Yes i have heard of it, in Switzerland, but last week i learned of a farmer in France doing something similar. Average farm. They use the wood chips as a bedding for the cows and put it out after 4 weeks i thought he said. My neighbor thinks of doing that too. Smaller farm and it will be a welcome contribution to the
permaculture garden we have started to establish last year.
The problem i see however is that farmers start to chop up all of the maythorn bushes which act as an oak mother over here. and shrubs and last refuges for birds in places where they can't come with the
tractor because it's too soggy. My neighbor is really looking forward to getting rid of all that rubbish as he calls it. Which puncture his tires and seem to eat quite a bit of
land.
I hope to convince him to do it in a controlled manner and chop up fast growing nitrogen fixers which take kindly to coppicing, like acacia pseudorobinia and alder which is abundant here and start to cultivate and propagate these
trees on a large scale for the purpose of healing the land. And leave the thorny shrubs be mostly.
More like a managed system. As a side effect we would have all the stems that we can't shred to bits because they are too thick for the shredder, we can keep them as fire wood or poles(acacia) or make
hugel cultures with them(alder) and even inoculate the alder trees with mycelium plugs, although that takes a lot of preparation.
Enough to be thinking about.
We had record heat summer for the second time, extremely long dry period, farmers are seeing we have to change the way we do things, and this is a promosing way i find, although it could turn out to be a double edged sword.
Some farmers hate they have to have hedges, prefer just fields, i can see them starting to rip the hedges up, which would be catastrophic for bio diversity. Something tells me that's the way it is going to go, just strip the last refuges for bio diversity to do this fashionable thing they saw on television.
I hope to do it differently, start propagating trees.
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