Report of 17 October CA-WN AGM and Monthly Meeting
October’s meeting started with the CA-WN Annual General Meeting, including election of officers.
This was followed by a presentation from Marga Witteman, one of the co-founders of the More Trees Now movement in the Netherlands. Working with a range of organisations, individuals and community groups, this initiative has enabled over 2 million trees to be rescued and replanted since 2020. Marga’s talk was recorded and is available on the CA-WN YouTube channel1 and her presentation slides are available to download2.
Apologies for absence
Alan Mawer, Briony Askew, Emmie Williamson, Patsy Hollingum, Roy Hawkesford
Present
Alexina Cassidy, Clare Robertson-Marriott, Clare Slater, David Garlick, Eishar Bassan, Harry Mellor, James Hadfield, Jane Wood (JW), John Hunt, Jonathan Harris, Margo, Maria Lee, Mick Lorkins, Richard and Linda, Richard Hollingum, Rupert Knowles, Sari Sudarsono, Teresa Cox, Ursula McArthur
Annual General Meeting Minutes
Papers were circulated in advance of the meeting3.
1. Minutes of last AGM
Accepted with no alteration.
2. Chair’s Report
JW summarised CA-WN’s achievements over the last 12 months and some of our plans for the future. Highlights included:
· Steady increase in subscribers to CA-WN Exchange
· Interesting and informative guest speakers at monthly meetings
· Attendance at local events, including the first West Northants area Climate Summit for town and parish councils. There are plans to follow up the summit with a programme of events and activities, which CA-WN will continue to be involved with.
· Launch of the Northamptonshire Woodland Community Volunteers group, led by Mick Lorkins
· Thanks to Alexina Cassidy and Clare Slater, CA-WN is now offering Carbon Literacy training to our supporters. Two courses have already been delivered – the aim is to offer training 2-3 times a year.
· Next year we plan to offer online home retrofit workshops.
Treasurer’s Report
CA-WN started the year with funds of £5,986 and ended it with £3,931. There are few transactions to report, with the main expense being a one-off payment of £1,800 for home energy surveys.
We also have fixed annual license costs for Zoom to enable us to hold online meetings, and for the Ghost software that supports CA-WN Exchange, totalling around £400. In previous years these costs have been met by generous individual donations. Small donations towards these costs would be appreciated and can be made directly to CA-WN’s bank account (which incurs no fees), or via Stripe4, which deducts a small percentage from each donation. For direct bank transfer details please email the Treasurer harry@ca-wn.org.
Election of Officers
The Constitution5 allows for 4 Officer roles, currently:
Chair - Jane Wood
Treasurer - Harry Mellor
Secretary - Jane Wood
Membership Secretary - Alexina Cassidy
It was proposed to amend the Constitution to introduce a Vice Chair role, to be combined with the Membership Secretary.
The following Officers were elected for 2024/25:
Chair – Jane Wood, nominated Jonathan Harris, seconded Rupert Knowles
Treasurer – Harry Mellor, nominated Jane Wood, seconded Rupert Knowles
Secretary – Jane Wood, nominated Jonathan Harris, seconded Rupert Knowles
Vice Chair and Membership Secretary – Alexina Cassidy, nominated Jonathan Harris, seconded Richard Hollingum
These appointments were unanimously approved.
Election of Steering Committee members
In addition to the Officers, there are currently 8 Steering Committee members. Those present at the meeting were asked to confirm whether they wished to continue in that role. Two committee members were not present at the meeting and JW will contact them separately.
JW had received notification ahead of the meeting from one committee member, Briony Askew, that she wished to stand down due to other commitments. JW thanked Briony for her valued contribution over the last few years.
Steering Committee members present at the meeting and who confirmed their wish to continue:
· Clare Robertson-Marriott
· Clare Slater
· Jonathan Harris
· Mick Lorkins
· Rupert Knowles
Not present at the meeting:
· Ella Sage
· Orianne Neyroud
Standing down
· Briony Askew
Teresa Cox offered to join the steering committee and agreed to attend the next committee meeting on Monday 28 October.
Date of next AGM:
Thursday 16 October 2025, starting 7:30pm, online.
Public meeting minutes
More Trees Now – background and development
More Trees Now (MTN) was started nearly 5 years ago by 5 people from 3 partner organisations: a progressive farmers’ group; Urgenda, the environmental organisation Marga works for; and a local ecologist who invented the method.
MTN have 3 goals:
· Stop global warming
· Increase biodiversity. The Netherlands has seen around an 85% loss in the last 100 years – one of the worst records in Europe.
· Provide opportunities for people to participate in something which helps the environment
Mature trees create 100s of saplings each year as part of a natural regenerative process. Many of these die or are routinely destroyed e.g. to clear pathways or preserve other habitat such as peat bogs or meadows. This provides a source of free indigenous saplings providing people are willing to collect them. The initiative has enabled the rescue of over 2 million saplings so far and given them away for free to all sorts of people – farmers, community groups and individuals.
Over 3000 tree harvesting events have been held and there are 150 locally run tree hubs where the trees are stored until they are collected for planting.
In the winter of 2020 the group started by asking who wanted free trees and found there was lots of demand. They then went to foresters to see who would be able to donate trees that would normally not survive for whatever reason.
Season 1 2020/21
MTN rescued 500k trees in the first winter – this included 200k pear trees the group was offered by a grower who couldn’t sell them due to the pandemic. This created lots of media attention. 80% of the transplanted trees survived.
Events were arranged by the original 5 people using Excel spreadsheets and email, which was difficult to manage as the numbers of trees and events was more than had been expected.
Season 2 2021/22
In the 2nd winter about 400k trees were harvested, these were all rescued saplings. Due to very dry weather only 73% of that season’s saplings survived.
MTN started to create a system on which people could communicate directly instead of using the core group as a go-between. This system is called the Tree Planner and enables people to arrange events and how and when to collect rescued trees.
Season 3 2022/23
Over 500k saplings and cuttings were harvested. Survival rate, again affected by drought, was 70%.
Tree Planner 2.0 was introduced, with some major improvements.
A volunteer in Germany decided to try out the method there, as there were large areas of forest dying due to disease and a shortage of trees to replant. Again a sympathetic grower, this time one about to retire, donated around 200k trees. 750k trees in total were saved that winter.
Season 4 2023/24
MTN saved their 2 millionth sapling and had 10k participants in the Tree Planner system. Ahead of the 2024/25 season there are already 25k people signed up to the Tree Planner, and pilot projects are being started in the UK and France.
Think of it as ‘circular forestry’ - as each rescued sapling will start to produce its own saplings around 10 years after being replanted.
Tree hubs are simply a collection or storage point for saplings. A hub is not always necessary if trees are collected to go to the planting location immediately after being harvested. A lot of the hubs in the Netherlands are community gardens as they have vegetable beds which are empty in the winter so can dig temporary trenches for trees in them.
Ecology is the solution. The trees are native and don’t need any extra support such as fertilisers and pesticides. They would otherwise die and disappear releasing CO2 which is saved if the tree is replanted. Saplings are often removed for a reason e.g. to restore a peat bog which has a different ecology to a forest. Therefore restoring one ecosystem by removing trees enables development of an ecosystem of a different type by planting trees elsewhere.
MTN is a community led movement. It is decentralised so the original core team of 5 hasn’t grown and doesn’t need to.
Tree Planner6
This lists events by country – the event in East Hunsbury on 26 October is currently the only one in England. Anyone can sign up to the Tree Planner to participate in events either as a helper or to collect trees. You can also join to organise events. It’s helpful to include information such as parking, access and what type of trees can be harvested when creating an event.
Marga walked through the system, which shows:
· Events, both ones you have organised and other events near you. Events can be shared with people not already signed up to the tree planner using a link.
· The location of tree hubs
· Planting locations of trees, this is where it is recorded how many trees have survived.
· There is also a chat function
It isn’t easy to keep the software up to date and MTN have needed to change things as they go. The tree harvesting and planting season runs from October to March so they use summer to update the system and test any changes.
Alongside the system some best practices have been developed e.g. transporting the saplings in a wet jute bag to prevent the roots drying out. There are manuals and tips available, which have been translated into other languages.
Harvest events
Checklists have been created for organising an event to make sure you have all the required equipment and paperwork.
It’s best to harvest saplings that are between knee and shoulder height – those below knee height may get out competed by grass, whereas for those more than shoulder height it is likely that not enough of the root system will be dug up for it to survive. Trees that are too small or too big need a lot of extra care and usually the number of trees being planted means they won’t get that much care.
Halfway through the harvest day the group splits in two, and one half starts identifying, bunching and labelling the saplings. All are sorted by species and bundled in 20s or 50s so they are easy to count. Each bundle is labelled; one of the educational benefits is learning how to identify saplings in the winter. The best way is to set aside and label an example sapling for each species to help with sorting. Most people can’t tell species apart without this to guide them, especially as the saplings will have no leaves in the winter.
With practice people can learn tens of different species in a season.
Then the saplings are transported in a trailer, usually either by the event leader or by the local tree hub. Then the trees are added to the tree planner, saying how many have been rescued, what they are and where they are going.
This process provides a form of risk management by tracking the trees from source to planting location. If there is something like a disease present in the harvest area that wasn’t known at the time, the trees harvested can be located.
Q&A
Question: Has this resulted in communities coming together for other things?
Yes, tree hubs are being used for other purposes now, for example plants are being dropped off to give away. The hub becomes a community gathering point too.
Groups have created flower meadows as well as planting woods. People also share tree seeds and acorns.
Question: How did you find the tree hubs?
Started with a network of farmers, who often have a lot of space available especially vegetable farmers in the winter. The latest date for giving away the trees is the end of March which fits with vegetable growing.
Community gardens are the best locations because rather than simply space having a core group of volunteers to look after the hub is very important. Hubs vary a lot in size and some are in people’s gardens. A 5 metre trench can fit 500 saplings; they need to be packed as tightly as possible for best survival.
Question: What do you do about tree guards and stakes to protect the trees from rabbits etc?
We give planting and aftercare advice but it is up to the people who take the trees to put guards in place if they need to. MTN also give advice about which trees are suitable for the site soil type and so on.
Question: How easy is it to join locally?
Anyone can sign up for the 26 October event on the Tree Planner - please do that on the More Trees now website6.
It’s also worth joining the Facebook group Northamptonshire Woodland Community Volunteers7 to get involved in tree harvesting and planting events more widely.
Question: What have you found are the best ways of finding people who want trees?
This is usually the easiest thing – MTN have found that using the words ‘free trees’ works really well! After 5 years they haven’t run out of people who want trees. A bigger challenge is to get the supply working smoothly and to find a way of giving people advice and knowledge on how to plant trees correctly.
MTN have inadvertently created ‘tree traffic jams’ by advertising trees too successfully! There is now a function in the system to automatically cut off the list for collecting trees at a certain point.
In Northampton the RAIN project is working to plant trees for flood management so we are expecting them to take some. Mick organised a tree harvesting event in January and from that 7 organisations took trees. The group Harborough Woodland Volunteers support a lot of tree planting projects and will take any extra trees if required.
Question: There must be an ecological message in terms of nature recovery, as well as the 'free trees' message? We have a challenge with that in the UK where some people still see trees as a necessary evil and only acceptable as part of a tidy ‘bowling green’ landscape.
Have you done all of this without any engagement with local authorities? In West Northants the new Tree Strategy includes an ambition to move from 9% to 20% tree canopy cover in the area by 2045.
On the eco message point, it really helped that there was engagement from the start with farmers who wanted to take trees for agroforestry projects. People already busy planting forests were helped by having access to free trees.
Having free trees on offer has allowed MTN to draw people in who had very little knowledge of trees and ecology and enable them to learn. People come for the free trees and stay for the story.
MTN have engaged a lot with different levels of government. The Ministry of Agriculture and Nature helped with developing the tree planner. There has been a nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands due to intensive agriculture, this provided a bit of crisis momentum enabling MTN to get some support.
They have worked with provinces, and with municipalities which have goals of increasing tree cover to address health concerns and climate adaptation concerns. Some have provided financial support to local groups. Engagement has generally been increasing but it does tend to vary depending on the direction of the political winds.
Question: Since leaving the EU UK farmers don’t just get grants for having land, they have to do something in order to get SFIs (Sustainable Farming Initiative). To plant a lot of trees will have to involve farmers. Will these trees qualify for grants?
Farmers can get grants in the Netherlands, not always for the trees as they are free but for hedgerow maintenance etc. Farmers also get grants from the EU for eco measures including hedgerow planting and forestry.
Question: Can we plant trees as part of hedgerows?
Yes, this is included in the advice that is given out to people when they join – what species are suitable for hedgerows etc. Also have advice about hedgerows in combination with animals; some trees are good for cows to eat. They call this a ‘cow apothecary’.
AOB
The next CA-WN informal face to face social event will be on Saturday 9th November downstairs in the café at the Northampton Museum & Art Gallery, from 2:00pm - 4:00pm. All welcome.
DONM
Thursday 21 November 2024. The guest speaker will be Emmie Williamson, whose previous talk on Climate Psychology was very popular. She plans to dig a little deeper into how a 'psycho-social' approach can analyse how it is that humans are causing such unimpeded damage to the planet.
References
1. https://youtu.be/GCFrFhEa9JM?si=mtOjWnb17-MZe__G
2. https://ca-wn.org/MemberDocs/More_Trees_Now_Slideshow.pdf
3. AGM meeting papers https://ca-wn.org/MemberDocs/AGM_2024.zip?ref=exchange.ca-wn.org
4. To make a donation via Stripe: https://exchange.ca-wn.org/#/portal/support
5. CA-WN Constitution https://exchange.ca-wn.org/admin-constitution-meeting-schedule-minutes/
7. Northamptonshire Woodland Community Volunteers https://www.facebook.com/groups/1121935529063523