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Comment by serpix | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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