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Speaker 1: The problem with committing to things that may well come

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Speaker 1: back to haunt you is down the track. At some

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Speaker 1: point the mistake starts to hit you in the face

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Speaker 1: of bit and some hard decisions are required. Now my

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Speaker 1: sense of it, as we've become too reliant on pine

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Speaker 1: trees to meet Paris as in the a court. Now

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Speaker 1: the sheep farmers you might have noticed this week, have

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Speaker 1: worked that out as the protests around land conversion are

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Speaker 1: once again been reignited, with posters up around the countryside,

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Speaker 1: put up by the meat and wilfolk, with the line

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Speaker 1: on the posters saying I am not the problem. Since

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Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two. Here's some fun facts for you. Since

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Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, we've gone from seventy million sheep to

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Speaker 1: twenty five. In the last seven years a quarter of

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Speaker 1: a million hectes have been swapped from sheep to trees. This,

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Speaker 1: of course, was always going to happen. What's the easiest way?

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Speaker 1: Ask yourself, what's the easiest way to meet a target

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Speaker 1: on carbon trees? Cutting and slashing, whether it's farm production

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Speaker 1: or the economy in general, was never going to be palatable.

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Speaker 1: So trees were easy. But you might have noticed a

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Speaker 1: couple of major things have happened. One, Paris looks increasingly

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Speaker 1: shaking in terms of people meeting targets, indeed people even

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Speaker 1: being interested in meeting targets. And two, stuff grown on

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Speaker 1: the land with legs is fetching very, very very good

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Speaker 1: money all over the world. At the moment, as far

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Speaker 1: as us earning a living goes, we have never made

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Speaker 1: more from farming. Carbon offsetting, which is what planting trees

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Speaker 1: is called, has restrictions. In other countries. They only let

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Speaker 1: you do it to a limited degree. Here you can

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Speaker 1: do it as much as you want, but I bet

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Speaker 1: you anything you want. Other countries aren't as reliant on

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Speaker 1: sheep and cows as we are. We used to have tourism,

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Speaker 1: as you've just heard, We used to have tourism back

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Speaker 1: us up. But last week's numbers tell a very sad story.

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Speaker 1: Dairy twenty billion, tourism twelve awful comes in at nine.

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Speaker 1: For God's sake, tourism used to buy for first place.

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Speaker 1: Hence the government, as we've just mentioned, through another thirteen

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Speaker 1: millionaire it yesterday to try and attract these seventy thousand people.

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Speaker 1: Trees also kill communities. Farming as life a forest isn't

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Speaker 1: as laudable as Paris was all those years ago. If

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Speaker 1: we had thought about it, if we'd been less evangelical,

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Speaker 1: we might have stopped to think just what it was

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Speaker 1: we were asking of a small economy. And the simple

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Speaker 1: truth is we were asking so much. A quick short

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Speaker 1: cut like trees was always going to be adopted with alacrity.

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Speaker 1: Saving the planet as people get tossed off the land

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Speaker 1: is not an equation we should be proud of. As

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Speaker 1: the protest poster says with a photo of the sheep

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Speaker 1: on it, I am not the problem and they're right.

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Speaker 1: The Zalads are. For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast,

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Speaker 1: Listen live to news Talks at B from six am weekdays,

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Speaker 1: or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio