Hasbeen- Your knowledge of the locale is greater than mine. Also I'm not a farmer. I understand that plants have a set of essential nutrients (like humans do)- from what I understand they include Nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphorus- soil is made of sand, loam, clay- as you've said there is ph and poisons too.

Perhaps I was incorrect in my assumption that the rain would fall in the lee of the mountain range and hence there would be a rain shadow beyond. Perhaps there is irrigation that supports the dry land farming- though I'm aware that some crops are better in drier locations.

http://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/rain-shadow/

Though I suspect that there is still a line that defines the desert or semi-desert in the middle of Australia beyond which it's difficult to grow crops without irrigation. Others have talked about similar lines in history.

Though not a compulsion- please let me know Hasbeen if there is anything you can add to my understanding.

Perhaps reference to the rationale for the mid 1960's softwood plantation expansion and 1980s the Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement with New Zealand would be helpful.

The expansion of the softwood plantation estate on public or land purchased by State and Territory governments, largely funded using Commonwealth funds, was a response to the earlier work by the Commonwealth body, the Forest and Timber Bureau. This work forecast an inability of then current forest estate, in all its' forms, to supply the wood products required in Australia into the future. This forecast largely ignored the option of meeting demand by imports.

The 1982 Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement with New Zealand to create a 'single market' had many players in the sector recognised the 'wall of wood' that could or would flow from the NZ as their plantation came into full production. Noting that the NZ radiata pine estate was historically largely funded using government funds. Why burden the local economy with funding wood production when it can be more cheaply purchased elsewhere, and focus on other commodities where there Australia has a comparative advantage? Iron ore for example?

There appears to be two completing paradigms, self-sufficient to ensure national security and sovereignty or seek to create an economy based on best net comparative advantage. Ironically, the export of wood chips or logs from eucalyptus plantation appears to be an example where Australia has a comparative advantage, supplying an excellent feed stock for paper production, in terms of quality and delivered cost.

I would suggest the 'save-the-forest' ideology has masked this apparent conflict.

Given that across all sectors of the economy, worldwide, the move to a carbon restrained world now should prompt decision makers to rethink and re-calibrate policy and approaches to the supply of timber.

Perhaps this is an unlikely outcome given the extent decisions makers at all levels in government and elsewhere, are battered and bruised by decades and decades of ‘forest debates and agreements’

Dear Mark,

SKM reflected, without a direct quantitative basis of any kind, that the expected 20% reduction in streamflows of the standard Kuzera Curve could instead be between 5 and 15% for the Otways given the soil capacity for water retention.

A bit of classic SKM. They are generally pretty good with honouring the data when it is present but tend to lean toward the hand that feeds them when they have wriggle room. To be expected to some degree.

And the modelling was very dependent of the future logging figures of the department which were markedly conservative compared to what they had been doing up till that point.

Even so it showed the intended logging regime for the following decade was 11% of Geelong's primary drinking water catchment the West Barwon. This is hardly “proportionally small” especially given it takes over 100 years for an area to return to be producing proper amounts of water.

As to the weed spraying I should have used 'weed'. Many of the trees that were treated with roundup were native, but they had to be poisoned because of the shading they produced on young planted mountain ash trees.

And it is interesting you would use this phrasing: “Surprise, surprise when those countries decide not to export to us, we are in trouble despite having the sixth greatest per capita forest cover of any country in the world.”

Japan has over 60% forest cover but here in Victoria it is around half that including plantations. We have about 15% of the original native forest coverage. So why are you using per capita figures? If a country has a small population size compared to land area should we be logging that to within an inch of its life? That is silly.

A lot of Japan's cover is plantation too but as one Japanese student told me 'why would we cut ours down when we can get pulpwood so cheaply from Australia'.

We really are mugs.

Steele Redux

The reality is most of the domestic water catchment areas in the Otways were already reserved and would not be logged. It does not take 100 years for regenerated forest to return to prior water yield - esp given that the Otways forests prior to harvesting were also themselves largely regrowth from Forests Commission replanting of failed farms in the 1920s and 30s.

Also, the Kuczera curve has long been usurped by more accurate models such as Macarque which recognise differences in soil types and other site specific variables and provide far more accurate models of what happens to water yield.

Using per capita forest cover figures is a measure of the extent to which a nation takes moral responsibility for its consumption of natural wood products. Australia is in the top 5 of per capita wood consumers and yet doesn't use much of its natural forest -- granted Japan is far worse --- so we expect other countries to use their forests to meet our demand and deal with the environmental impact which that entails. Those countries have a lesser capacity to deal with those impacts than us, and have far more problematic landscapes subject to high and intense tropical rains. So, from a global perspective, we are simply not pulling our weight in hardwood production. That is largely a reflection of the 'save-the-forest' ideology that is politically dominant.

You ask why are we "logging forests to within an inch of their lives" (or words to that effect), when that has never been the case. In Victoria, it was estimated in 1986 that 31% of the public forest was available and suitable for long-term timber supply. Within about 15 years, the development of regional forest management plans and the RFAs, with the attendant reservation of large slabs of forest, had reduced that figure to about 10%. With the later closure of the timber industry in western Vic and reductions elsewhere, the current figure is about 6%. That means that 94% is reserved. None of this is indicative of logging forests to within an inch of their lives.

Dear Mark,

You claim: The reality is most of the domestic water catchment areas in the Otways were already reserved and would not be logged.”

Well no, the West Barwon catchment was planned to be significantly impacted by future clearfell logging. One of its most water productive subcatchments had already been hard hit and over 5 square kilometres had been planned for the wider basin.

http://www.oren.org.au/issues/water/report/6WBarwon.htm

As to the Kuzera Curve neither Watson nor Moran nor that SKM derived curve for the Otways showed a return to normal by the hundred year mark.

Nor did the Macaque model.

So why say: “It does not take 100 years for regenerated forest to return to prior water yield”?

Steele Redux
There are many Otways catchments used for domestic water supply. You are referring to one sub-catchment of the West Barwon catchment, which is a bit meaningless without the context of how much if any harvesting was planned for neighbouring sub-catchments and catchments. Harvesting here was compensated by reservation over there. The amount of thought and planning that goes into harvesting in catchments is not to be sneezed at, and taking individual areas out of context can create a misconception.

You use the term 5 square kilometres presumably to create an impression of one huge contiguous area of logging. In fact, 5 square km = 500 hectares that would be scattered across time and space. In any case, 'planned' logging is in gross area terms and overstates the actual net harvested area once stream buffers, road reserves, landscape reserves, and even unproductive or too steep sections are excluded.

I don't believe the Macarque model was ever applied in the Otway forests. It was first used in 2000 in the Thomson and other catchments that supply Melbourne's water, and came up with quite different conclusions to the previously used Kuczera curve.

Overall, your fixation on the Otways wood production forests which at the time the industry closure was announced in 2002 comprised just 35,000 hectares out of the ~10 million hectares of public forest nation-wide that was available for use at that time, seems to be predicated on its issues applying everywhere. They do not. And if not for political expediency, how else do you explain the millions of hectares where timber production has been evicted despite it being low impact selective harvesting on flat ground far removed from water catchments? Eg. the river red gum forests of Vic and NSW, the cypress pine forests of NSW and QLD, the list goes on...