But I think the point of the program they offer is more for conservation than for incentivizing wood production.
(Softwood exports have ceased to be a healthy industry in Canada a couple decades ago, especially since a long and ugly trade war with the United States which they seemingly won.)
But if in France, stay below the 40ha limit to not have to deal with massive costs of having your forest to be managed with validated planning every X years etc. which makes it very hard to keep "wild" areas in it (even more paperwork!).
I read about that a while ago! To me it seems like good-intent at first that turned out a complete bureaucratic creep! My question is: Can we decide to "manage" the forest ourselves and be registered as an official "forest manager", draft a management plan, publish any outstanding paperwork, etc ? I'm not sure about which administrative body would enforce the planning and management (municipalities, ONF, ...)
I won't go above 40ha for any foreseeable future, so it's probably not an issue!
Trees are not evolving as fast as the speed we destroy our environment, we have no choices left and we need to help them by not letting the forest completely wild. You need a bit of control. This is the reasoning being this 40ha limit. Starting this limit, you need to do the control seriously.
Mostly, the problem isn't actually one of too-slow evolution, but even more basic: Forests often can't migrate fast enough to keep up with current rates of climactic zone movement.
Human intervention is pretty simple and effective, though: keep planting trees on the leading edge of the forest (usually poleward or upslope where the limit is temperature, away from the coast where the limit is precipitation)
Of course, there are ecosystems that don't have anywhere convenient to move to (arctic and alpine, for example), but most forests don't fall into that category.
You basically lose 20 to 30 years of taking care of the trees and you need to "restart" the forest naturally afterwards, because anyway, you have no ideas what could be the right kind of trees to support the climate change.
You lose money on the forest, the land is getting more value, but it means just more taxes nothing more.
At the moment, it does not make sense to own only the land, the value is extracted one level above. But here in Europe (at least in France), forest is owned by a lot of people. Many, many people have 1ha or less, here and there, because of the agricultural tradition of the country (forest has been growing again on not taken care of fields).
Source: We have about 300ha, taken care of in a "sustainable" way (all the stuff you read about the "best/ecological" way to take care of a forest) for the past 30 years, we just break even. That is, the forest is bringing no money at all to the owners, everything is going back to pay the workers and taxes.