Loggers' clear-cutting causes floods, droughts for ranchers downstream; Vancouver, BC

Struggling rancher at loggerheads over clear-cutting:
Randy Saugstad is waiting for the flood. Then he'll be waiting for the drought. The Williams Lake-area cattle rancher says the Liberals' controversial makeover of the province's logging regulations is going to spell disaster at his off-the-grid beef operation.
So he's been fighting Tolko Industries, the Vernon-based logging company that last month started cutting trees in the watershed above his ranch.
On Dec. 23, Saugstad used his pickup truck to block Tolko's crew from putting in a bridge. On Wednesday, he received a letter from high-powered Vancouver law firm Bull Housser Tupper promising to sue him for damages if he does it again.
'All I can do is wait until they finish logging, and then in the spring when the flooding starts, I can go to court,' says Saugstad, 59.

Tree cover and agricultural land not natural enemies as supposed

Tree cover far bigger than expected on farms: study | Green Business | Reuters
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters)
- Almost half of the world's farmland has at least 10 percent tree cover, according to a study on Monday indicating that farmers are far less destructive to carbon-storing forests than previously believed.
'The area revealed in this study is twice the size of the Amazon, and shows that farmers are protecting and planting trees spontaneously,' Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, said in a statement.
The Centre's report, based on satellite images and the first to estimate tree cover on the world's farms, showed tree canopies exceeded 10 percent on farmland of 10 million square kms (3.9 million sq miles) -- 46 percent of all agricultural land and an area the size of Canada or China.

ALSO COVERED IN: Can farms and forests mix?