But little has been said - we can assume thought about - as to the range of species, though manuka for honey production has been mentioned. What Jones has said is that 100,000ha is targeted for planting annually.
Whose land will this involve? Much, perhaps most, will surely be private land.
How will landowners be induced to plant these trees, whereas currently they are not? And will the planting stock be available?
Bear in mind that around three times the intended final crop is initially planted, with two thirds thinned to waste after the trees intended for harvest have had their form enhanced.
And will there be enough skilled and motivated (it's hard work) labour be available for planting and silviculture?
And let's not forget that as important as our radiata industry is, and its ability to stabilise eroding hill country, there are downsides.
Logging can be an environmentally traumatic exercise. Furthermore, wide-scale contiguous properties, blanket-afforested, have negative social consequences.
Where involved, the social infrastructure has been garroted, leaving the district deserted of landowning residents and their permanent staff, with their schools, services and security. Look at parts of the East Coast.
No doubt natives will also be planted. Such planting regimes involve high numbers to the hectare; far more, actually, than a productive forest.
Still, as valued emotionally as they are, they are not economically productive. Planting costly, with the need for follow-up for weed control, and who will pay for the land ownership, cost of capital servicing, rates, etc?
Widespread conversion of productive land to natives is not realistic.
It is easy, though, to identify flaws in any proposition.
Criticism carries the obligation of solutions or alternatives. I believe that the approach should be to look first at the land resource, and work back from there by determining how trees can be matched to it.
So the trees accommodate the land, not the land accommodating a billion trees. The objective should be to minimise loss of current productivity patterns - maybe even enhance them - and suspend a pre-election conjuring up of a magic figure.
There will be a place for blanket plantings of natives, as well as productive exotics - pines, eucalypts, redwoods, Douglas fir, or whatever. But we need to approach this cause with the widest vision and imagination that will excite the community, for soil, water and atmospheric health affects us all.
One of the opportunities we need to develop is silvopastoral, where timber production can overlay productive pasture by cultivating that extraordinary genus poplar.
We've been planting poplars for soil conservation over pastureland for decades, but to be widely accepted we need to capitalise economically on its cultivation. This means management of the tree (long-since accepted with pine), and market exploitation (poplar is a major timber globally).
For too long we have been, quite literally, sticking poplar poles in the ground and thereafter forgetting about them. If we do not control them - we aren't - they will control us - they will. (This really applies to all trees; what better example than the pines planted along roadsides in the 1960s by the old Patangata County Council.)
To bequeath to future landowners a landscape of massive worthless trees increasingly impeding livestock production is visionless and immoral. Through silvopastoralism we can increase our forestry estate substantially with the meshing of economic and environmental benefits - and wood with livestock production.
But let's not stop there.
Consider the opportunities for inspired amenity and recreational plantings through town and country.
The benefits are exciting and lasting, but in terms of adding to the magic billion trees target the contribution will be minimal. So there needs to be much thought put into this aspiration.
