Gary Patterson

And as they grow, as they come to maturity, they'll be thinned out and they'll be allowed to go to full maturity down, like...

towards 100 trees per hectare and less as they go to, say, the size of the trees that are here now.

It will obviously, you know, take a lot of time.

The trees that are here already are like, you know, maybe 150, 200 years old.

So I probably won't see the best of them, but yeah, somebody will.

Absolutely, yeah.

And I think, you know, I suppose I was an ag science teacher and then myself and my wife, Gráinne, we took career breaks and we went travelling and we got to see different countries, different ways of farming, different ways of living.

And yeah, before I went away, it probably wouldn't have been something that I considered.

But yeah, having come back.

The way the grant system is, the way that the country is with tree cover, I see it as an amazing opportunity for farmers.

We're in conversion to organic at the minute, so we have our normal farm grants, we have the organic payments and the trees are layered on top of that.

There's definitely been head-scratching, like driving in, it looks...

It catches your eye and I'm sure lots of people are wondering like what is going on in there.

But I suppose I can, I have a sense of like into the future of like what it will be like.

And yeah.

Yeah, so these are the kind of groups.

This is the other kind of way of planting the trees that we've done.

So they're planted in groups.

There's rows of trees inside each of these rectangles and then each area is fenced off so that the cattle can't access the trees and damage them.

So it really varies on the time of year, the grass, how the grass is grown, how the weather is.