A WARNING has been sounded over the threat to Welsh farming from tree planting, with cold calling from speculators on the up, according to one farming union.

The Farmers’ Union of Wales says it has a dossier of evidence to back-up industry concerns about afforestation in Wales.

All tree planting covering 50 hectares (ha) or more must first have an environmental impact assessment (EIA), a regulation that considers if that afforestation would have a significant effect on the environment.

In 2015 the land area applied for by landowners covered around 700ha in Wales, in 2021 it was close to 3,000ha.

What changed in that intervening six years was the acceptance that climate change is real and the onus put on every sector, from energy providers to airlines, to negate their carbon emissions.

A big surge in new carbon offsetting companies followed, businesses looking to profit from the carbon-offset.

There was a massive shift in government priorities too, including financial incentives for tree planting.

In Wales, as of October 2021, contracts offered under the Glastir Woodland Creation scheme were worth £9.3m and £1.3m of that total is being paid to businesses registered outside the country.

The devolved government has an ambitious tree planting target – it is committed to getting 86 million trees planted by 2030 to meets its net zero target by 2050 – so farmers are questioning how this can be delivered if farmland is to be protected from afforestation.

However, deputy climate change minister Lee Waters says claims of mass applications for tree planting from outside Wales were “wide of the mark’’ and likened them to a trickle not an avalanche.

Of the 1,121 customers in the first 10 windows of the Glastir Woodland Creation scheme, 35 had registered addresses outside Wales; these included small projects and schemes by organisations such as the Woodland Trust, but also companies.

“We are not seeing any evidence of an avalanche, it is a trickle of applications,’’ said Mr Waters.

But climate change was an emergency, he said, and that meant changes to the status quo

“We have to change the ways we do things, including how we farm,’’ insisted Mr Waters, who has suggested that tree planting has become a convenient pantomime villain for those railing against the change.

He quoted the UK Climate Change Committee’s figure of 5,000ha of woodland that would need to be planted in Wales every year to 2030 to sequester carbon.

If every farm in Wales planted half a hectare on its land, Mr Waters calculates that “we would be halfway to that target’’.

It would require a 10 per cent change in land use, which he describes as “modest’’.

He insisted it was not a threat to the future of farming but required a change of approach.

Although there are big concerns about vast tracts of monocultures of conifers, these species are needed because they grow quickly, said Mr Waters, and the timber provides a valuable income stream for the Welsh rural economy.

He admitted that in the past the government had made it “far too difficult’’ for farmers to plant trees and, as a result, they had been disincentivised.

But systems had since been reviewed and the process was now easier, he insisted.