Went to a tree farm meeting in C-ville and took advantage of the place to visit James Madison’s house at Montpelier. Madison gets less respect and recognition than he merits. He was more than anybody else the father of our Constitution, the oldest living written constitution in the world and still the best.
Timber Harvest – Brunswick County, May 14, 2018
Went down to the farms to see the harvest. We are thinning around 80 acres to 50 basal area (trees very far apart). We are also clearing 1/4 acre on every acre and clearing about four acres that were overstocked.
My plan is to plant longleaf on the 1/4 acre clearings and on the four acres, as well as some under the remaining loblolly. The idea is that we will do a final harvest of the loblolly in about ten years and the longleaf will be established.
In the meantime, the thinned acreage will be wonderful wildlife habitat. We will burn and plant pollinator habitat, which will also make the diverse habitat even better.
My pictures show the harvesting. Clear cuts look like hell,but they are wonderful habitat in the year after, especially for bobwhite quail. The early succession habitat provided food and the brambles that inevitably grow provide cover.
First picture shows the machine doing the thinning. The machine grabs and cuts the trees. Next shows a cutter and a chipper. After that is a log truck arriving. Last is video of the thinning. It is a little hard to see the machine.
Brodnax Fire
Science & experience tells me that everything will be okay, but I still worry about my trees. Convention from the hot fire gets all the way up the trees and singes the needles. I expect that lots of them will fall off. I have reasonable confidence intellectually that most of the trees will grow back better than ever, but I don’t feel it.
Found time between presentations to rush down and look at my newly burned forest. The forest floor is very clear now. You can easily walk through. We are doing patch burns of 1/3 each year for three years. This is great for wildlife and it puts more life, and carbon into the soils.
You can judge the fire by the color it leaves behind. Black is good. That means the fire has put a good char w/o destroying the life of the soil. White is not good but still okay. That is ash. The fire was a little too hot, but things are still okay probably. When you see red, you got trouble. Virginia clay is red (actually kind of orange.) If you burned down to that, the fire was too hot and destructive. In the really bad cases, the fire essentially bakes the clay into a kind of porcelain and nothing much will grow for a long time. Fortunately, we got the black.
My first three pictures show the forest floor. #3 shows part of the place where my friends & neighbor Larry Walker planted some pollinator plants. It will be very pretty soon.
Picture #4 shows my longleaf and the last picture is the gas station in Lawrenceville, even cheaper than Exit 104.
Virginia Forestry Summit 2018
At the Virginia Forestry Summit in Richmond. It is fun to hear what people have to say about forestry meet new friends and catch up with old ones. In-person events are important for that. In theory, you could learn more from watching on the web, but you miss the serendipity of unplanned meetings. I also find that I pay less attention if I am on the web. It is too tempting to “multitask” when you are sitting at home.
A good example of the personal contact has to do with CLT. I ran into a guy who works at a major Virginia firm with whom I had discussed CLT production. He said that he wanted to approach his top-management with the idea of making CLT. I forwarded some information and then looked for the DoF guy who works on CLT to make the connection. All of this was unplanned but not unanticipated in the broad sense. Personal meeting is useful.
The meeting started off talking about Carl Schenk. You may not have heard of him, but he is a big deal in forestry. He started the first forestry school in the USA.
Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, lots of people worried about a “timber famine”. We were running out of wood, since forests were being cleared and not regrowing fast enough. Schenk was trained in forestry in Germany. He quickly saw that American forests were different, but adapted techniques. We still are using some of the concepts he introduced,although much modified by our greater understanding. We can see farther because we stnd on the shoulders of giants like Schenk.
Interestingly, we no longer talk of timber famine. In fact we have a kind of “timber obesity” i.e. so much wood available that prices are very low. In the Southeast, we have a glut of mature timber. Given the low number of housing starts in the last ten years, we have an oversupply. One speaker said that we have 35% more standing mature pine in the Commonwealth than we did ten years ago. Even if housing picks up, it will take years to work through this surplus, so we cannot expect prices to go up much for saw timber, even if housing picks up. BTW – the price of lumber is going up much faster, but that is not due to cost of wood.
I will write more later. I have to get going now to attend today’s program.
Virginia Forestry Summit
Burning under the loblolly
Virginia Department of Forestry (Adam Smith) did the first understory burn on the Brodnax place today. This was a growing season burn. The science tells us that this should kill the brush and encourage the growth of grass and forbs. A dormant season burn top-kills the brush, but they grow back. the wildlife and ecological effects are significant. It is likely that the “natural” burns were more likely in the growing season, since they were set off by lightning and thunderstorms come a lot more often in May than in December.
We are burning 1/3 of the property each year, following a plan we agreed with the NRCS. This is supposed to encourage wildlife habitat and add carbon to the soils. It is a fun experiment. The pictures show the woods after the burn and the part not burned for comparison.
The hunt club is going to plant pollinator habitat on the loading decks and around the burned area. Next fall the seeds should spread into the burned area and next spring it should be glorious.
I have to get down and have boots-on-the-ground experience.
Alex becomes an officer and a gentleman
Went to Alex’s commission ceremony today. Mariza, Brendan & Espen went too. Chrissy got to pin on his bars. Alex is going into signals, with the permutation that he will be part of a new cyber corp formed in Northern Virginia. I am not exactly what they will be doing. He will go down to Georgia for a few months’ training in September.
The unit has a real cool name. They are called “shadow warriors.” I think they may have got the name from a video game, but it is still cool. It is something we need for our country to fight that information warfare battle, and after his service is done he will have a useful skill.
