Month: October 2012

Wildlife needs edge communities, places where different biomes meet, where resources are varied.  There are several natural places to put food plots. One is under any transmission wires that cross your property. You cannot use this land for much of anything anyway, so it provides a good, long narrow wildlife area. Other natural areas for food plots are landing zones.

Landing zones are where loggers set up equipment to stack and process harvested timber.  There is not much sense in planting them in trees, since subsequent harvests will squash them.  But you don’t want to just neglect them. Because of the soil compression of the heavy machines, plants will not easily regenerate on them naturally. You need to break up the hard surfaces and plant in some wildlife plots.

The additional advantage is that the landing zones are spread out in the forest. They provide little islands of food and variety within the forest. 

Food plots play out over time. You have to replant them every 3-5 years. I am lucky in that the guys at the hunt club do that on my land. They study this.  I get the magazine that has different studies and possibilities. But each site is special.  It is an art and not a science.  The hunt clubs and I have common interests. They like to make the food plots to improve wildlife. I agree. They also seem just like the joy of doing it and I am happy to have them “play” with my land.  One of the guys helped his granddaughter plan a food plot on our CP land. She won some kind of 4H project.

My pictures show the food plots ready to be planted or in growth. The top shows the plot on our new property. I have not yet though up a name for this place, so I am just calling it new forest. The trees are twenty-eight years old. Below that is the plot under the wires on the Freeman place. That food plot was planted last spring. The trees in the background are sixteen years old. The bottom is CP, our “original” land. Those trees are nine years old. All the stands look pretty good.

Our forests in Virginia, mine included, are not very intensive. Notice all the stuff growing under and among the trees, weeds. But the weeds are what the animals eat. They are better for the environment. I have seen much “better” managed forests, where the trees are planted closer and there is much more production per acre.  I am happy to leave some space on my land for the diversity of nature. The only thing I worry about is that our business model will not be competitive. People more clever than us will figure out ways to make things more efficient.  It would take away much of the joy of forestry for me. I like the easy management, less control.

That is one reason I think we have to maintain other values. One of the most important is hunting. W/o the hunt clubs, I could not mange the way I do. The hunters are really the stewards of the rural environment. I am glad they are there and that I got to know them. 

There seem to be lots of spiders around here.  Maybe it’s just spider season. I don’t know. They throw their webs across the trails at about face height. You usually don’t see them, but you walk into them and get the threads in your mouth. It is not pleasant, although I suppose ruining all that work impacts the spider more than the walker.

We are down here to look at the farms and especially to look at the new one. Everything is looking good. The trees look healthy and have put on good growth this year. Usually it is not so long between visits, so I am seeing a little more growth than usual.

There is an interesting change in the streams on the CP place. As the trees get bigger, they suck up more of the water that falls on the land, so it doesn’t run off so quickly. Some of my formerly full stream beds are now just wet, even with the extensive rain we had here in the last couple of months. There is still water pooled up in some places, so it is not a general dryness.  I like one particular place where I sit under some really big beech trees. This place now has a spring, where it used to have a surface stream.  The water evidently follows the stream bed underground and then if forced to the surface by some really big rock formations.  It flows down the rocks.  Very nice.

The new farm is 137 acres just north of Hwy 58.  It is good land with around 100 acres of twenty-eight year old loblolly, another maybe twenty acres in five year old and the rest in mixed hardwood SMZ. There is relatively little SMZ, so a more generally useable land.   We could harvest the pines at any time, but we would ideally do this in about five years. I want to be around to watch the harvest and the replanting, so maybe after I retire would be a good time. That is not that long away now.

I probably have to modify my planning to account for retirement and mortality.  My forestry planning goes out to times when I will probably be dead.  The thing that is fun about forestry is the long term perspective, but you cannot manage events past your lifetime.  The other problem is just getting around. Yesterday I was climbing around over rocks and streams. I was getting tired. I take good physical condition for granted.  How much longer can I do this?

I talked to Larry Walker who runs the hunt club and works in local forestry.  He told me that the market for pulp and timber has improved a lot recently, especially over the last month.  I don’t know if this is a leading economic indicator, but it is local good news. 

Another piece of good news is that Dominion Power will begin using wood chip biomass to replace coal in its power stations in Altavista, Hopewell, and Southampton coal-fired power stations. Wood chips are a completely renewable resource & carbon neutral, i.e. they soak up as much CO2 as they produce when burned. This move will also provide a market for slash and other forestry byproducts and steady the market prices for pulp wood.  It makes sense to burn biomass in a place that produces so much of it.  This is the fundamental principle of energy. You should use what works best in the local conditions.   There is no single solution.

The two top pictures show our new land.  I am standing near the trees to give perspective. Below that is my usual corner on the CP property. The bottom picture are my sycamores along the road. I have been thinning them into a kind of colonnade.  I am vaguely allergic to sycamore. If I do a lot of work cutting branches etc, I cough and sneeze.  So I can do it only a little while before I need to take a breathing break.  Sycamores have a distinctive smell, which I suppose it the same thing that causes me trouble.