Ask Rowan Reid which is the best species of tree to plant and he'll give a wry smile and a surprising answer.
"I'm not really sure."
Four decades as a forester and a lifetime of planting farm forestry trees might not have answered that simple question.
But they have reaffirmed one long-realised fact: timber is an increasingly scarce and valuable commodity worldwide, especially the eco-friendly plantation timbers Mr Reid grows on his farm.
"When people come here, they've never seen a forest like this, because there is a person who has been involved in the management of those trees while they grow," he said.
There are 70 species spaced across the 40-hectare property at Bambra in south-west Victoria.
Timber transformation
When Mr Reid arrived in 1987, it was a denuded dairy farm, almost bereft of vegetation.
Now it's a lush world of natives and exotics and a drawcard for tour groups, especially farmers keen to integrate tree growing and timber production into their enterprise.
Beneath the canopy, sheep graze contentedly on the rich pasture, proof that agriforestry can co-exist with livestock production.
The trees have flourished and so has the biodiversity.
The towering eucalypts planted in the late 1980s are gradually being felled and replaced by an emerging understorey of rare rainforest trees and premium timber varieties such as Australian red cedar.
For agriforestry to succeed, Rowan Reid continually stresses the need for careful maintenance. Trees need to be carefully established and then later systematically pruned of low branches to a height of 6 metres.
The end goal is a long, straight log, free of knots and blemishes, that will yield stable, valuable timber.
"Maintenance is essential. What we need to do is to have a campaign and a program that supports active management of forests on farms and stop this notion that it's just plant, walk away and let nature take its course," Mr Reid said
On a gentle slope beside a stream, Mr Reid recently harvested the fruits of his foresight.
He has grown and milled much of the timber being used to build his architect-designed house, including a 35-year-old mountain ash eucalypt with a girth of more than 80 centimetres.
Using his portable sawmill, he has sawn the timber into stair treads. His pine trees have supplied much of the framing timber.
His abundance of fine timber has been a blessing at a time when Australia's construction industry has seen a severe shortage of building timbers.
"This has been a great opportunity that I had standing trees that I could convert for this purpose, and I think it's going to save us a lot of money," Mr Reid said.
Forestry foresight
Growing timber for the future was Mr Reid's aim when he started the Otway Agriforestry Network in 1987.
His neighbour, sheep farmer Andrew Stewart, also began revegetating his family's property at that time.
"Rowan has been a real catalyst about stimulating ideas about agriforestry," Mr Stewart said.
"He's got this wonderful combination of combining the scientific theory and the practice and making it happen in a living classroom on his property."
The Stewart family quickly realised that plantation-grown trees could provide far more than shelter and shade for stock.
"At that stage, we were addressing the issues that we had here, which was erosion, salting, exposure, all those sorts of things," Jill Stewart said.
Andrew, Jill and Andrew's brother Hugh began planting trees all over their property.
"The creek lines and the drainage lines, the salt-affected areas, [we] planted those out as well, planted out the water-logged areas, the remnant vegetation areas," Andrew Stewart said.
"We hooked all those up into a web of connected trees across the farm for wildlife corridors and for shade and shelter for the stock."
Three decades on the Otway Agriforestry group has grown to 200 members and its collective foresight and hard work have transformed the landscape in every direction.
The group can measure how much carbon the trees are sequestering using GPS tags on each tree that can be scanned using a smartphone app.
That, along with the growing value of these timber trees, is an emerging market.
"We're still producing the same amount of agricultural production as in prime lambs and wool now with 18 to 20 per cent tree cover compared to when we had 3 per cent tree cover," Mr Stewart said.
Andrew and Jill were recently named as national Landcare winners for their farm revegetation efforts.
They've also established a flourishing native wildflower business on a once barren, exposed hillside and have plans to establish another plot to meet the surging demand.
Like the Stewarts, Rowan Reid talks of planting trees now and carefully tending them for future generations to come.
"Use the time you have as a landholder as an opportunity to flip it into a new opportunity for the next generation.
"It's really exciting when you do that."
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