of wood. Because in the last 15 years, the technology has moved on so far that we can do that. To do that, we need sustainable timber industry. And we probably don't have that in this country, but we can. What we need is that realization that all these things can't work together, but not necessarily on that same piece of grain. So if we're in, you know, you're I was going to say typical, but a sicker plantation in the uplands. Well, best one in the world, that's going to be timber and a little bit of habitat if you manage it right. Very little... Yeah, with a rule, you know, I mean, there will still be, you might displace the curlers a little bit, but then you will get nitrals. You will get raptors.
Richard Prideaux: Something will live there.
Nick Adams: Something will live there, yeah. It's not a dead zone as people would like to call it. It's just stupid. So you've got that in that space. But in another space, you could say, actually, the best bit of news for that land is just to leave it. Let it go wild. Because we can't get a decent timber crop out of it. We can't let people go in there with a mountain bike because it's too flat, it's too steep, it's too rocky, it's too whatever.
Richard Prideaux: There's too many fallen trees in there.
Nick Adams: It could be anything. But what it can do is still have regen birch and gorse and bramble. annual weeds can grow. I say weed. It's not a weed if you want it to grow, is it? All of these things will come together to make that a habitat for something. And we can still manage it. We can still say, well, that brambles or that gorse has taken over 2 minutes. We'll knock that bit back over there. And we'll make a nice little open area because that will suit Graham Nest and Bird.
Richard Prideaux: Do you think, because we talked about this about The Royal Forestry Society have a campaign at the moment about sort of mental health and perception of the work that foresters do and the public perception of that. And there's a film, we'll encounter it, but it's one that was part of the panel discussion this afternoon about what the public say to people working in forestry about cutting down trees, you know, tree murder and stuff like that. As I was watching that, this time around, because I've seen that a few times before, it struck me that maybe one of the things is that the public, when they see a woodland, or when they go for a bike, they go on a bike in the woods, or they go for a walk in the woods, or they're going camping there, whatever they're doing, they see a value in it being woodland. They don't, in their day-to-day lives, sort of see a value in timber. Unless they work in joinery, or unless they work in something involving timber, or they have a wood-burning stove or home. they don't feel an easy link to, oh, timber, that's a resource.
Nick Adams: Yeah. And I think, I've got to ask something you can blame. I mean, we talk a lot about educating people about what we do and how we do it. And that, I think that's got to come almost from the cradle. I mean, we need to start saying to people, actually, this is the way we do these things. I think another part of it, which during that discussion I was sort of thinking about is actually the things that we produce for timber, mainly off your house. So it is the floorboards, the skirring boards, the architrave, the doors. Well, people don't see those things. They use those things, but you walk on the floor, you open a door, you don't look at the nice bit of architrave that just finishes that a little bit off. You don't see the timber. And I think some of the connection is there is lost. Much in the same way as you drive a car, but you don't necessarily know how it works. I mean, me, you do, because we drive old cars and have to fix more times. Most people don't.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, I get it. So it's, particularly if you think about new build houses now, there's actually more timber in a new build house than a house from the mid 90s, because houses of the mid 90s were often double skin brick, a lot of hard materials, whereas now they're often timber frame with a brick skin. And that is the modern construction technique, but you have brick on the outside of that timber. and you have plasterboard and everything on the inside of the timber, so you don't see the timber.
Nick Adams: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: But even down to MDF and for things like kitchens, there's what Chronospan up at Cherk, they are buying huge amounts of timber from UK and EU sources and some overseas, I think, that are all going into making MDF, even though it's a manufactured board, the fibre that they used to make it is still coming from a tree somewhere.
Nick Adams: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: When it's the side of your kitchen or whatever.
Nick Adams: Yeah, again, you don't, you don't see it, you'll see the thing on top of your workshop, on your workshop, which is laminated, but inside that is what we're just talking about the big huge chippers.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah.
Nick Adams: You know, that's what they're producing a lot of the time, as well as biomass. They're producing, you know, that does go and that's how chip is made. It's basically chipped up, glued and pressed.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. So it's. There was this campaign a while ago that if you had breakfast today, thank a farmer. It's that if you're sat on a surface today, thank a forester.
Nick Adams: Yeah, thank a forester because you can sit and eat the thing that the farmer has made for you.
Richard Prideaux: So there's that there. I mean, there's loads more to talk about the education of it and the education of the public, but I think that's something we can do anyway. And we're going to be doing more of that with Side Country, hopefully, and a few other projects. But Tannoy in the background as well. I think now we should go and speak to somebody that can tell us a little bit from the other side of things. So maybe not from a sort of a higher level organisational levels.
Nick Adams: Yeah, so we've talked to my mate Andrew Sober, who is the president of the ICF, the Institute of Charred Foresters. Known him a long time, very knowledgeable man, and he comes from a different place than I do. So I am very much on the ground. He is very much, he started somewhere around, but he has moved up through and he informs policy for Welsh Government amongst a host of other things. He has fingers in every pie and yeah, one of the good guys I would say.
Andrew Sowerby: My name is Andrew Sobey. I live in Pontypridd, I'm from Yorkshire originally. I'm the director of Bromman and Abbey Limited, one of the directors there. We're a woodland management company that cover Wales and West England. And I'm here at the APF today because I'm also the president of the Institute of Chartered Foresters and I've been meeting some apprentices today and yeah, just meeting people in the industry.
Richard Prideaux: So I've got a burning question to start off with. What is the difference between a forester and a chartered forester?
Andrew Sowerby: My view on this is that a chartered forester is one who is publicly accountable for the work that they do. So they go through a process of assessment by their peers, which is set and transparent, and their peers judge them to be competent. And then as they practice their work, they're essentially, they're open to complaints and there are consequences if actually they're found not to be meeting the professional standards. So you can be a forester and not be chartered, but I think if you're demonstrating public accountability, then you're meeting a much higher level of competence and standard, along with all the other benefits and opportunities that come from being a charter body.
Richard Prideaux: Maybe the difference between being a doctor and a first aider?
Andrew Sowerby: There are lots of good foresters out there with lots of knowledge and we can all learn from each other, but I think If we're not publicly accountable for what we do, then society is less likely to trust us to do more. And what we've heard consistently over the last 20 years is that we need to be better at using wood, we need to be better at growing more woodlands and we need to be better custodians of our forests. And if we need to meet that challenge, we need to be accountable to the people that are prepared to pay for it.
Richard Prideaux: We're here at APF. We're here in the, I think it's around the Ragley estate. So this is 50 years of APF. How long have you been coming here?
Andrew Sowerby: So I've been coming to the APF really since I went into the private sector 10 years ago. In fact, my first APF was September 2016 and I've been a week into working for Primary Rickets Silviculture. So yes, it's great just to see what's really special about the APF is all the people that practice forestry in the woodland day in, day out and all the arboriculturalists come together and they share all their knowledge and experience because professionalism isn't just about the managerial choices or the policy choices. It's about those hugely important day-to-day, minute-to-minute choices that people make that take skill, that take judgment, and that's all underpinned by integrity. And the ICF actually has a technical membership for that it developed over the last 10 years to make sure that aspect of all of our work is covered.
Richard Prideaux: So we've got several things in the news at the moment where, depending on when this episode comes out, we may or may not be a war with Russia.
Andrew Sowerby: Indeed.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, we've got that. We've got, I think Trump announced yesterday, today that they're going to not explore diesel for the next 90 days. So possible fuel issues, we've got the war in Iran, all sorts of resilience issues. And one of the things that's being discussed is how we get what we need for the nation, you know, food, fuel, all resources. how we sort of, we get that together from what we have already in the country. Where do you think we are at the moment with forestry and the products that come from forestry? How are we self-sufficient? Do we have, are we on track for being self-sufficient? Where are we up to?
Andrew Sowerby: So the general view of UK government and the bodies around forestry such as Confor and the wider sector estimate that we're 20% self-sufficient in timber consumption. And that 20% self-sufficiency is coming from a forest base that takes up 13% of our land area. And what we know about our history, particularly in relation to conflict, is at the end of World War I, we established the Forest Commission because we needed that strategic reserve of timber because our forest cover was down at 5%. And then by the end of World War II, and having had the Forest Commission for 20, 25 years, we were down to 2% forest cover. Wow. So that's on record and that's what very much drove the Forest Commission in the 20th century. Where we are now is there is, you know, Britain is, we're also saying that Britain is 80% urban, 20% rural in terms of its population distribution. So you have, most people are concerned about the environment and understand that their needs come from the environment, but they don't understand the nuance of how food is produced and how the environment is protected. And the gap in my my view is that what we've lacked is consistency. There's been a lot of, you only have to go back to the early 1980s where there was the concern about the changing land use and how afforestation had happened in the 20th century, the enthusiasm for broadleaves and the restoration of native woodlands which was needed and ultimately we've, there's been And with devolution as well, we've had different initiatives in different places that haven't stood the test of time. And what really brings that to a head is like we've had, the worst summer since 1976 in over 50 years. And we're in a place now where we've had wildfires in farmland and in forests that probably could have been prevented or reduced the damage by having fire breaks and having better equipment and drills and organisation in the countryside, but that's not been supported. And what I would suggest, speaking for forestry, for private owners and for the public forest estate, we need that baseline level of doing the fundamentals, which is fencing, ride maintenance and all that basic management. And I would suggest farming needs that as well to make sure we've got that resilience Because if you've got the resilience, you've actually then got options to experiment with things and try different things. one of the things that gets talked about is agroforestry. And it's something that farmers are interested in. It's something that foresters are interested in. But it sits out with most people's day-to-day expertise. But actually, if we can get that right, we can see a huge increase in the amount of trees that we manage well across the countryside. But it's just very difficult to do it. And sometimes the processes that are set up discourage experimenting and the inevitable failure that comes with experimenting. So that's part of the picture in my view.
Richard Prideaux: And you said in a couple of different roles within forestry, within that sort of spread of experience, how... How well do you think the public, do you think the government, do you think industry understands the difference in pace of forestry? Because you cannot make a forest overnight. You can't, it's not like wheat or something like that or oil seed rape where you can plant it now, you know in so many weeks you can harvest it. A forest is decades. So how well do those organizations, those people, those stakeholders understand that, do you think?
Andrew Sowerby: Very few understand it at their core and people will encounter it in their lives. I think it's everybody is busy living their own lives and we're very privileged in a society that we're all relatively wealthy and pursuing our own goals. So people bump into forestry in the same way that they might bump into life and death in their own lives and it's only when it slaps them in the face that they have to process it. So our role as professionals particularly senior professionals in bodies like the ICF and Con4 and Royal Forestry Societies, is to tell our story and to talk about, well, this year I'll probably create 10 or 15 hectares of new woodland and they are woodlands that will really be at their maximum value at the beginning of the 22nd century. And the trees that I cut down this summer were planted, you know, when my parents were being born. And that's my span of control. And my duty in the day-to-day is I don't get hung up in, will it be all right in 80 years? I just make sure that this year's stuff is as good as I can make it. And the people that really make a difference in that are the people that work in the forest, planting trees, harvesting trees, setting up fence lines and things like that, because they deliver the high quality and they deliver all those on-site judgements that society really benefits from.
Nick Adams: So you've led me brilliantly onto the question I wanted to ask, which was, So you're here partly because you've got apprentices from the Forestry Commission and you just said that it's the guys who plant the trees, it's the guys who fell the trees, it's the guys like you who go out and get all these plants. We have a massive labour shortage. How do you think we overcome that?
Andrew Sowerby: Do you know the best thing I've seen in recent years is actually all the practitioners out there that already put themselves out onto social media. So for example, the person that sticks out in my mind is Mditch84. So Mditch84, I found out Mditch84 because on my Facebook, which isn't particularly forestry, it's all mates and stuff like that, it came up, oh, today I'm building a floating rd for a forest. And I was like, You are. People have talked to me about floating roads for the last 25 years and they talked about it in unit, I've never seen it. And this guy just did a five minute video on how you build a floating rd. And I was just like, my word, that's incredible. And then you link into he's following five different harvest operators and then there's a tree planting contractor that's doing it as well. And we just have to keep testifying and keep getting that message out there. So I do a YouTube channel now and it was off the back of being elected president We had a conference where it was all about telling our story and it's like, I've got to lead by example. I'm A relatively young president, it's not like I've been head of hundreds of people and all that kind of stuff. But actually what I can do is go, right, let's do, we've always talked about this, now I have to do it. So, you know, I started, and then you start searching and people are out there doing it. It's fantastic.
Richard Prideaux: And if you are a sort of a millennial in your 40s now, because that's all the millennials have.
Andrew Sowerby: Millennials are in their 40s now, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: But we've got.
Andrew Sowerby: Apparently I scripted a jag.
Richard Prideaux: Just ex-ennial, I think. Is that what they say? If you didn't work in forestry, if you didn't work in that, that's our world, you worked in an office, the footer of every e-mail said, save a forest, don't print this e-mail. There's always been this perception that any use of timber, any use of paper or any of the products from forestry is effectively a negative because you are removing a tree. Whereas what I can see now, what I can see from my other projects outside of side country, there is a lot more interest, as you just mentioned, from social media driven examples and sort of examples of you can have a life planting trees all winter, you can spend all winter planting trees and then the rest of the summer recovering or something like that or you can work in forestry, you can work doing this. There's just walking around the show here, so the average age seems to be dropping down to younger and younger people. Are you finding that with the ICF? Do you know what sort of your average age is or is the ages getting younger or older? Where are we going?
Andrew Sowerby: So with the ICF, I have seen that graph. I'm pretty sure I'm still on the just under the average age of the ICF. But it is changing. And we meet planting gangs where the average, you know, some of the people that run the contract teams are in their mid to late 20s. What's the right way to put this? I think, well, there are two things in my mind as answering that question. One is it's the circular economy. That's the thing, that's the idea that should really drive us. And what I mean, what I mean, there's a great book called Donut Economics and the author's name escapes me, but I've read the book. And it talks about the role of the commons in a circular economy and how fibre works in a circular economy and how we design. it's all right cutting trees down for paper if we know what we're going to do with the paper afterwards. That we should feel very comfortable with that and so should agriculture and all the other industries. In terms of like young people coming through, We just cannot operate if we don't recruit new people. And I've been in this position. I think anyone who's a thoughtful, responsible manager of people or a team leader should be always working on the basis that at any point someone in my team can drop out. They might win the lottery, they might have a change in family circumstances or something that's less pleasant to talk about. Ultimately, We should, if we're responsible managers with ambition, we should always be on the lookout for recruiting people. And that's not dangling silly jobs and crazy money at people. It's about just talking authentically about what it's like. You know, you were talking about tree planting there. You know, tree planting is hard work through the winter and then you'll go on to spraying and weeding and that's hard work through the summer. And what you want to do is bring, and also it's not just young people. We want people to change career because if we are about increasing what we're doing, we need to offer people jobs and it's where Nick and I have always remained in touch partly because I would have contracted Nick in for services and things like that. But it's always been hard to recruit and it's hard to recruit to get people to stay and also how to recruit to get people to just actually keep up to the physical work of your niche of the sector. And you need to be able to offer, you know, one of the firms I work with, you know, they set up so that if their newbies are planting 5 or 600 trees A day, that's not killing them economically. And there's huge amounts of data that go into allowing them to do that. And it's really not economic for them in the first year, but actually they've built a very versatile team so that as one person leaves, it's not the end of the world. And that works. So we have a duty to be fair to our contractors. We have a duty to advocate for the industry at large and empower people like Nick, practitioners like Nick, who are out in the forest day in, day out. They don't have that kind of space just to nip off and do this and that, whereas managers we have the privilege of being a bit more flexible with our location and time.
Nick Adams: I think there's two sort of things there. One, there is the salaried role, which is yours and forest managers, people who work for state bodies. And then there is the non-salaried or self-employed or contractor owner role. And that generally is what it is, less it's less easy to work at that. There's not so much security in your work. It's a problem I've come across and we've spoken about it for the last 10 years on and off. Is there a way forward that you, where we can improve that kind of, what a contractor or what someone who works on the ground, is there a way we can improve that, maybe improve the offer for them, change, is there room to change that what has been essentially a 50-year mechanism for what your job is, what my job is?
Andrew Sowerby: Yep. So I think there are two tools that we, well, I think we should do. We could say explore, but we should just get on and do. The 2 things I think we should do are, one is that we need a consistent level of woodland management grant for private sector woodlands and that the public sector forests should be funded at that basic level. And that's important because the basics, ride cutting, good restocking, cleaning and respacing, doing fencing work and things like that, they're all, it's all work that tends to attract entry level people into forestry and it needs doing up and down the country for matters of resilience, national security and environmental protection. So that's, we need that. In terms of public procurement on the public forest estate, actually there needs to be more flexibility. So my experience of being working on the public forest estate for the first 15 years of my career through the noughties and mid-teens is that procurement scaled up and scaled up and scaled up. And actually those processes could take six months to a year. They would be big contracts and small companies that are field based coming in on an evening after having been out 11, 12 hours of fresh air, you're not of a mind to concentrate. It made it really hard. Now, some of that is evolving back and you've got framework contracts with smaller jobs and all that kind of stuff. But the public sector, for all the complaints it gets, it's very good at doing big procurement and pushing prices down hard. and ultimately there isn't that much room for manoeuvre. So it's quite high risk for people to start companies and work at a local level as a micro business and succeed. So actually, if there was some grace given within procurement to allow that, and it's the same, you know, one of the hats that I wear is I chair the industry leadership group in Wales that advises Welsh Government on its timber industrial strategy. And we don't only just look at what I've just spoken about there, but how small organisations buy timber from Natural Resources Wales. Because when Natural Resources Wales answer to that question, they say, well, our role is to put volume on mass out to the market and then actually secondary sellers then pass it on through. And that's okay and that's efficient, but it's not necessarily the thing that really stimulates micro businesses and gives communities reassurance that if they want to do something nuanced, They can work with the public sector. So consistent woodland management grants across the board and that flexibility for micro businesses to actually get them started.
Richard Prideaux: So just before we started recording, a lady came over here to ask you a question. It starts me thinking, based on what's happening now in this current year, what do you think motivates young people to want to come and get a career in forestry now? That's his fault he asked this question.
Andrew Sowerby: It's a really good question because do you know what? I've got two teenage sons and I think I know what motivates them, but I don't really know. I almost don't want to answer it. I will try and answer it because everyone's so different. I want to say, if I was to judge the generation, I'd say they're much more interested in environmental matters. And people are aware of it. They're aware of deforestation. They're aware of their consumer choices. And actually coming to forestry is a way of pushing back against that. The irony is the engine of forestry, that growing of timber, it's at its best when you're managing things consistently, regimentally and annually in a way that's deeply unromantic. You know, the best tree planting contractors I know They might talk about the environment, but they're interested in is the site going to be worked efficiently and are they going to win their coin at the end of it? That's not criticism, that's real. Because people draw sustenance from that. I mean, my experience was, I was a youngster in the 80s, news round had the hole in the ozone layer and Amazonian deforestation, and I was in Cubs and Scouts. So that led me to forestry. By the time I'd gone through university and understood what forestry was about, All I wanted to do when I was in my early 20s was just to be relied upon to do a good job. And actually having a role where you were broadly doing something positive was really fulfilling. And probably most people that are thinking about forestry want to be in a role where they're around peg in a round hole and what they're doing isn't a detriment to the planet. And I'm dead keen to meet them, frankly.
Richard Prideaux: So it might be a case of agency by taking a career in that field, they're actually able to take some control of themselves. They're not just sat in the background or even just campaigning or doing something in that sense actually. They're working at the coalface.
Andrew Sowerby: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the thing that, you know, if you'd have asked me 15 years ago, would I be in debates, you know, in countryside debates about are trees a bad thing? And, you know, because forestry, forestry's got a checkered history or it's seen as challenging to some parts of the country in terms of the status quo. And I find myself trying to be a positive advocate and listening to people's worries and concerns about the changing countryside. I never, there are times I walk into the room and you go, am I the bad guy here? Am I the bad guy in this room? And what I do is I just lean into being civil and informed and refer back to statistics that aren't mine. And I'm trying to advocate for that. People that come into forestry now, they might come in thinking, oh, I've got a degree, I've got kind of like an office background, and they might actually be thriving doing planting, but you've got to create the journey and the connections and hope that they've got the mouse to navigate it for themselves.
Richard Prideaux: So what do you think then is something that maybe people aren't paying attention to, but is actually something quite important for the future of forestry?
Andrew Sowerby: It's the opportunity for employment throughout the country. And what we have is We have a fairly small workforce doing a lot across 13% of the area of the United Kingdom. But the opportunity of the 21st century is that we need to build more houses out of wood and we grow that wood in the UK already and we grow that wood on shorter rotations. We have that the public forests of the United Kingdom are the urban commons and actually COVID showed that more and more people are going to use the urban commons and they need to be safe and they need to be guided and we need that interpretation that people value it. And with the AI revolution, where actually lots of jobs are going to change in nature and people are going to have to change careers, forestry is something that you can come into because forestry by definition, forestry and aboriculture I should say, is the relationship between people and trees. And AI is not going to define the relationship between people and trees. People interacting with each other and interacting with trees is that definition. And we will always need people to do the work on the land, to do the social interpretation of all the data information that we get in. And forestry can do more of that because we need the houses, we need people to Value their environments and we need thriving biodiversity while we're also harvesting father.
Richard Prideaux: Perfect. Good way to end. Andrew.
Andrew Sowerby: Thank you very much. Cheers.