Category: Conservation & Environment

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Growing the Best Trees

Below is my article for the next issue of “Virginia’s Forests”, the publication of the Virginia Forestry Association.  It draws on a blog post from a few months ago, so it might be familiar, but there are changes.  I am going past the farms on Sunday, so I may have some pictures to add.

Growing the Best Trees

I have been a like a proud parent with my forest land, taking pictures of my growing trees and the changing face of the land I own.  One of the tracts was clear-cut in 2003 and the next year replanted with genetically superior loblolly pine,  so the trees are now six years old.   I know that as a relatively new forest owner, I am just experiencing things that many readers have seen long before, but I still think it interesting to mention.

Differences show up

At first the biggest trees were not those planted ones.  The volunteers or the trees that had just been coming up when the stand was cut had a quicker start, and those were the pines I saw and captured in pictures in 2005.  But the equation has been changing. The “old” trees are still growing vigorously in many cases, but the “new” trees have now caught up and generally grown taller. There is one particular place where I have been parking my truck and using it for comparison in pictures each year, where I notice this especially.  A couple years ago, the old trees looked pretty big, but now the new trees are bigger.  The new ones are also shaped better, much less spreading branched and rounded. Beyond all that, the new trees responded much better to my application of biosolids fertilizers. If I can see (and have pictures to prove) this difference in five years, imagine what it will be like in twenty.

Genetic improvements have greatly changed forestry in the last fifty years. This is especially true for loblolly pines, the most commonly planted timber tree in the South, which are unusually adaptable. The “original” loblolly is a fast growing but often crooked and unattractive tree. Some of my volunteer trees show these characteristics.  Genetic improvement can be very simple. You just choose the trees with the best characteristics and try to plant more of them. We are now in the third generation of loblolly and the differences are remarkable.  

The new trees take thirty years to get as big as the original trees did in eighty.  They are also a lot straighter, more resistant to disease and have a better branching structure. You can achieve these goals in different ways. The easiest is the simple one I mentioned above:  Just gather the seeds from the best trees, grow them and repeat.    The trees pollinate themselves, so there is randomness in this process.  Another  method is to control pollination in order to ensure that the best fertilize the best. This is more labor intensive, since you have to put little bags on the trees to be sure that only the right pollen gets to the right flowers.  

Bring on the clones

The most recent method being deployed is cloning, although it is not really new.  Most gardeners have cloned plants.  You can clone a willow or a cottonwood just by shoving a stick into wet ground.  A grove of cottonwoods along a river may all be the same tree – genetically – as trees sprouted from roots or from sticks that lodged in the mud.  I once inadvertently cloned a cottonwood when I used a freshly cut cottonwood branch as a marking stick.  A couple days later it sprouted into a little tree. Pines are harder, but they can be cloned too.  Among the pines, loblolly is relatively easy because it can re-sprout from a cut when it is young. 

I  have to say that I am a bit uncomfortable with using clones. It is too much of a monoculture.  Without the subtle genetic variations, the whole stand may become easier prey for very adaptive bugs or disease, as has happened with some apple varieties.  On my land, I would prefer to go with a little more genetic variety, even if that means lower yields, but that is a judgment each tree farmer must make for him/herself.

Good genetics can move the whole curve higher, but variation remains and good genetics are most profitably deployed as other conditions improve.  As I mention above, the superior trees responded significantly better to my biosolid application.  Many of the costs associated with establishing and managing a stand of trees remain the same no matter what you plant.  If you are planning to expend a lot of energy and time on management, [“planning” is repeated in sentence] you are well advised to spend a little more for genetically superior trees. All trees will do better with better management, but the better trees will do better than the others. 

Improving conditions improve the better trees even more

In other words, the more you improve conditions and remove obstacles, the more results are determined by genetics and the greater the gap between the superior and the inferior trees.  It makes sense when you think in terms of potential.  It doesn’t make much difference if one tree has the genetic potential to grow 80 feet tall in twenty years while another can only grow 40, if limiting conditions prevent any of them from growing more than 30 feet tall.

So what are some of the limiting factors? The most obvious are climate, rainfall, soil and elevation.   These make a difference when choosing a site, but after that they are beyond our control.  We can control, spacing among the trees, thinning schedules, rotation timing, competition control and fertilization.

So I guess the trees you plan to plant or allow to grow on your land should depend on how much you are going to put into it.  If you plan to do not much of anything except cut them sometime in the future, it probably doesn’t pay to invest in superior trees. If no attention is paid to spacing, thinning, fertilization, etc., they won’t grow to their potential anyway and almost any old tree will do.  But the more you plan to do, the more you need to do it right.

I am just enjoying my land and trying to learn as much about forestry as I can, with a little help from my friends and fellow tree farmers.  And when I learn something, I try to pass it on too. That is what it means to be a tree farmer with your land in the American Tree Farm System.

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Conservation too Conservative becomes Pointless Preservation

Relationships long established should not be changed for light or transient causes.  Everything exists in a complex web of interrelationships and changing any part may bring unexpected systemic changes and unwelcome changes.  But everything is always in the process of becoming something else.  Change is constant and avoiding it is not an option.  The best we can do is work toward sustainable, predictable change.

I thought about change and continuity, as I walked through the Quail Botanical Gardens north of San Diego.   The Southern California environment most people know, love and want to preserve is largely man-made, as I wrote in an earlier post.   The local environment has a lot in common with some places in South Africa, the Mediterranean and Australia, so plants from those places tend to do well in Southern California. Below, however, is a familiar tree from Brazil. I never knew what it was called. It is a floss silk tree (weird name).

There is some emphasis on trying to reestablish native or nature ecosystems.  IMO, sustainable is important; natural or native really are not. The problem with natural is that the concept is too slippery and unrealistic.  As for native, it all depends. Native plants and animals might be well adapted to the local environment and fit in the overall environment, but sometimes non-native plants and animals can be as good, or better. I am glad that banana, oranges, apples, wheat, potatoes, horses, honeybees etc have spread beyond their narrow native regions … and improved in the process.  Sustainable, usually means a decent diversity and some non-native plants can become invasive, obliterating too much of the competition.  It is also possible that invasive species might have undesirable characteristics. But it requires judgment of the whole system.  There is no blanket native = good/non-native bad formula.  Some native species may have become un-viable because of other changes in the environment.   We cannot reestablish “pristine” environment and we have to resist the feeling that “what was, is good.”

With all the changes of the last century, and all that will come in this one, what used to be “natural” will no longer be sustainable.  That is why sustainable is better than natural.

Above is a grove of cork-oak. The bark can be harvested every ten years or so after they mature.  they live around 150 years.  Cork grows naturally in Spain, Portugal and parts of N. Africa. Below is an old world desert plant landscape.

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Spring Forest Visit

It was a little early to go down to the farms. The trees haven’t quite started to grow yet and the clover is still small and not flowering. I will be back in a few weeks. But I wanted to check on flood damage now. Above are the trees near the clover field at the top of the hill. The truck gives perspective. The land was clear cut in 2003, so you can see how much the trees have grown since then. The biosolids helped them grow faster last year. Below is another truck comparison. There is an interesting detail. Look at the two trees behind the truck. The round top one is a “volunteer” i.e. natural regeneration. It was probably a little tree when the place was cut. The one next to it is a planted genetically “super tree.” Because of their location at the crossroad, I have been paying attention to this place. The round top tree was twice as big as the ones around it when I first noticed. Today, you can see that the one next to it is a little bigger and I expect that after this growing season it will be significantly bigger. I will take another picture.

I saw clear evidence of heavy rain and lots of runoff, but no real damage. The places near the streams overflowed, but that doesn’t hurt the trees. The water is running UNDER one of the water pipes. I figure it will undercut the road, but I don’t think there is much to do about it. I will put in a load of rocks and turn it into a ford when/if it collapses. I think it will be better for the water to run over instead of under. 

One of the little streams changed course last year. It went back to its older course. When I dig down, I find sand and gravel all over, indicating that the stream has changed course a lot. It creates wetlands until the mud piles up into natural levies, and then it moves again. You can see from the picture above that there have been times when the ground was dry for a long time.  The dead trees were alive when I got the place in 2005, when the stream shifted and evidently drown the roots in wetland. I suppose that now the stream has shifted again, it will be dryer, although the whole place is spongy.

I also think that runoff will decrease over time as the trees on the slopes get bigger and their roots absorb more of the water before it hits the streams. 

I want to get the trees on the Freeman tract thinned this year or next, before I get to Brazil.   Above you can see from the comparison with the truck that the trees are big enough and thick enough. They will be fourteen years old this year, which is a little early for thinning but within the range.  Below is the power line right-of-way. They replaced the wooden pylons with steel and kind of tore up the grass. I have eight acres under those things. I am looking into establishing quail habitat, since I cannot plant trees (or allow them to grow) that would interfere with the wires.  On the plus side, it provides a long area of forest edge and wildlife plot and the utility company maintains the road. 

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Various Facts About Foresty around the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge

I drove with Frank Sherwood to the Virginia tree farm of the year and got a chance to talk to him as we walked around on the ground. Frank has been doing forestry in Virginia for thirty-five years and I got some good information on drive down from Winchester. 

This area of Virginia features a lot of mixed hardwoods and white pines. I was very familiar with white pines form Wisconsin, but I really had a lot to learn about them. For example, white pine wood is light and not as hard or strong as loblolly.  It is good for fence rails (it doesn’t twist) and it is used in log cabins, but it is not as much use as structural timber.  Frank lamented that there is not much of a market for white pine saw timber in the immediate area, besides in those two limited uses. A lot of the local white pine had not grown straight and un-branched.   The newer plantations are doing better.

White pines have not been developed genetically as well as loblolly and it is less likely to be planted, since natural regeneration works very well.   A white pine rotation is around fifty years (15-18 years longer than loblolly) with two possible thinning. 

Pulp prices have remained steady over the years, Frank told me.   Some people are a little concerned about biofuels, which would compete with pulp and drive the prices up (good for landowners), but there currently is not a biofuels market in the Winchester region.  You can make ethanol from cellulous, but it is not worth it with today’s technologies.   That means that effective biofuels for wood is to burn it directly and for that you need local facilities that burn it.   The alternative is to make wood pellets, but that industry is also not present locally.

Landowners have a couple options for timber selling.  The one you get the most money for is saw timber.  Saw timber will yield $150-400 per 1000 board feet.  Pulp is the cheapest, maybe biofuels in the near future.  Pulp yields $5-7 a ton for pine and $2-3 for hardwood.  In between is scragwood.  These are small diameter but straight trees that can be sawed into rough boards used in crates and pallets.

Frank feeds the mill in Luke, Maryland.  He says that the mill’s catchment area is getting bigger because it is harder to find wood in local areas.  Development and forest fragmentation are the causes.  You can do forestry on small tracts, but at some point it gets to be economically unviable.  You probably need around forty acres to do decent management. Development has been taking forestry out of business. Although the recent economic downturn has stopped much of it, development will resume when the good times roll again. Too bad.

Frank doesn’t know of anybody using biosolids or animal manure on forest lands in this part of the Shenandoah valley or around.  There are several chicken operations (we drove past a Perdue operation) that produce a fair amount of chickenshit, but Frank didn’t know what they did with it.  Chickenshit is a powerful fertilizer, high in potassium, but as I understand it, chickenshit has to be left to decompose a little otherwise it can burn out the crops.  IMO forest lands would be a good place to dispose of some of these farm wastes.  There is a lot of forest and they could absorb and use the nitrogen and phosphate w/o letting it slip into the Chesapeake Bay. Of course, the problem is transportation. Manure is bulky, heavy and stinky.

The problem is concentration.  These large animal operations concentrate the crap. That changes it from a valuable fertilizer into a potential pollution problem. The difference between a life-giving medicine and a deadly poison is often the dosage.

Anyway, those are some of the things I learned from Frank.  The biggest benefit of writing the tree farm of the year article is getting to talk to people like him while actually setting foot on the forests.

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2010 Virginia Tree Farm of the Year Visit

Noble Laesch, the father of the current owner Judith Gontis, bought this acreage in the late 1960s and it has been a certified tree farm for the last twenty-eight years. Laesch and Gontis did not live on the land and so for the last twenty-eight years it has been forester Frank Sherwood’s business and pleasure to look after these 927 acres of hilly mixed forest just inside the Rockingham County line.

It is a tree farm with great diversity in terms of species composition, topography, soils and microclimates. The ridges are still dominated by mixed hardwoods, although gradually white pines are taking over, both through natural processes and forestry practices. We looked at a logging operations and examined some of the recently cut stumps during a recent visit. The partially shade tolerant white pines had seeded in naturally under an older stand of mixed hardwood, mostly scarlet oak, but were suppressed until released by the forestry operation. 

 We counted 130 rings on a scarlet oak stump. For the first sixty years of life, the tree grew slowly and crookedly. It is clear that there were too many trees here competing for sun, nutrients and water. We have no record of how the neighboring trees were thinned, but the tree started to grow much faster at around sixty until it slowed in older age. Unfortunately, although very big, this scarlet oak, like most of the others in the stand, had begun to rot in the middle. It was past time to remove them and give the white pines their time in the sun. Within a few years this will be an almost pure stand of white pine.

Farther down the hill was a recently thinned plantation, a total of 126 acres of twenty-year-old white pine and a clear cut left to regenerate naturally in white pine. The trees were vigorous but widely spaced. The blueberries had come in very thickly and perhaps they just outran the pine seedlings.   The plantation was clearly better for timber production, but the naturally regenerated area had cost nothing to plant and the widely spaced trees were providing excellent openings for wildlife.   As with any management plan, it depends on what the landowner wants and it was interesting to see the side-by-side comparison of different choices.

The tulip-poplars that grow so profusely on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge do well here too, but only in coves or bowls that have deeper soil than the rocky and sometimes sandy slopes.   In these places you find towering tulip poplars that can be harvested at regular intervals and regenerated naturally.

The rest of the tree farm is mixed hardwoods, especially white and red oak, plus some maples, as well as white pine.  This is white pine country. Although loblolly can be grown here too, the white pines do it naturally. With Frank Sherwood’s advice, Mrs. Gontis, as her father before her, manages for pulp and saw timber mostly through selective cuttings.  

Like all well-managed tree farms, this one provides a home for wildlife, a place for recreation and protection for water resources. The farm is drained by Runion Creek, whose waters find their way into the Shenandoah and the Potomac and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay. Although there is some development in the region, it looks like this tree farm and its 927 acres will continue to provide these kinds of ecological services for years to come. 

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130 +/- Years

The stump is from a scarlet oak that started life sometime around 1870 up the hills just over the northern boundary of Rockingham County, where I was visiting this year’s tree farm of the year. I didn’t count all the rings, but it is close. I sharpened a little on the picture so you can see the pattern. It tells a little about Virginia history.

You can see that it grew hardly at all for the first sixty years. This is probably because it was severely overcrowded. This area was almost completely cut over in the decades before the Civil War. Some of the wood was used for building, mining supports & staves, but mostly for charcoal for little foundries and lime kilns in the region. The trees grew back after the industries moved along and they came back thick and for about sixty years, roughly from 1870-1930 there wasn’t enough sun or water to go around. (In those days there weren’t as many deer and other varmints around. These days, they would browse down some of the trees.) Our tree was also leaning a little. You can see that it grew as a reaction more on one side.

But something happened around 1930. Somebody probably cut down some of the trees.  Or it could have been a fire or insect infestation, but that seems less likely, since whatever it was didn’t harm our tree here. In fact, it started to grow a lot faster, until it slowed again down because of its age.

Scarlet oaks are part of the red oak family, but they are among the worst members. They wood is not as good northern or southern red oaks and scarlet oaks tend to rot in the heart or have other irregularities. The logger said that the logs in the pile shown in the picture were probably not up to saw timber standards because of this.

All members of the red oaks family have open pores, which is why they cannot be used for barrels and generally do not do well when exposed to water. Even as seasoned firewood, they can hiss when burned, since they absorb water easily and a little rain will soak in. The oak whiskey barrels used for Bourbon whiskey are always white oak. White oak also makes better firewood. 

There were mostly scarlet oaks on this ridge, mixed with white pines. White pines are partially shade tolerant when they are young, so they will come in under the oaks. The loggers cut out the scarlet oaks and the forest will come back as mostly pine. The scarlet oaks were almost done anyway. Many were already rotting in the centers and they were well past prime as timber trees.

This part of Virginia is white pine country, at least on the hillsides. In the coves, where the soil is deeper, the yellow-poplars do very well. The picture above shows some of them. They grow very fast. This stand has been harvested twice since the late 1970s and it is ready for a third cut, as you can see.

Yellow-poplar is good for furniture inside drawers and cabinets with veneer of oak or other high quality wood on the outside. Yellow-poplar doesn’t shrink or swell very much, so it is good for that purpose. 

I will write more about this subject tomorrow. 

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National Climate Service

NOAA is establishing a National Climate Service, analogous to the National Weather Service. This is a good step for the very practical reason that it will facilitate planning and adapting to changes in climate. But it also carries with it the legendary pitfalls of prognostication.

You can listen to the NPR story about it at this link.

Weather predictions have become a lot more reliable in the last ten years. You can make reasonable plans based on hours of the day. For example, I was able to make drive across my state ahead of a blizzard because the weather service was able to accurately predict sun in the morning before the blizzard hit in the afternoon. Climate prediction is still not up to the scientific level of weather prediction, but it is getting better. We should soon be able to make reasonable predictions on the regional and sub-regional level.

This brings the obvious blessing that we can take advantage of changes and/or minimize losses. For example, as I have said on many occasions, it is positively insane to rebuild the below-sea-level parts of New Orleans. We should not extend subsidized flood or storm insurance to any new construction on low-lying coastal plains and we should encourage people to move to higher ground, even if that means building higher premiums into insurance policies and mortgages of those who won’t.

BTW – we DO NOT have to mandate this, if we just refrain from getting governments to subsidize or require insurance or mortgages be available at “reasonable” rates. The market will sort out which places are too risky. If someone is willing to insure your house on a mud-slope, it is his business and yours. People can build if they want, but we should not become accomplices to stupidity. We might also plan to retire some crops or cropland and get read to move into others. Advanced plant breeding and biotechnology will be a great help here.

Climate change will create winners and losers. Having a reasonable idea of the shape of the changes will make it possible to reap more of the benefits and suffer fewer of the penalties. But think of the troubles along the way.

Somebody today owns valuable land near major ports or in the middle of today’s most productive agricultural land. On the other hand, somebody today owns near worthless land. These might change places. Think of the ports around Hudson Bay. How many of us can even name one? If you look at a globe instead of a flat map, you can see that Hudson Bay is more convenient to many parts of Europe or Asia than is Los Angeles or New Orleans. The problem until now has been ice. The place was locked up most of the year. If this changes, so does the shipping calculation.

Are the current owners of prime real estate and infrastructure going to welcome all the newcomers? Are they going to welcome a study that shows investors and government decision makers a future that makes their wealth creation machines redundant?

Woe to the GS-13 bureaucrat who issues the report proving that no more government aid should go to New Orleans’ 9th Ward. Imagine how much more this will be true of more crucial and expensive infrastructure owned by politically powerful people and interests.

I think the National Climate Service is an excellent and useful idea. It will help us adapt and prosper in the future. But I fear the daunting politics.

I remember talking to a guy from North Carolina during disastrous floods a few years ago. He told me that they had detailed maps that could accurately predict almost the exact shape of a flood, but they couldn’t use them because people objected when the places they wanted to build were shown to be in the middle of seasonal swamps. We have seen this kind of stupidity in New Orleans and continue to see it.

There is a whole genre of literature involved with someone getting a prediction of future events and being unable to do anything about it. Predictors are dismissed (e.g. Cassandra) or often the twist is that the very attempt to stop the predicted event is what brings on the tragedy (e.g. Oedipus Rex). Let’s hope that our prognostication works out better.   

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Nature versus Nuture

The debate about whether heredity or environment is more important in shaping human behavior has been a hot topic for many years. The “blank slate” idea dominated thinking when I was on college and I remember being embarrassed by the castigation I got from one of my anthropology professors for suggesting that human events were influenced by genetics.  We have reached a more nuanced understanding, but books like “The Blank Slate”, by Stephen Pinker still cause controversy.   And suggesting innate differences among people can still get you in serious trouble in some places.  

The tree and genetic determinism

So let me talk about genetic determinism in trees. Presumably none of them will be insulted or feel that I have diminished their self esteem. Getting the best genetic stock and managing it for optimal results (nature & nurture) was a topic at the Forest Landowners’ conference on forest productivity that I attended.  They were going to hold it at the Virginia Department of Forestry in Charlottesville, but the snow knocked out the electricity, so they moved it to the Rivanna Volunteer Fire Department (above), where they have a big meeting room (below).

Both genetics and environment are important and they build on and affect each other.  The anger of my anthropology professor just showed that he was not qualified to teach the subject.  Unfortunately he was reflecting the mainstream scientific consensus of those times.

Genetic improvement changed forestry

Genetic improvements have greatly changed forestry in the last fifty years. This is especially true for loblolly pines, the most commonly planted timber tree in the South, which are unusually adaptable. The “original” loblolly is a fast growing but often crooked and ugly tree. Genetic improvement can be very simple. You just choose the trees with the best characteristics and try to plant more of them.  We are now in the third generation of loblolly and the differences are remarkable.  

The new trees take thirty years to get as the original trees get to be in eighty.  They are also a lot straighter, more resistant to disease and have a better branching structure. You can achieve these goals in different ways. The easiest is the simple one I mentioned above.  Just gather the seeds from the best trees; grow them and repeat.   In this system the trees pollinate themselves, so there is randomness in this process.  A next step is to control pollination to ensure that the best fertilize the best. This is more labor intensive, since you have to put little bags on the trees to be sure that only the right pollen gets to the right flowers.  

Below are Virginia pines squashed by the snow.  Virginia pines are weedy trees and not much use. They don’t live long and break easily.  I saw lots of broken Virginia pines along the road. 

Bring on the clones

The latest step is cloning. Let’s explain a little about cloning in plants, lest we think about a “Caprica” scenario. Most gardeners have cloned plants.  You can clone a willow or a cottonwood just by shoving a stick into wet ground.  If you see a bunch of cottonwoods along a river, there is a good chance that they are all the same tree – genetically – as trees sprouted from roots or from sticks that lodged in the mud. I once inadvertently cloned a cottonwood when I used a freshly-cut cottonwood branch as a marking stick.  A couple days later it sprouted into a little tree. Pines are harder, but they can be done. The clones are all genetically identical, so they can be a good test for the nature v nurture question.

Good genetics can move the whole curve higher, but variation remains and good genetic are the most profitable deployed as other conditions improve.    Many of the costs associated with establishing and managing the stand of trees remain the same no matter what you plant.  If you are planning to expend a lot of energy and time on management and planning, you are well advised to spend a little more for genetically superior trees.  All trees will do better with better management, but the better trees will do better than the others. 

Improving conditions make good genes more important

In other words, the more you improve conditions and remove obstacles, the more import genetics becomes to the results and the greater the gap between the superior and the inferior trees.  It makes sense when you think in terms of potential.  It doesn’t make much difference if one tree has the genetic potential to grow  80 feet tall in twenty years while another can only grow 40, if limiting conditions prevent any of  the trees from growing more than 30 feet tall.

Limiting factors

So what are some of the limiting factors? The most obvious are climate, rainfall, soil and elevation.   These make a difference when choosing a site, but after that they are beyond our control.  But there are many limiting factors that we can control, including spacing among the trees, thinning schedules, rotation timing, competition control & fertilization.

Spacing

Trees will grow faster and stronger if there is more space between them.  It is like thinning flowers in a garden. Everything else being equal, a similar amount of wood will grow on a given piece of ground no matter how thick or thin the trees are planted, but the health and quality will be very different.   If planted too thick, you will have lots of small, maybe worthless trees.   The optimal number of trees per acre is still debated among foresters.  

Some of it depends on your goal.  If you want to produce lots of pulp, you might want to plant thick.  If you are trying to grow saw timber, you need to plant thinner.  Another consideration is that if the trees are close enough together, they will sooner shade out competition and also shade out lower branches so that the trees will essentially prune themselves, leaving wood with fewer knots.

Thinning

Thinning schedules are a type of spacing issue, but with additional considerations. Thinning does not have to be a random selection.  You can take out the inferior trees when you thin, so thinning both produces more space, more sun, water etc, but also leaves the better trees.

Controlling competition

Competition control is crucial. If you don’t control hardwoods, they will out-compete pines in most situations. Some hardwoods, such as gum and tulip trees just grow faster, but hardwoods also often have the advantage of an established root system, since they sprout from stumps or roots even after many years of being shaded out. Hardwoods can be controlled with physical methods, such as cutting, but the best way to control hardwoods these days is chemical.  

BasF makes a couple of products called “Chopper” and “Arsenal”. They kill most hardwoods but leave the pines. Unfortunately, they don’t work very well with herbaceous plants or with blackberries, which easily over top the little trees, but they still do a good job with the hardwood competition, which is the key.   

It is smart to spray with Chopper when you are establishing a pine stand. After that, you can go in with backpack sprayers.  The boys and I killed off a couple acres of invasive Ailanthus using hack and squirt (where you smack the stem with a machete and then squirt in some arsenal) and I still have to go after individuals constantly. The good thing for the landowner is that the prices of these chemical has plummeted, as they have gone off patent. IMO it is still good to buy the name brand because they support the product better and the name brand product is also fairly cheap.

Fertilization 

Fertilization is still not much used in forestry but it can increase yields. Most forests in Virginia grow on bad soil, either naturally poor or depleted by bad farming practices of times past. (The key crops of Southern Virgina, cotton and tobacco, are hard on soils.)  If the soil is good, the land is usually devoted to row crops, which pay more than trees.  (An exception is recently converted tobacco land. When the government stopped supporting tobacco crops, many tobacco farmers left the business and the land has been planted in trees. These trees are only a few years old, but they seem to be growing well.) 

Deficient Virginia soils

Virginia forest soils are almost always deficient in phosphorus and nitrogen and trees grow a lot faster when they are provided with them. You have to give both, since just providing one or the other doesn’t do much good.  You can fertilize when the stand is established and or fertilize after 6-10 years. Until that time, there is usually enough P & N for the little trees.

I fertilized my CP property with biosolids in September 2008.  It seems to have given them a good jump. 

Anyway, those are some of the things I learned at the meeting. I have drifted a little from the nature versus nurture.  I think both are important.  We cannot choose between them, since it is nearly impossible  to know where the effects of one stop and the other start and they actually change each other by being in contact. As the trees show, equalizing or improving opportunity and conditions will make genetics more  – not less – important and will make inequality more – not less – acute.  The trees don’t care; people might.

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Snow in the Virginia Woods

It has been cold again this year but this year we are also getting more snow. They got a lot of snow in southern Virginia & North Carolina, so I wanted to go down and look at the snow on the farm.  Well, it wasn’t a lot of snow by Wisconsin standards and it will melt in a few days, but there was more than usual and it created a different look for the place. You really wouldn’t guess that you were looking at southern Virginia.

I saw a couple cars in the ditch on the way down and I didn’t dare take the back roads, as I usually do.  Instead I went down I95 all the way down to Emporia and then went over on 58. I also didn’t dare drive down the dirt roads on the farm.  You can see that 623 was good in the spot above, but look near the bottom and you can see why I didn’t want to drive up the farm road.  It is harder to walk through the snow but it is nice to feel it underfoot. There were a few animal track, but it was otherwise undisturbed. It is nice to have land.

It was a long trip to see it and it took longer because of the adverse weather conditions. I finished almost the entire audio-book Infotopia, which I found very interesting and useful (I hope) in my job.   This was one of the three audio downloads on Audible.com that Mariza gave me for Christmas.   It was a good gift.  Audio books make long drives bearable and even beneficial. I lose my NPR a few miles outside Washington.  I don’t like music radio or those silly talk shows that purport to give advice that will solve problems that I don’t have. Audio books do the job.

Another good audio program is “the Teaching Company”.   Alex likes them too because they are around forty-five minutes long, which fits his workout schedule.

Anyway, take a look at the nice pictures. 

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Natural versus Sustainable

Below is my article for the next issue of “Virginia Forests”.  It is based on an earlier blog post, so if you have a feeling of deja vu, that is why.

Everybody has his/her own idea about what is natural, and often thinks everybody else’s ideas are wrong.  What is a natural forest, for example?  Is it made up only of native species?  Does it feature only local species?   Is a tree farm natural? The distinction most often made is that “natural” is what the situation would be like absent human activity.  Of course, nobody has ever seen that.  The “natural” Virginia of 1607 was the result of thousands of years of human activity.  Natural is not an attainable or even a useful goal when talking about forestry.

I think the goal should be sustainable, not “natural.”  Natural is a slippery, arbitrary and often arrogantly used term.   It assumes also that an environment that results from random chance and the interactions of non-human animals and plants is somehow qualitatively different than one with human influences and implies that human interventions are always damaging. This is just not true.   Besides all that, some environments that are natural are not sustainable and some environments that are sustainable are not natural.  Many of the most productive, beautiful and sublime environments are the results of long term human interference and management.   They are not “natural” if that term implies human-free.   But they beautiful and productive and they are sustainable.  

That is why I also quibble with words like “recovery” or “damage” used too freely when talking about human interactions with the environment. They can sometimes be appropriate.  Humans do serious damage to the environment and recovery may be necessary, but they too often go too far.   Some radical misanthropes who call themselves environmentalist actually believe that somehow the earth would be better off without humans.  Of course, this is a very short-sighted and ironically very human-based point of view. 

We would not want most human-influenced, human created, environments to revert to a pre-human state, even if that was possible and even if we could determine what non-human even looks like, since there has not been such an environment in most of the world since the end of the last ice age or before.  The wonderful “natural” environments of pre-Columbian America were by no means natural.   They were created by Native American activities, especially the use of fire, for example.  Humans have changed the environment ever since there have been humans.  Other animals have done so too.  Change is written into the book of life and all life creates change.  Everything is always in the process of becoming something else. Natural environments come back quicker than we often think and The truth is that it takes a lot of human effort to prevent nature from obliterating the most of the works of humans. 

Sustainable is clearly the better concept.  It provides a wide variety of choices and varieties of human influence. We will always have human influence as long as we are here.  So let’s go with sustainable, which is achievable and good, rather than some hypothetical “natural” state.

A well-managed tree farm clearly meets the standards of sustainability and through the “ecological services” it provides, such as cleaning water, providing wildlife habitat and just making the world a prettier place, it helps make the rest of Virginia a sustainable environment.  The constant learning and experience sharing provided by organizations such as ATFS, university extensions, departments of forestry and others helps us all adapt to changes in the environment.  This is a sustainable ecological system and we can all be proud to be participants.