One of the things we will most definitely be doing at Hunters Farm is to plant some trees. I envisage enough coppice woodland to provide a yearly crop that will meet all our heating needs. Not sure how big an area that would need to be – something to be researched.

Todays exercise is to look at grants!

All these people work in hectares, not acres. So I need to know that my 25 acres = 10ha.

http://www.rfs.org.uk/grantsfortrees.asp says that areas must normally exceed 0.25ha to be eligible for a grant. That would be 0.6 acres. According to this document, the main grants that look as if they might apply to us are
(a) forestry commission (see http://www.forestry.gov.uk/grants);
(b) Farm Woodland Premium Scheme (FWPS) – grants are for “income foregone” (see http://www.forestry.gov.uk/grants again)
(c) Countryside Stewardship Scheme (CSS) http://www.defra.gov.uk/erdp/schemes/css

(These links are straight out of the document and I see that at least one of them is broken.)

Other useful resources suggested by the same document are

(d) The Tree council (see http://www.treecouncil.org.uk/ )
(e) The Woodland Trust – a charity which I am already a member of (http://www.woodland-trust.org.uk/ )

This all leads me to http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/ewgs7-guide.pdf/$FILE/ewgs7-guide.pdf which is current (applications must be in by 30th September 2009 and covers both Woodland Creation Grants (one-off cash to cover the cost of planting, or some of it) and FWPS (on-going compensation for “income foregone”).