Seeing the wood and the trees: the remarkable Ockert La Roux on forestry and photography

So getting back to the article that we have in the current issue of Outback about the Green Triangle, it was really interesting to read that one third of Australian homes feature timber from the Green Triangle and that about half of the nation's farming fence posts and transmission poles and millions of tonnes of wood chip come from that region.

Yep.

You made the point in the article, you can't just, this is pretty much exactly what you said, I think, you can't just go out and purchase new land to build trees as the industry is restricted by water licenses.

You have to increase the productivity of every hectare.

And you said it was like livestock breeding, breeding for a straighter, denser and faster growing trees.

That was a really interesting analogy.

Yes, that's correct.

You know, there's always competition for land.

The earth was formed and the planet is what it is.

It's a fixed size.

And there's always competition for land and other resources like water.

You need water to farm, if it's cattle or trees.

And That competition is, we've just gone through 8 billion people living on the planet.

So there is more demand on water.

So we live in a water scarce state.

South Australia is one of the, besides Western Australia, is very short on water.

So it's important that you wisely use that resources that is finite.

And the way we went about is, how can we increase that productivity on a square unit of area, like a hectare or an acre? And the first seed that was collected was from California and off Mexico, the Rararara Pine, that's where it's native to.

And that seed was brought across to Australia.

And there was a lot of smart, clever people called forest scientists, and I'm a forest scientist too, but I didn't specialize in genetics.

And we're not talking the classical genetics here with genetically modified organism.

It is a breeding program.

So you select a father and a mother tree that is superior.

And what are we looking for, for instance, in the structural wood sector, which is used predominantly for housing framing.

We're looking for a very straight tree with very little branches and the tapering that, in other words, the tree as it goes up gets thinner and the base, it's thicker, the diameter that is.