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Comment by alltakendamned | Hacker News Reader

One nuance to make is that having trees doesn't necessarily equal a forest. Lots of agroforestry ends up being a monoculture with very limited biodiversity.

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Here in Finland the agroforests (99% of all forest coverage) generally do get some biodiversity in them but then the entire plantation is clear cut and the forest floor is raked clean and sterilised of all life. They take everything but rocks. The end result is a massive biodiversity loss. Everything is put through a grinder and shipped away. I hate agroforestry like this with a passion and fully expect prison sentences to these criminals in the future.

Done like this, it's like a carbon sequestration project that would decide to periodically dump all of its captured CO2 in the wild back again...

There is a lot living in the slash left after a harvest operation, also that's forestry, not agroforestry. Wood also has to come from somewhere.

Not much when the slash site dries out so much that newly planted trees fail. Happens here in Central Europe, as recently there are dry spells more often. Foresters have to (very reluctantly) accept that cutting everything clear won't work.

This also seems like a recipe for soil degradation and erosion.

Yes but they don't leave it at that. They dig up the roots, stumps everything up and pile it up and grind down and ship it out.

Sustainable forestry would only take out some of the trees, leave the stumps and replant. The forest would still look like a forest but only a little sparser for a while. there are studies proving this leads to greater yields.

Have you got a source for that? I would be very surprised if they dug up roots and stumps but I guess its possible when producing wood chip

Thats less a forest and more just a farm pretending to be a forest. If they are criminals, then the people growing monoculture wheat fields are also criminals.

I think you mean plantation forestry rather than agroforestry. An agroforestry system tends to be quite biodiverse and have multiple canopy layers. You also usually intercrop with food crops.

I mean it literally can not be a monoculture, for it to be agroforestry there has to be at least two species

I don't know anything about this, but that seems pedantic? Is a duoculture significantly better than a monoculture?

Yes. Many invasive species/pathogens are not as likely to devastate the whole area when they do not have a single clear pathway to infect.

Two species are at least twice as good as 1, right?

Not really, you still have a lack of biodiversity.

Japan had a government policy of only reforesting with two types of trees for economic purposes, in some cases replacing natural forest, and as a result there's a lack of biodiversity and Japan now has allergy seasons that are estimated to cost $2B a year: https://ensia.com/features/japan-reforestation-deforestation...

To add insult to injury, the economic rationale for planting lots of fast-growing wood never really panned out, because it turned out with even Japanese oversupply of timber that it was cheaper to import it from SEA.

Do you have any links for the cheaper wood from SEA. I am always facinated about how things are cheaper to buy and cheap halfway around the world versus buying locally.

Yeah, much better

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