It seems a little odd that other crops have been cultivated to literally suit people’s tastes and interests, yet many trees…Seemingly not as much?
I recognize the growth cycles are much longer, in some(many?) cases far exceeding individual human lives, but whole civilizations have been relying on trees for ages. Have none, not even isolated parts of them, been stable enough to take on this experiment?
Forestry management is a fascinating topic.
Many commercial forests are treated like row cropped “farms”. If you are looking to grow a bunch of trees with straight trunks that grow quickly and all become harvestable at the same time, a tree farm is the way to go.
I have no true numbers to point to (though I’d love to see some), but you could imagine that if you needed to go harvest 1000 trees to send to the mill, and you have to find them in a non-plantation forest, you might have to search through 50 times as much area to get the trees you need. Logging equipment causes a lot of disturbance to underbrush, so you might get less impact on the environment as a whole by just dedicating a smaller area to the crop.
It’s the same reasons why we plant food crops in rows rather than intermingled in a forest.
Similar to food farms, tree plantations often take species from completely different geographic areas, so it’s important not to treat, for example, radiata pine plantations in new Zealand as wild spaces because they are no more wild than cornfields.
There are different styles of management for different purposes (e.g., pulp wood, construction lumber, hardwood) and the goals of the landowner (e.g., a logging company may want to maximize long term production, while on your own property, you may want to maximize continuous biodiversity).
There are also considerations for terrain and local climate. Hilly country may have bad erosion risks if there is a clear cut. Fire risks play a part. Wildlife may even benefit from clear cuts depending on the situation.