Wood took a significant part of the forest farmers' daily life. In April, it was one of the most important tasks on the farm. Farming hadn't started yet, and forestry was over for the season. It was crucial to get the wood home so that it could dry over the summer. Sawing and splitting logs was women's work, and stacking wood was something all children who helped had to do.
The Farmer's landscape
The farmers created the landscape, a landscape that looked completely different from today for a long time. In the 1600s and 1700s, the boundary between field and forest was not as sharp as it is today. There were many mixed forms, creating soft transitions. In fields and meadows, trees often stood that provided leaves for fodder. Ash was one of the trees that cows loved to munch on. Further away, the forest began to thicken, but the young trees never grew tall before they were grazed away. It was a good distance from the village where the forest could grow relatively undisturbed.
The forest gains value
Historically, there are three different "realms" in the Swedish forest. In Bergslagen, the industries had large forests, which first delivered wood to the mines and charcoal to the smelters, before leading the way for export sawmills in the early 1800s. When exports couldn't be satiated, the companies moved up to Norrland, where they emptied the virgin forests around the turn of the century in 1900. In southern Sweden, it took time before the farmers' forest became an industry. Well into the 1900s, wood and forest grazing were the main focus. During the interwar period, more forest owners began to understand that the forest could have a value in itself. The first Forest Conservation Act came in 1903 with the message that forest owners should ensure regeneration after clear-cutting. More and more people took that message to heart.
The 1948 Forest Conservation Act
The end of World War II marked the beginning of several decades of regulatory economics even in peacetime. This included a new Forest Conservation Act in 1948, which aimed forestry towards producing as much timber as possible for the industry's needs. The forest couldn't be finally harvested as long as growth was still good, but it should be thinned to encourage better growth. At the same time, the definition of forest land changed. Heaths, wetlands, but also pastures with tree inclusions were defined as forest, not agricultural land. Thus, the owner was obliged to plant them again. Up until 1990, over two million hectares of old agricultural land were reforested. The state paid subsidies for plantations on a tenth of these lands. Not until the 1970s did concerns about nature conservation arise.
Land and Forest
When forest grazing ceased, the ties between agriculture and forestry loosened. The industries were no longer as intertwined as when cows grazed among pines and pigs rooted for acorns. Still, the connection lingered for a long time. In the eyes of the authorities, forestry was the obvious complement to agriculture. Practically all forestry work was done in the winter when it was quiet in agriculture. Therefore, the state decided that no land could be sold without enough forest to keep the farmer employed year-round. How much forest was appropriate for a farm? In a circular in 1938, the authorities calculated a time estimate based on how long the growing season was in different parts of the country, from 250 days in the far south to 122 days in the far north. In addition to this, the farmer needed 115 days for livestock care and maintenance. The forest area should be calculated so that it was sufficient to keep him busy for the rest of the time. In Söderslätt, the calculation left no time for the forest, but in the north, forestry would suffice for work for three to four months.
The Scapegoat for Forest Shortage
But the image of the farmer and the cow as forest destroyers lingered. With recurring economic booms for the forest industry after the end of the war, concerns increased that the forest would not be sufficient when the industry was in full swing. Then, in particular, the unions of the forest industry attacked the private forestry. Farmers were considered not to harvest enough. Their forests were alleged to be poorly managed. The state should force the timber out of the forests through coercive laws or economic policy instruments—or by nationalizing the forests. In the early 1970s, many warned that the age of wood was coming to an end. Plastics, concrete, and other materials would replace it. Therefore, it was important to cut as much as possible while you could still get something in return. If the farmers didn't understand this, they needed to be forced. The chairman of the Union of Paper Industry Workers, Roine Carlsson (who later became Minister of Defence), declared: "It is not certain that the one who owns the raw material should decide at what price he should sell his timber and to whom."
In the 1800s, the image changed. Boundaries became clearer. The relocation of farms after individual allotment and land redistribution meant that many meadows, pastures, and outfields were ploughed. The fields increased from 800,000 hectares at the beginning of the century to about 3.5 million hectares by its end. The number of farmers increased from 205,000 in 1809 to 270,000 in 1910. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest and even larger outfields had become cultivated land before it reversed after the turn of the century, and the roughest lands were reforested.
Champion of diversity
The forest policy from 1948 to 1993 involved increasingly detailed regulation. It also led to a uniformity of the landscape. "Get rid of the birch!" became the slogan, at least as it reached many of that time's forest farmers, although responsible forest wardens claim they never expressed it so simplistically. But somewhere along the way, the nuances seemed lost.
The widespread ownership of forests saved diversity. This applies not only to biological diversity but also to the forestry methods themselves. It is easier to find new methods instead of the old ones if a few stubborn forestry owners have managed their trees according to their judgment. Thanks to forest owner zones, even small forest owners could take part in the mechanization from the 1960s onwards. That was what the state realized when the Forest Conservation Act of 1993 gave much more room for the individual forest owner's management of their forest.