Country Focus
The Tree Nursery
The national call to plant trees to fight climate change requires a good stock supply! This week we're at the largest commercial tree nursery in the UK – selling approximately 35 million trees a year from it's base just outside Wrexham. We've all heard the mantra "the right tree in the right place", well behind that is a lot of research and science. Caroline Evans visits Maelor Forest Nurseries at Bronington, close to the Welsh border, where they are sowing the seeds to success specialising in home grown trees.
- Duration:
- 30m
- Broadcast on:
- 18 Aug 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
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So first, call your parents to say I'm sorry and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee with your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 in order, additional terms apply. Hello and welcome to Country Focus, I'm Caroline Evans. The national call to plant trees to fight climate change requires a good stock supply. This week are at the largest commercial tree nursery in the UK selling approximately 35 million trees a year and it's based just outside Rexxon. So we're in the seed processing facility and what you can see on the ground in front of you is sycamore seed, collected from our seed orchard here on site. We collected that a few weeks ago and we're drying it out, separating the seed out from the leaves, ready for storage. Well we've all heard the mantra, the right tree in the right place, behind that is a lot of research and science. Here at Mailer Forest Nurseries at Bronnington, close to the England Wales border, they're sowing the seeds to success, specialising in homegrown trees. Now Bengo, you're the commercial manager here. I can see a gentleman over there, well what's he doing with all those trays? It looks like pine cones from here. Those are spruce cones, again from our seed orchard. I think we're on target to collect about three tons of spruce cones, which should give us somewhere in the region of 60 kilograms of seed. So those are on the trays, they're drying out just atmospherically and then they're going into the machine over there that's basically like a big tumbler. So we've loaded cones into it, the seeds are being separated from the cones and dropping out the bottom into this bucket here. And as you come closer to this machine, beautiful aroma just gets stronger in here doesn't it? Oh there's lots of different scents in here, obviously, sort of pine cone smells, fruit smells. So does everything you get here come through this room first of all? Pretty much everything we do, there are some different ways of producing things. You can produce things by cuttings for example, so those don't come through here. But most of the seed which we bring in, we will process ourselves. We've got a seed testing lab here as well, so we can test purity, test viability of seeds. But yeah, we like to process it so that we know what we're dealing with. So tell me a little bit more about the operation as a whole, what exactly do you do here? So we grow trees, it's as simple as that. I mean most people don't think about where trees come from, we talk a lot about tree planting, but what they don't realise is that somebody has to grow those little trees ready for planting. We grow sort of about 35 million trees, up to about sort of 60 centimetre size typically. So not big trees in pots, not root balls or anything like that. And really we're just aiming at growing good quality trees, healthy trees, the right species, the right provenance and then sending them out to customers for planting. That's an awful lot of trees, who's buying all of these? Lots of different people. The government or the public forestry sector, for example NRW, they plant a lot of trees, there are private forestry companies who plant on behalf of landowners, farmers, farmers establishing hedgerows, agroforestry, an individual who might have a couple of hectares of woodland that they want to plant some trees in, lots of charities, the woodland trust, wildlife trust, you name it, anybody really. So we only supply into Britain, we specialise in trees which we've grown here on the site, which haven't been imported from outside Great Britain, so that we can minimise any bi-security risks, bringing pests and disease in. So how long will these seeds be in here before they go out to be planted? So we've harvested them, like I said, a few weeks ago when the conditions were right, before they fell on the ground and the squirrels took them or whatever. We will process them, store them over the winter and then we'll sow them in the spring. So most of our sowing is done during the spring, but the seeds obviously come in throughout the year. I think the first seeds to come in generally are cherry, they'll come in round about July time. I think we're processing some crab apples somewhere as well. We've got all the cones, we've got the sycamore seed. Conifer seeds will come in more and more over the winter, we'll get pine cones and things like that coming through, all the way through Rowan, Hawthorne, they'll be processed through the winter as well. So it's an ongoing process, we probably stop processing round about February time and then we'll start again in July. This is our agronomy office, our agronomy team, basically. You can sum it up as crop protection, so they're making sure that we're free from pest and disease, looking at things like nutrient applications, field regeneration, soil quality, all that kind of stuff. That's a very important area, I would imagine, pests, a continual problem. I always say, we're trying to grow, have many million trees and plant them, but actually if you import a pest by bringing trees in from an unhealthy nursery, you could introduce a pest like ash dieback, which will kill many times more trees than you've actually planted. So, bio-security is very important to make sure that you're actually doing what you set out to do. But you're not importing? No, we don't. So we took the decision probably about four or five years ago to say we're not going to import anything. Most nurseries will trade because it means that they can fulfill an order more easily, so we have to kind of live or die by what we do here on site. When he's off. When he's off. When he's off. So we're just going into the somatic embryogenesis lab where we bulk up trees from limited genetic material. So when we've done control pollinations, you might only have a handful of seeds. We want to turn those handful of seeds into a few thousand trees. So if you imagine a pine cone on the tree, it gets pollinated. So you'll have pollen flying through the air, and then the cone is actually the female flower. So the pollen pollinates it. What happens then is the seed generates or develops within the cone. The cone will then drop to the ground, the seed drops out and germinates on the ground. And then that seedling grows on. So if you think about those three stages, the seed development in the cone, the germination of the seed, and then the growth of that seedling, the lab kind of mimics those three stages. So if you're bearing that in your mind, hopefully it will make a bit more sense. So my name is Sheila McCartan. I am the R&D manager at Mail of Forest Industries. I run the somatic embryogenesis lab. Sheila, we're here on the England Wales border. But you don't sound like your English or your Welsh, if I may say so. No, I am South African, but I have been in England for a few decades now. I just haven't lost the accent. So what we do is we produce clonal or genetically identical embryos, artificial embryos, using tissue culture. So what we're trying to do is produce thousands and thousands of genetically identical plants so that we can exploit the traits that we're looking for. Those traits are good wood density, good growth and good form. So we want straight trees with limited branches. Is it a commercial decision to do that, or is it all about biodiversity, protecting species? So it's largely a commercial decision because we are trying to produce the best timber we can, and it's almost need to maximise the amount of timber that can get out of a tree. So that's why we want straight trees and limited branching because that affects the number of knots in the wood. So shelves and shelves of plastic boxes with little petri dishes inside. So I've just taken you into the darkroom and the reason why it's a darkroom is we try to mimic what happens on the tree. So certain stages of the seed development would obviously occur in a cone, which is dark. And what we're doing here is we take out the embryos from the seeds and we put them onto a jelly, which contains sugar and plant growth regulators that trigger different growth responses. So what you're looking at here is masses and masses of plant cells. And each plant cell is potentially a little tree. That's incredible. Have you had to do this individually for each of these thousands and thousands of dishes that you have in here? That sounds very labour intensive if that's the case. It is very labour intensive. What my role is is to try and automate this process. So this particular stage where we bulk up callous cells, which are a bit like stem cells, we are going to try and do in bioreactors. So we're trying to create a little factory where we can bulk produce these plants. So after this stage, we move them onto different media. And this media contains a natural plant growth regulator that triggers embryo development. The team will harvest embryos one at a time, and they'll put them onto the next stage, which is in the lightroom. And that's the equivalent of the seed germinating. Very aptly named light for a beautiful light in here. So we've got red and blue light. The red light is because that part of the spectrum is good for photosynthesis. That's the part that the plants use to produce food. And the blue light is to promote chlorophyll formation, which is green pigment, and also for root formation. So if you look here, we've placed those embryos that were in the darkroom onto media, and they've germinated, and they look exactly like seedlings, but technically they are emblings. What's the difference? A seed ling comes from a seed, and an embling comes from an embryo. Once they've got a nice well-developed shoot and root, we move them into germination boxes. With rooting hormones, and you can see that they are proper little trees at the stage. They are indeed proper little trees. They're now in something the size of a sort of a fruit carton you buy from the supermarket. Isn't that how many are in there? They're at a time. A wreck of shelves like this, if it's double stacked and full, will contain 10,000 plants. What we do is we take those plants from the germination boxes, and we need to harden them off because they've had quite a comfortable life in those germination boxes. So they're harden them off, and then they're ready to go to the polyhouse. And they're now looking very much like little trees, aren't they? These are sicker sprues. We only do two different species here. We do sicker sprues, and we do a hybrid cross between white sprues and sicker sprues. So it's known as Lutz sprues. Two different reasons why we do somatic immunogenesis. The one is that we are able to select for specific traits, so for instance, gradual disease resistance, and the second is in comparison to other production systems, we are able to pivot very quickly and adapt to environmental or market conditions. So because we can do a controlled cross in one year and have a plant less than a year later, we can change very, very quickly compared to cuttings or seedlings. I guess that's going to be increasingly important now going forward. Yes it is, particularly with climate change. There's an increased risk of new pests and pathogens, and if we can find a clone or tree that is resistant to the new pest on the horizon, then we could potentially get into culture very, very quickly. So this is a large two hectare polyhouse that we grow from seed, mainly sicker sprues trees. So it's a germinating environment. I've come into what looks like really a big massive polytunnel. I've come to meet Adam Robinson, who's the indoor growing manager here. Adam, this is your domain. It looks vast. Yeah, we'll have a look. So the first machine we're coming across is the automated sowing line. So it breaks down the compost, fills trays automatically, dibbles them and makes holes and applies the seed onto that, all done robotically. Really good system means we get higher percentage of germination on the trays. So the seeds I saw when I first arrived, they would come through here and through this process. Exactly that, yeah. How many do you process and how often is this line running because it's not running at the moment, is it? No, so we'll be sowing in August, end of summer and springtime. So we split our planting to split the rotation. But we'll do about a million a day. A million? How many people does that involve? Or is it completely automated and involved? It's not completely automated. With machinery does come technical faults and things like that. So we'll probably have four or five people around the machine, loading trays, loading compost, taking seed away. Just making sure that it's all running, but the output's incredible. Yeah, one million a day. So next it goes on to these large silver trays. So the small trail do about 345 trees. So we get about 13,000 on this tray. This is automated and will run all the way down to the end of the polyhouse. Oh, that's a long way, isn't it? Yeah, it is, yeah. It saves carrying them. Yeah. That'll then go into the polyhouse next door, which is the growing area. Well, we'll germinate them. One of the biggest things we manage is the growing area and the humidity and temperature. We've got to get that right to create the best germinating environment for the seeds. There's vents that move the air and change the air flow, vents on the roof as well that we can open and close. And how do you keep them all watered? We'll have a look through here. We've got 11 different bays and each one has a separate spraying boom. From there, we can apply anything for pests and disease or irrigation for water. One thing we do is monitor the weight of the tray. So that allows us to know when we need to irrigate and apply water. So once it's dried out, we then know to apply water. And we do that with a luggage scale. Well, like you weigh your suitcases. Yeah, so if you go to the airport and you want to know if you can fit your luggage on the flight, or if you just hook it on the tray. And you weigh each and every tray? Not every tray, no, we do an average, yeah. We'll walk across the bay and take four or five averages, yeah. Yes, you could be here till Christmas doing that. It'll be a long time, yeah. Okay, well, we've come in now to an even more vast space. And here are some little green shoots poking up. Yes. So this is sick of spruce. This is sown from seed with the machine we looked at earlier. So it'll take between 10 to 14 days to germinate, and then obviously we're now at six weeks. So we're starting to see the center flush again, which is what we want to see. Get as much as we can before winter. They're tiny little things now. How tall will they grow eventually when they're adult trees? Yeah, 40 foot. We'll grow them in here till about 7 to 10 centimeters is what we're aiming for. So if we sow in March, we should be at the end of summer putting those outside to be lined out by our outside team. A nice, healthy plant. And then you say goodbye to them. That's your job done. That's my job done. And then we'll turn around and sow another 20 million and do the process again. Yeah. The ones we're stood in front of now, you need to put a cover over which holds moisture and nutrients in, but stops any weeds and liverwort you can see. So what we're doing at the minute is trialing different products to see which one suppresses that the most because with a lot of liverwort can cause a lot of problems for the tree. It can take away the nutrients. So the cleaner we can keep the top, the better. So we're just trialing a few different wood chips or dust and chips and things like that. And what's working at best so far? I'd probably go with the chip we've got, which is the third one down seems to be doing quite a good job. Yeah. So the ones we've got here are Douglas fir. So we don't just do sicker spruits in here. We're starting to do a bit more Douglas fir, Norway spruce. It's a really good environment to germinate in so we can get a good plant that we can then transplant into a bigger cell later on. So we're starting to do a lot more in here and use it for more germinating of different species. So you've just pulled one out. That's really quite sweet, isn't it? Yeah. What we're really happy with there is we've got a nice formed plug. That will go into the ground really nicely. It's not falling apart. When the guys are planting into bigger cells, it will slaughter nicely or if this is going to be lined out in the field, the automated planter can pop these out quite easily and pop them into the ground. So we are doing some trials currently and looking at starting to plant into peat-free. We've got to be peat-free by 2030. So we're doing various different trials to see how the trees grow and how they react. It was a little bit nerve-wracking when you first heard it, but actually it's going to really suit us in here being in peat-free. It's a bit more free draining. You can keep the trees a lot drier. This is our main crop that we sewed August. So it looks like a long green runway going off into the distance. How many little trees are in here? So there's 1.3 million in one side of this base, a 2.6 million total running down this way. So we've stepped out now into something a bit more like a garden centre really when you walk out and they've got the bays and all the trays laid out. But the seedlings here, they're a bit bigger aren't they? Exactly, yes. So once they get to size inside, we'll bring them outside and they'll get used to the outside conditions. So these ones here are the lab emblings. So they've been bought from inside, lovely colour, lovely size. They look really good and they're in really good health. So these ones, the little ones we saw planted in the greenhouse, we transplant them into a bigger tray. If I pull one out, we're starting to get the formation of a larger plug which is how we sell the tree. So the roots are growing really nicely. It's a good size, good health, good colour. So will it be that size when you sell it or are you looking for it to buy it? Just about, a little bit bigger than that we'll be looking for, yeah. So that'll be something for next year. So what we're walking past now are some of the polytunnels where some of those seedlings will be put into bigger cells, bigger plugs and grow onto their full size. And then we're going to go across to some of the fields and see some of the crops being grown in the field. How big is this operation as a whole then? So we've got two nurseries. The one down here in Bronnington is 200 hectares. The nursery up near Inverness is 70 hectares. So we've really only seen a fraction of what you're doing. So about 1% of what we've done so far, yeah. Just looking into the polytunnels now, we can see some Aspen, different furs, I think there's some western red cedar, some birch in there, and they were just about to walk past some coastal redwood. Well they're going to go there, can't they? The largest trees in the world I think is a coastal redwood. So when are you taking some of these this year? Does it matter where trees are planted, you know, are you breeding trees for specific areas? So people talk a lot about the right tree and the right place, and as much as anything that refers to a tree which is able to grow and thrive in that particular location. For example, if you look at something like beach, it's very well acclimatised to the south of Great Britain. It doesn't tend to fare very well upon a hill in Scotland. Equally you've got to choose the right provenance. So birch, for example, which has adapted to growing in southern England. Probably won't do that well again up that hill in Scotland. And vice versa, something which has adapted to the high rainfall up in Scotland will probably struggle in a drier climate like southeast England. Great Britain is split into 24 native zones, if you like, and you select seed from each of those zones and you have to declare where that seeds come from as part of what's referred to as the forest reproductive material regulations. So we track a seed batch from the point that it's collected, and we have details about the coordinates of where that was collected, what elevation it was collected, what species it is obviously, and that will stay with the tree all the way through its life. We'll send a seed certificate out which will have those details on there. So one of the things which is quite important is ensuring that the trees we plant are suited to not just the environment that they're being planted into, but the environment and the climate that they will live through in their long lifespan. So trees historically have adapted, they've had millennia to adapt to changing climate, but because the climate is changing so fast, it's changing faster than they can adapt. So what you need to look at is actually what is the climate forecast to be like in 30 years in the area that you're planting, and then look at an area which has that climate currently and choose material from there. So that might be, for example in the case of oak, you might be selecting acorns which have been collected in France to plant in, let's say, whales, for example. There are always exceptions, different species adapt faster or slower, they have more adaptability or less, but it's not as simple as saying I will collect material from here and plant it in the same location. You need to think more about the future climate and about the conditions that that tree has got to survive through. So here we've got some more plugs, some hazel, spruce, some oaks. I think there's some holly, some birch, some dogwood. You can see our production there, it is in rows, it's more akin to a field of crops rather than trees, and that's the thing that people maybe don't understand, they don't appreciate that we are growing this as a crop rather than trees that you might see in a garden center, for example. So to our left we've got a field with oaks and sweet chestnut in and there's a very wide range of provenances in there, including probably about 40 different batches which were collected as part of NRW's acorn antics program. We're the children collect acorns, yeah. School groups, scout groups, they each collected a batch of acorns, sent them to us, we processed them, assessed them and actually scored them and sent some feedback to them, and then planted them out in the field here, and those will go back to NRW for planting this winter. And then also in the field, so we've got some other commercial Welsh collections, collections from all over England and Scotland, and then some French acorns, and actually some Dutch acorns in there as well. I can see in the distance there, somebody hard at work. So that's Staland and Vanier, they're out there doing stock counts. At the end of the season, we'll go and measure the trees, and we'll count how many trees in each batch. We don't count every single tree, but what we'll do is a representative count, and then we can work out how many big trees we have, how many small trees we have, and then we can use that to communicate with our customers and say, "Okay, that's your order there, we've got that covered." Well, they're certainly going to need to withstand the wind, these little trees. Yeah, no, we have to work out in all conditions and we're out on the nursery all year round, so in the spring we're sowing, we have to have the right conditions, we need still days for sowing birch, for example. We need the rain, in the summer we need good growing conditions, the right amount of light, the right amount of rainfall again, not too hot. In the autumn, we're relying on the weather being cold enough to send the right signal to the plant, so they go dormant. If you have late Indian summers, like we've had or about to have, then that can delay the season because you can't lift the trees until they're dormant, and then equally you need the ground to be dry when you're lifting the trees, otherwise you'll just lift a lot of mud, so you want it dry and cold during the winter. So, actually with climate change, that's changing all the season, you're getting extreme weather events, hence why we're doing things like the mini-plug facility and indoor germination, because it takes some of the risk out of that, it's a much more controlled growing environment. Yeah, you think that's the future, is it becoming more difficult to grow outside? Definitely, there's lots of reasons I've talked about the weather, labour in terms of having, you know, the people available to work outdoors, you know, and be able to sort of work in those conditions, and also in terms of things like chemical regulation, certain chemicals which you might rely on for seedbed sterilisation, for example, there was a chemical which we used up until about three years ago, which was banned, you know, which is right that we should tighten up on chemicals, but it means that we need to look at how we grow crops in a different way. So, we're using things such as cover crops, bio insecticides, integrated pest management to really make sure that we can still get that healthy tree, but without using the same chemicals. That far field over there is Sycamore, Norway maple, silver birch, downy birch and older, and then this field closest to us with the horizontal rows is more hedging species, hawthorn, hornbeam, beach, cherry, crab apple, dog rows. And actually you can see over in that far field over there we've got some seed beds, so that's effectively sowing seeds, outdoor, which can be quite vulnerable, but it's the traditional way of doing things, so we've got our seed beds out there, which will be sort of a two and a three year crop, whereas these are a one year and a two year crop. The oaks, interestingly, are normally a two year crop, but because there were no acorns two years ago, we've had to get a one year crop out of this batch here, which we've done, so that's credit to the team. We'll bear with coming to a barn out of the wind. So, this is where we send the trees out from, so trees will come in from the field, lifted when they're dormant or when the leaves have dropped, and then we'll pack them into these crates, and then they'll go out, and then they'll get planted. Well, you are doing such a lot of different species here. I guess there are so many priorities that you're having to consider. There's the climate, there's biodiversity, economy. That's why we grow so many species, I suppose. Probably grow about 60 different species, broadly split between broad leaves and conifers, but that's changing all the time with the changing climate, with changing demands. So, yeah, we're always trying out new species because there are lots of different reasons that you plant trees, and there's definitely different views on why we should plant trees, how we should plant trees, which trees we should plant. And that tension is something which I feel quite strongly about personally, that we need to grow trees to address all those requirements, because it's not an either-or choice. All those species, all those objectives, if you like, are valuable, but if we don't grow the right trees for those, we don't address those tensions, then all we'll end up doing is arguing about it and not planting any trees. You know, everybody would be poorer for that. So, there's definitely a tension that we've got to recognise between land use for farming and food production and land use for timber production, land use for woodland creation for biodiversity. Actually, we can do all those things. And some of the things we're doing here, like we saw in the lab waschila, we're breeding for improved productivity. What that means is we're trying to get more timber per hectare, so reducing our land requirement for timber, which then frees up land availability for things like farming for food and biodiversity planting. So, none of these things happen in isolation. I suppose that's what's great about this job, is you've got to make that jigsaw fit together, but, you know, we need to have that communication with all the different people in the chain to make sure that everybody gets what they need from it. Well, there's clearly a lot of enthusiasm from you and the team. So, from here at Mylar Forest Nurseries near Rexum, that's it from me, Caroline Evans and the Country Focus team. Thanks for listening and stay safe. Selling a little? Or a lot? Shopify helps you do your thing, however you chit-ching. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. 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