Plantation

This article is about crop plantations. The word plantation may also refer to a colony, as in the History of Ireland (see Plantations of Ireland), or in the mid-Atlantic and southern United States colonies, from Maryland southwards. A plantation is also a form of local goverment in Maine.

A plantation is an area of perennial crops such as trees, cotton, sugar-cane, tea, etc., that have been deliberately planted by humans.

Forestry plantations

In forestry, plantations of trees are typically grown as an even-aged monoculture for timber production, as opposed to a natural forest, where the trees are usually of diverse species and diverse ages. A plantation is not a natural ecosystem. Plantations are also sometimes known as "man-made forests" or "tree farms", though this latter term more typically refers to specialist tree nurseries which produce the seedling trees used to create plantations.

A plantation is usually made up of fast-growing trees planted either to replace already-logged forests or to substitute for their absence. Plantations differ from natural forests in several ways:

• Plantations are usually monocultures. That is, the same species of tree is planted in rows across a given area, whereas a conventional forest would contain far more diverse tree species.
• Plantations may include introduced trees not native to the area, including (in a few cases) unconventional types such as hybrid trees and genetically modified trees. Since the primary interest in plantations is to produce wood or pulp, the types of trees found in plantations are those that are best-suited to industrial applications. For example, pines, spruces and eucalyptus are widely used because of their fast growth rate, and are good for paper and timber production.
• Plantations are always young forests. Typically, trees grown in plantations are harvested after 10 to 60 years, rarely up to 120 years. This means that the forests produced by plantations do not contain the type of growth, soil or wildlife typical of old-growth natural forest ecosystems. Most conspicuous is the absence of decaying dead wood, a very important part of natural forest ecosystems.

Plantations are grown by state forestry authorities (for example, the Forestry Commission in Britain) and/or the paper and wood industries and other private landowners (such as Weyerhaeuser and International Paper in the United States). Christmas trees are often grown on plantations as well. In southeast Asia, rubber, oil palm, and more recently teak plantations have replaced the natural forest.

By convention, plantations of fruit-bearing trees are termed orchards, even if grown on scales that occupy a landscape to the horizon. Plantations of grapevines are termed vineyards.

Ecological impact of tree plantations

Critics point out that due to the vastly different nature of the ecosystem that develops around plantations, they are not a fitting substitute for old-growth forests, and the replacement of old-growth trees by plantations results in the loss of biodiversity. Plantations may also involve draining wetlands to replace mixed hardwoods that formerly predominated, with pine species. Where non-native varieties or species are grown, few of the native fauna are adapted to exploit these and further biodiversity loss occurs.

In the Kyoto Protocol there are proposals encouraging the use of plantations to reduce carbon dioxide levels (though this idea is being challenged by some groups on the grounds that the sequestered CO₂ is eventually released after harvest).

Other plantations

Some farms of smaller-growing crops (other than trees) may also be called plantations, particularly in historical usage. Tobacco, sugarcane, pineapple, tea, cotton and coffee are examples. Before the rise of cotton in the American South, indigo and rice were sometimes called plantation crops. There are still extensive tea plantations in India (Assam) and Sri Lanka (Ceylon).

A comparable economic structure in antiquity was the latifundia that produced commercial quantities of olive oil or wine, for exportation.

Slavery, para-slavery and plantations

Slave labour was used extensively to work on early plantations (such as cotton plantations) in the southern states of the USA, and in modern times low wages paid to plantation workers are still a part of plantation profitability in some areas with minimal employee-protection legislation. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil worked by slave labor are perhaps the best example of the plantation system at its height.

In more recent times, overt slavery has been replaced by para-slavery or slavery-in-kind. At its most extreme, workers are in debt bondage: they must work to pay a debt as such punitive interest rates that it may never be paid off. Others work unreasonably long hours and are paid subsistence wages that (in practice) may only be spent in the company shop.

Related matters

In the American South, such plantations were centered on a plantation house, the residence of the owner, where important business was conducted. The plantations engendered their own characteristic architecture; see e.g. Berkeley Plantation.

In Brazil, a sugarcane plantation was termed an engenho ("engine") and a 17th-century English usage for organized colonial production was "factory". Such colonial social and economic structures are discussed at Plantation economy.