Diskontinuitäten in der Waldnutzung in Südwestfalen: Landwirtschaftliche Nebennutzungen (Streunutzungen und Waldweide) am Übergang zur neuen Forstökonomie in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts : Multifunktionale Waldwirtschaft in der Vergangenheit und heute

1997

S. 24-38

Unselbständiges Werk

200102785

Trees and misfortune are growing every day"; in these words some early exponents of forestry wanted to verify the collective mentality of affluence of the common people. What however was a substantial element of traditional rural economy for centuries, often was described as an agricultural overexploitation of forests. Forests still belong to the typical landscape of the "Sauerland", a part of the Southwestphalian mountainous region. This rural but also restricted industrial cultural landscape has seen various phases of disordered balance between traditional agricultural systems and the development of forests during the last 200 years. Unfavourable geoclimatic factors, combined with an extensive husbandry and a traditional agricultural constitution, provided for only insufficient resources for living. Pronounced livestock and woodland management resulted from low crops over a long period. As an integrated part of rural working area, forests fulfilled some vital functions for the agriculture after 1850 as well. Apart from their industrial exploitation (charcoal burning, burning of wood-ash), common woodlands and small private forests both managed in low forestry economy and "Mittelwaldwirtschaft" carried on serving as an agricultural reserve. Sheep walk and cattle pasture took place on stubble -fields, fallow grounds and in the woods because of missing permanent grassland. The hacking of heath (in some cases also called "Plaggenhieb") and the raking of litter had to compensate for missing stocks of straw and a constant shortage of manure. That's why official authorities and forest administration gave priority to the detachment of minor uses of woodland. Together with the privatisation of common lands, this should lead quickly to a regular afforestation with hardwood and - in the second half of the 19th century - with coniferous wood. There were numerous protests from the population against the new forest economy. Not the production of timber was a part of peasants' motives for acting but to get rid of concrete scarcity of feed and manure. Within the scope of economy and property rights most of the farms were not able to install stable feeding and to intensify land utilisation for a long time. Until as late as the end of the centruy many afforestations of cleared areas ('Höhenblößen') failed because of the resistance of ranchers who urgently needed the heathland for cattle pasture and the raking of forest litter. Conflicts between timber growing and food production contimed even decades after initiation of the agrarian reforms. For example the extent of using litter expanded after installation of stable feedling. It is true that increased potato growing and fodder cultivation stepped up the production of food for man and beast in the long-term, but for the moment available stocks of straw did not fit the requirements of enlarged livestocks. In Southwestphalian forestry the measures of the so-called agrarian reforms often did not lead to the intended aims. In many places the detachment of üasturage and the cultivation of fallow temporarily caused a bottleneck of grazing area once more. Forests and heathland had to compensate this. The reduction or adaptation of livestock did not agree with the spread of new methods of animal husbandry and land utilisation. Since the administration failed to carry out the detachment of grazing and forest rights during the process of the division of common lands and forests (after the law of 1821) and does not initiate other activities in agricultural policy, the reforms broke off at the halfway stage. Most of the peasants could not cultivate permanently growing clearings by their efforts. Along to this a technological change in Rhenish-Westphalian iron industry as well as an improved infrastructure with better conditions of transport redefined the functions of woods after 1860. Charcoal burning and tanning (oak-bark) which both preferred low forests in the same way as agriculture sudddenly decreased. The timber market expanded without many chances for the inhabitants to participate in it. For a long time afforestation projects were constrained by agristructural circumstances. They were a handicap for the peasants to conform with the new forest economics.Therefore forestry was only indirectly the actual initiator of restructuring agriculture. As long as husbandry was not able to realise structural reforms successfully on its own, the using of woodlands was essential. For many farmers in "Sauerland" the transition to timber growing in a forestry independent of agriculture, became reality only at the beginning of our century.