I went down to the farms over last weekend. I did a lot of bushwhacking to check the boundaries and water courses and although I had long sleeves and bug repellent on, I picked up at least three ticks. I got them before they managed to bore in but something got me and made a bit of a rash. I hate ticks. I usually don’t get any, but they are very active now and I went more into the bushes than usual.
Below – spring is here. Leaves are coming out.
I am trying to stabilize one of my roads and I needed some branches etc. So I went and cut out some of the trees damaged by the machines squirting out biosolids. Some were bent so much they would not come back and others had so much bark stripped that they would be deformed. I laid them in the ruts to slow the water flow. It works well. Where I did this before on the slopes I have some vegetation coming in, but it is a lot of work, especially given the primitive tools I use. I am glad to have the truck now. That allows me to move a lot more and a lot farther. I am letting the road grow over for now.
Below – I want to keep my streams clean, so I cannot have dirt running off the roads or anyplace else.
The wildlife plots are doing well. They used a couple of them as staging places for the biosolids and those are growing like made. It is probably the most fertile half acres in the state. We planted ladino clover and some orchard grass and chicory. The clover is good because it fixes nitrogen. I like how it looks too.
Below is Blimbie. Now that I have have the other forest, I sometimes go up 95 via Emporia, which is where this is. I’ve always like Blimpie, but my favorite place used to be Togo’s. I have not seen a Togo’s for a long time. I don’t know if they are still in business.
The truck is no good unless it has the orange mud decoration.
Environmentalism and climate change fall near the bottom of most people’s priorities, according to a Pew Research study done a few months ago. Fewer and fewer people are calling themselves environmentalist. That information made me feel a little uneasy, but then I thought about it. I would not characterize myself as an environmentalist either. The term has changed, so that now people like me, who love nature and want to conserve it, but also want to use resources wisely, are not really part of the group anymore.
The most ardent and persistent friends of nature are hunters but they were among the first to be banished from the new understanding of the term. As a forest owner, I can stay in the group until someone asks me if I ever plan to harvest the trees and I say yes. I have thought about this topic before and written about it. Responsible stewardship is the responsible way to be. It is hard for me to understand anything else as a logical or moral position.
I was talking to a friend yesterday who mentioned the debate about whether or not clear cuts should ever be used. IMO, there is no debate. There is only trying to explain to uniformed but emotionally excited people why some types of forest ecology require clear cuts. But my friend made a good counterpoint. He said that for some people environmentalism was not really about the environment. It was a kind of aesthetic. They felt offended by signs of human management, so ironically humans had to manage very carefully to hide the signs.
That’s it. Environmentalism has become an aesthetic proposition to many of its adherents. That is why it is so popular among artists and celebrities. It allows them to satisfy their need for self expressions while seeming simultaneously to stand on the high groups of extreme altruism. And they can jet around the world attending concerts and events w/o guilt when they claim it is to help the environment.
I read about a split in the environmental movement. I don’t know if you can split something that was already in many separate parts. We should probably abandon the word.
Environmentalist may end up doing significant harm to the environment. As I read the polls, many people are just sick of the hyperbole. My observation, and all the measurements back it up, is that the U.S. environment is much cleaner than it was when I was young. Virtually every kind of pollutant we measure is less prevalent than it was. Yet we keep on getting the scary stories. Some would argue that you have to frighten people or they won’t listen. I don’t agree. We have to be truthful and realistic.
The environment requires constant protection AND management. I believe that I could grow timber sustainably on my land just about forever. It is not being used up or degraded. On the contrary, the land and the forest is healthier than it has ever been. Farmers using modern techniques can also harvest sustainably essentially forever. That doesn’t mean that we won’t use better and different techniques in the future. Sustainability doesn’t mean you don’t change and adapt. It means you can keep on going.
The thing that is most crippling for the environmental movement is a precautionary principle. It sounds prudent. Always be more careful. But if we had applied the precautionary principle we would never have electricity. It is always possible to ask questions. It sounds very wise to earnestly intone that we don’t find anything now, but we could find something we don’t know about. You can use that logic to block anything at all. I can use that as an argument not to take out the garbage. I just don’t know if there is a killer standing near the road.
The general hysteria in some environmental circles makes it more difficult to address real problems. We have real problems with fisheries. The real problem is overfishing, which can be solved by management and giving people property rights over some of the fishing stocks, as Iceland did. We have trouble with nutrient management, which can be addressed by using biosolids properly, but this is often blocked by environmental regulation. We face a problem with water availability, but places like Australia have shown the way to manage a scarce resource.
The true stewards of nature are those that work with it and in it to sustain it now and forever. Those that want to preserve it in some particular form just don’t understand its dynamism. The artists express themselves with paintings and sculpture. I suppose they can have gardens.
Trees in established urban areas often are be bigger than trees in rural areas. This is counterintuitive until you think about it. Although urban trees suffer more stress from human activities, they are also protected and fertilized as individual specimens and are usually spaced farther apart, so they are not in close competition. Beyond that, trees are harvested in rural areas when they reach or pass maturity, or the bugs get them and they just fall down. In urban areas, they are often patched, pampered and propped up. It is unnatural. We do it for our own artistic tastes. It doesn’t make much ecological sense, but we humans develop attachments.
I recently visited a stand of forty-five year old loblolly. This stand is past prime. Loblollies are sprinters. They grow fast and although a few can live as long as 200 years, most don’t. (The oldest known loblolly pine is 245 years old, but none other is more than 200). They grow a lot slower after they reach the age of around thirty-five and don’t grow much at all after they are fifty. If you look at the picture above, you will see that the trees are planted too thickly. This and the stagnation of age make them much more vulnerable to disease and attacks by insects, such as the southern pine beetle. Most succumb to disease or accident long before they reach the century mark. Their lifespan is actually very much like three score and ten, mentioned as the lifespan of a man. Some of the individual trees are very impressive, and it is good to have a few of them, but the forest itself is not as healthy as it could be when it is dominated by over-aged trees. In fact, an over aged tree stand is much like a person with a disease such as TB. Their poor health may adversely impact the health of those around them.
Below – my guess is that these trees are around 80 years old. They remain healthy because they are isolated and w/o competition and are about as big as loblolly get. They really are not part of a forest. They are up against a pasture, which is well fertilized by the grazing animals. They look good, but they are growing almost not at all anymore.Notice that they are not much bigger than the forty-five year old trees pictured above
I feel bad whenever I see a large tree cut down, but I also don’t like to walk through the geriatric ward for trees in terminal decline. Trees live a long time, but they don’t live forever and as with any other living thing, few will reach anything near their maximum lifespan. A tree in decline is not a beautiful thing and it is not good for the health of neighboring trees. If we manage to save the old tree this year, it is not like it will live on forever. The best choice is to replace the old tree with a couple of new ones and admire the big and healthy old tree somewhere else. Think total ecosystem, not individual specimen.
I visited George Washington’s birthplace (below) on the Northern Neck the other day and I wondered if little George played under some of the big trees. I doubt it. Those trees would have to be around 300 years old and few trees, even most of the long-lived oaks, don’t make it that long. It is easy to be misled. An oak tree grows very slowly after it reaches 100 years old, so a 300 year old oak tree is not very much bigger than a 100 year old tree.
It is fun to think of the trees as a living link with our past, but unfortunately some of our past is too long ago. There are still some trees at Monticello that remember Thomas Jefferson & some at Mount Vernon planted when George Washington owned it, but they are up against their maximum lifespan. We are now reaching the edge of the Civil War trees. I can remember a time when there were living trees at Gettysburg that still bore the marks of the battle. Each year they are fewer and many of us alive today will outlive the last of them. (The longest-lived trees in Virginia, BTW, are bald cypress found in the southeast corner of the state.)
Below is Pope Creek divided by a sandbar from the Potomac River. The Potomac is miles wide at this point; from this place it looks like a really big lake or even the ocean.
The point is that you have to think ahead. Assume that the big old tree will die and plant similar little trees somewhere else. Nothing lasts forever, but working with nature we live with sustainable change.
We are all excited that natural communities offset some of the carbon emitted by burning fossil fuels, but we have to put it all in context. We have to recall that carbon offset is only one of the thousands of ecological services performed by natural communities. I will say more about that below, but let’s start with the carbon.
Below is construction on a Hot-Lane interchange on I 495. This area used to be covered with trees. We traded trees for travel time. Everything we do is a tradeoff. We should just be sure we know what trades we are making and make them well. More on congestion pricing at this link.
Carbon is as necessary to life as oxygen. Growing plants covert carbon dioxide to biomass and release it when they decompose or respire and this cycle has been going on for billions of years. The processes have been roughly in balance.
They have to be; otherwise all the carbon would have been used up billions of years ago and life on earth would have perished. This explains why a mature ecosystem absorbs little carbon dioxide. And this is the problem with offsets. An established old growth forest doesn’t remove much carbon from the atmosphere. A rapidly growing new forest soaks up a lot of carbon, and that is what we are growing now, but eventually it becomes a mature forest. In the short run, offsets can compensate for a small percentage of industrial CO2 emissions but in the long run carbon absorption will balance carbon release.
The USDA has a good online calculator for how much carbon is sequestered in various types of forests. Forests can sequester carbon in the branches, roots, soils and understory of living forests, as well as long-lived wood products (the wood that in your house will be around a long time.) Offsets will buy us some time and they are worth doing for that reason alone, but there are lots of other reasons to preserve natural lands and maintain the ecological services they provide.
Below is a clearcut. This was covered by a mixed hardwood forest and I don’t know why the owner decided to slick off the trees. I don’t like it, but it is not my business and this is not necessarily the end of the forest. It can be replanted or grow back naturally, unless it is coverted to other uses. By the end of the summer, this bare ground will be covered with vegetation and provide good wildlife habitat. In three years, it will be ideal bobwhite quail habitat, for example. It looks really ugly to human eyes, however.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone
We are used to getting ecological services for free or by imposing costs on others. Economists call them externalities. Among ecological services these include things like carbon, sediment removal, water, air, biodiversity, open space and natural beauty. But it’s getting harder to get these things free and others are increasingly unwilling or unable to provide them as a public service and we are facing a tragedy of the commons. By 2025 Virginia will probably welcome 3 million new residents and we are projected to lose a million acres of forest land to development. (When a forest is harvested, it can grow back. When it is converted to other uses, such as homes or parking lots, it is lost for a long time or essentially forever.) As our populations grow and demands increase, it becomes clearer that we have to find prices for these priceless goods. Otherwise they will continue to be wasted and abused.
Markets can handle risk, but they do less well with uncertainty. A market in ecological services requires a lot of the same things as other markets. It is harder in the ecological services market because definitions and measurements are difficult. Any measures have to be science-based and compatible with regulations. Beyond that, markets thrive when transaction costs are low; rules are clear; there are credible measures; an adequate number of buyers and sellers and – perhaps most important , trust – trust that contracts will be honored, goods and services will be more or less as represented and trust that markets will persist for a reasonable amount of time.
Below are mature beech trees in front of a new pine forest. This is great wildlife habitat, since it combines old woods, young woods and ground vegetation.
Given the unusual nature of ecological service, the dominance of regulation and the need for a long-lived authority to define products and enforce agreements, there is a useful role for government to jump start the creation of a such a market. Section 2709 of the new Farm Bill gives the USDA the responsibility to study and foster markets for ecosystem services. In our region we also have things like the Bay Bank.
Markets are usually the best way to aggregate information, allocate resources and organize diverse needs and contributions. Now is an exciting time for ecological services markets. This is how it looks at the early stages of a market formation. There are lots of entrants, a plethora of good ideas and chaos. We have to tolerate ambiguity, while reducing it. From all this ferment I am sure solutions will come.
The problem with not putting a price on nature is that it becomes too expensive. Landowners may dread a visit by an environmental activist. They fear the discovery of a rare species or a sensitive ecology on their land. Why should that be?
Below is the Lewis & Clark monument in Charlottesville, near the Omni Hotel where our conference on ecological services was held.
Think about what should be an analogous situation. What if a geologist shows up at your house and says that he thinks there is gold on your land. Do you throw him out of your house and avoid him next time he comes around? If someone wants to show you a better way to grow pine trees or crops on your land, do you feel you have to call your lawyer to protect you? Why not?
Of course you are delighted to find gold on your land and you are enthusiastic about making it more productive in terms of crops or timber because it makes your land more valuable and gives you more options. Finding rare species or having local environmentalists take unusual interest in your land will have the opposite effect because the benefits of the ecological services are widely shared by the greater community, while the landowner bears the expenses and the downside risk. This is more than unjust; it is stupid.
I am continually astonished by the passion among landowners I meet to be good stewards of their land. Most want to leave a legacy to future generations. They are willing to spend money and time to protect and improve the environment, but landowners need to be concerned about open-ended liability and uncertainty related to changing standards. And they are afraid that self-appointed “stakeholders” will dictate expensive or specific solutions and that they will lose control of their land.
Above is spring-time coming to Charlottesville, VA on March 13
Environmental gold
Endangered species are rare and precious, like gold. Ecological services are valuable and useful products of the land, just like timber and crops. But unlike gold, timber or a corn crop, we lack a good way to price most ecological goods and services. I am not advocating that we find the price of everything and value of nothing. But value has to have some relation in price society is ready to pay. As it stands today, beyond the rewards of virtue, landowners have few incentives to produce ecological services and little financial support to make needed investments. Let me return to my gold analogy. You discover gold on your land. The estimated value of the gold is $1,000,000 but it requires a $50,000 investment to get it. You would be foolish not to make this investment because you will make twenty times as much as you spend. Now imagine that you still are required to make that $50,000 investment and let the miners use your land, no matter how inconvenient, but all the gold that you get from your land is distributed equally to everyone in the country. How generous. Your share is less than a penny, but you also get the satisfaction that you have done something nice. Of course, other stakeholders might still demonize you (it cost them nothing to complain) if you are less than 100% enthusiastic about paying the full costs or if you cannot come up with the $50k.
Welcome to the priceless world of ecological services.
The incentives are wrong. We have to change them and make it more profitable to produce or protect clean water, air, wildlife and natural beauty. This will give the incentive and the means to those who do the work and make the decisions. When I mentioned this incentive problem to an apartment dwelling friend, he scoffed and told me that landowners just had obligations and that we should just pass laws forcing them to comply. Let’s overlook the totalitarian aspects implied by this statement and consider only the practical implications for our environment. Is a command, compel and control paradigm the best way to move forward or should we try to get cooperation?
Governments can make all sorts rules, but enforcing them is difficult w/o general support. (Many of the most environmentally degraded countries in the world have beautiful laws on their books, but nobody pays attention. Don’t be fooled by so-called international comparisons,) This is especially true in out-of-the-way places, i.e. places like forests. A lax & casual attitude toward rules you don’t support is easy when nobody is watching. But making one-way, difficult to enforce, rules has worse implications than simple non-compliance. We also lose the ideas and intelligence that may solve some of our worst problems.
Enthusiasm needed, not mere compliance
Nobody is saying we should just get rid of the rules. Anybody who remembers how things were thirty or forty years ago knows that we needed to take action and it worked. But a generation ago, environmental protection was simpler. Big sources were easy to identify. You could look up to the smokestack or down to the pipe and make a rule to stop it. We did a good job of cleaning up and we have eliminated most of the easy ones already. I tried all day to find a dirty smokestack so that I could put the photo with this post; I couldn’t find one. Today we not only have a challenge controlling pollution; we have even a bigger problem finding and identifying them. More than 70% of the pollution entering Chesapeake Bay comes from non-point sources. It is no longer the end of the pipe, or even the end of the cow, but pollution may be run–off from suburban lawns or fertilized fields. It might be from your house or car. Beyond that, environmental degradation can occur both from things you fail to do and from things you do. We have a big storm water problem in Northern Virginia because people make sure water quickly runs away from their houses, but they don’t provide a place to soak in. And drivers demand that tons of salt be dropped on any ice or snow that dares form on roads. (BTW – we essentially require people to pollute the Bay by allowing the threat of lawsuits to fall heavily on anybody who fails to salt. Sometimes bad things happen because of not in spite of our best efforts.)
In this more complicated environment, we really need to use the power of people’s imagination and intelligence. But you cannot force people to be creative. The rule makers cannot even know which rules to make. With the right incentives, however, individuals all across America will be actively looking for opportunities to make things better. The best way to harness this “people power” is through a decentralized, distributed decision-making method, where individuals are autonomous but aggregated. That way we can take advantage of all the information available to the masses of unrelated individuals and allow those people closest, most affected and most knowledgeable to have the greatest impact. All these things together is what we usually call a market. We need market solutions to environmental challenges.
Typical economic statistics do not include most of the things that keep us alive. A big reason is that we just don’t understand that “ecological services” we get for free because we have not figured out good ways to measure them. Estimates of the true worth of ecological services can range from near zero (a free good) to absurdly astronomical figures. I suppose we can say that they are priceless in both cases.
But we do indeed need to find a way to measure these services, because anything that doesn’t get measured gets wasted. Anything that belongs to everybody gets abused by anybody. And anytime the ones getting the benefit are not the ones paying for it … you get the picture.
Above is a spring time robin.
We discussed how to value and compensate ecological services and compare them to more conventional economic measurements at an ecosystems services seminar in Charlottesville. There was a lot to think about and I will write more about it tomorrow.
A solution is elegant if it is gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct. Elegance also implies beauty and a profound understanding. The opposite of elegant solutions are clumsy, complicated and cumbersome. The parts fit together poorly and there are too many of them. We are working toward this sort of non-elegant solution to our problem of CO2.
I read today in Scientific American that the EPA will begin a carbon register. This will be a sort of Doomsday Book of carbon emissions, detailing emissions great and small with the eventual intent of regulating and taxing them. (You will recall that William the Conqueror commissioned the original Doomsday Book precisely so that he could squeeze the maximum taxes out of the newly subjugated Saxons.)
The announcement of the carbon Doomsday Book was greeted with ecstasy and enthusiasm by the chattering, regulating and taxing classes. They anticipate this will be as useful to them as the medieval version was to the Norman barons. If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it and if it stops moving subsidize it. This becomes much easier if you have detailed records. I am not against taxing carbon. On the contrary, I think we should tax it a lot. It is the most elegant way of reducing greenhouse emissions and weaning us away from oil, which is often controlled by bad men in unstable places. (We don’t fight wars FOR oil, but we certainly have trouble BECAUSE of it.) The carbon tax is elegant in its simple form. It creates the proper incentive and it has a minimal effect on freedom. It actual solves the problem while letting people and firms use their intelligence, imaginations and energy to find innovative ways to benefit from the new situation. That is why we won’t get the simple version.
Inelegant solutions persist because they create opportunities for well-placed people to squeeze out fees, skim off profits & collect tolls. A good metaphor, in fact, is a bumpy, winding toll road full of steep turns and choke points. Lots of people can collect tolls at these places. Others exploit the traffic charging higher prices to those who inevitably get stuck on the road. Garages make money by fixing flat tires and broken axles. The authorities can reward their friends with permits and special exemptions. And all the crooks can pretend that they want to fix the problem. They probably hold telethons; celebrities attend; politicians make promises. All this frenetic activity distracts the mass of people like a shinny object. They may even thank the perps for being inconvenience and ripped off. Occasionally, someone will smooth down a few bumps or fill some pot holes. Regulators will force some of the greediest exploiters to lower their prices, and everybody is grateful, but those who could really solve the problem in a systemic way make sure that nobody builds a bypass that will improve conditions at the expense of their sweet deals.
So the carbon Doomsday Book will form the basis of some kind of cap & trade. Cap & trade can work. It worked beautifully, inexpensively and elegantly to reduce the pollution (SO2, NOX etc) that led to acid rain. But it requires as preconditions a relatively small number of participants with an easily measured output working under roughly similar conditions enjoying available alternative options all subsumed under a system that can ensure against cheating and/or excessively gaming the system. Carbon cap & trade meets none of those conditions because carbon is everywhere.
Every human activity produces CO2. Notice I did not use the qualifier “almost”, because you are producing CO2 as long as you are breathing and even after you stop doing that, you continue to emit CO2 when you decompose. When you include other greenhouse gases, such as methane, you covered almost anything you can think of doing beyond breathing.
CO2 is not pollution. It is a necessary part of the ecological system. We just may have added a bit too much of it for the current balance. That means that regulating this is extremely difficult through anything except a very simple tax on the fossil forms of CO2 (oil, coal, gas etc).
You can imagine the absurdities & shenanigans that will come from a political interpretation of the cap & trade on ubiqutous carbon. Politically powerful groups will get exemptions. Others will figure out elaborate ways to game the system. Maybe if all our employees just held their breath … I am not completely unbiased. My forests produce carbon credits, which I could sell to rich celebrities, who can then devastate the atmosphere with guilt-free impunity. I explained how I rationalize this in an earlier post, but you will find people a lot smarter than I am with even better rationalization. They will all form long lines at the government trough. Most will get more than the couple hundred dollars a year my forest land earns by doing things less useful than growing trees.
The cap & trade will cost us at least $646 billion (yes billion with a b) by 2019. I think that is a price we must be willing to pay. Price is the only thing that reliably stimulates conservation and energy innovation. Experience shows that CAFE standards just make activists feel good and provide political cover. And all the talk about conservation is just people talking until the prices go up. In 2006, the U.S. succeeded in reducing its CO2 emission during a time of rapid economic growth. No other major country had ever done that. How? The only thing that was different was price of oil.
Besides, it doesn’t have to be all downside. The potential energy solutions are related to some very cool technologies (nanotech, biotech, better materials etc) and the advances might well be worth more than the cost – IF the incentives are right. We need to keep it simple and elegant. A simple tax on carbon will do that. Cap & Trade might work for carbon too, but given the fecklessness of politicians it will probably cost more than it should and produce less innovation than it could.
I went down to the farms today. I had nothing special to do, but diligence and vigilance demands attention. The new growth on the loblolly will start in a few weeks and the old needles are a drab in anticipation of the energy that will go into the new. None of the hardwood trees is budding out. Although Brunswick is more than 150 miles south of Washington, spring comes just a little bit later. I don’t know why. Maybe it is because Washington is a heat island, as most urban areas are with all their heat absorbing surfaces and heat producing human activities. One problem in measuring changes in overall temperature is that as the measuring stations are surrounded by urban areas, the readings are biased by the buildings nearby.
Above is one of the streams near the road. The banks are just starting to green up. In back is a wetland about two acres. The stream shifts. I have seen the main bed in three different places. It ranges over around 100 yards and I am never sure where I will find the main stream. Below is Genito Creek that runs through part of our land. Look carefully. The creek is very wide at this point and the bottom is reddish clay, so it doesn’t stand out clearly in the photo at this time of year. The creek changes course and sand bars build and disappear. The forest near the creek is mature, but the shifts tend to knock down the big trees.
Above shows the stream management zone between two areas of pine. The SMZ protect the streams and provide corridors for wildlife. Some of the trees in the SMZ are very big. According to the records, the zones were established in 1958. don’t know how old the trees were when the zones were established. When the leaves are on the trees, you cannot see how they interact with the pines. Below – I have been exploring the new property in Freeman, VA. The forest is a little older and the ground is flatter, so it is easier to get around. I was surprised to find these big rocks in the SMZ. You find these kinds of outcroppings in mountains. This area is mostly flat. For my friends and relatives in cold climates, let me point out that the green leaves you see are holly. It stays green all year long around here and thrives in the understory, so the woods are never completely bare.
A lot of water is flowing and the roads are muddy. I am glad to get my truck muddy again. It is not a real truck unless it has the red clay spray marks up the wheel wells.
Although this is the least attractive part of the year – the wear of winter just before the burst of spring – it is also the easiest time to move around. Last year’s brambles are as weak as they will get and I can push through them. The ticks are active if it gets at all warm, but chiggers are not out yet; snakes are not active, no mosquitoes or flies. This year it is easier than before. The thinning and fertilizing operations of last fall made some paths. Beyond that, the trees are just getting bigger and starting to shade out some of the brush.
I walked around the SW boundary, down to the creek. My neighbor cut timber year before last. The boundary trees stand like a row of sentinels. He had a lot of hardwood brush. I don’t think he is going to replant. The guy who sold me my property called to tell me that this place is on the market. Not many people replant before they sell. Replant might be the wrong word, in any case. It was natural re-growth before. If he just leaves it alone, it will come in with tulip trees, some oaks. This is what he had before and it will come up from the roots. The pines cannot compete with this. The problem is that a lot of the re-growth will be inferior. They tended to selectively cut in the old days, which meant that they took the best and left the worst. This pattern will persist into the next generation if they come back from the roots.
Above is part of Genito Creek. You can see the sand bars. They form and disappear. You can also see how the water undercuts the trees on the banks and eventually causes them to fall in. I also found some signs of beavers. They probably cannot do much harm here, and may be beneficial if they make a little pond at this point. Judging from the composition of the forests along the flats, I don’t think this would be the first time beavers have damed up this creek.
I wrote this article about investing in forest lands for the next issue of “Virginia Forests.” It is based on a posting I made a couple months ago, so it should look familiar.Below are five-year-old pines.
We own lots of things during our lifetimes but we form special bonds with land; it is our connection to the earth and our legacy for future. There is no surprise that people have deep feelings for land that has been in their families for generations, but it is astonishing how fast the same sorts of connections form with adopted land.
I have loved forests and wanted to have my own part as long as I can remember, but owning a forest is not something you can easily do. Many forest owners inherit their land. Others have long connections with the forestry community. I was completely new. I would have to think about it long and hard. I thought about it for more than twenty years. I couldn’t afford to buy a forest as a luxury. My forest had to be an investment that would at least break even, so I started to study the economics of forestry. I was surprised and encouraged to learn that forestry is an excellent, if illiquid, investment. According to “Forbes” magazine, timber investments from 1990 – 2007 timber produced a compounded annual return of 12.88%. You can’t beat that if, and only if, you have the time and ability to wait for nature to take its course. There are several ways to invest in forestry.
Below are twelve-year-old pines. They are growing very well, but are a little thick. We will probably thin early – in two or three years.
Many people who invest in forestry do so through Timber Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs). That option didn’t appeal to me. That makes forestry just another investment. My logic was the reverse. I wanted to own a forest and I needed to justify it as an investment, not the other way around. I wanted my forest that I could stand on and manage. After investigating the economics, I decided that I felt secure enough in my judgment on this matter to base my retirement savings on growing trees rather on a capricious stock market.
Of course finding the right forest is harder than buying stocks or bonds. I needed to find a place close enough that I could visit but far enough from my home in Northern Virginia that I could afford the land. My research took me to Southside Virginia on the Piedmont south of Richmond. I quickly learned that successful forestry on my tract of land requires successful forestry on the land in the neighborhood. Timber is heavy and hard to transport. Unless you have enough nearby forested acres, skilled forestry contractors and mills to process the timber and sustain a forestry industry, you cannot grow trees profitably. The forests of Southside Virginia meet these requirements.
The real estate broker didn’t think I was serious when I called and he probably didn’t change his mind when I showed up at his office in Lawrenceville. He tried to steer me to small tracts of land suitable for a getaway cabin. I told him that I wanted a place for forestry – real forestry. “You would never be able to build your cabin,” he warned. This is just land good for growing trees. He smiled when I told him that is exactly what I wanted.
We looked at several tracts of well developed timberland and then told me about a recent clear cut, which was less expensive. The trees were two years old, but there was good site preparation and I could see the tops of the little pines poking above the weeds, slash & brush. I loved the potential. I also liked the streams and the mature hardwoods left near them.
Above is the land as we bought it in 2005. Below is three years later in 2008. Trees grow. The ones in the lower picture are thinned to make them more resistant to pests and improve wildlife habitat. Notice the different density compared with the twelve-year-old trees in the picture with the truck. Those are planted a little too thick, IMO, which is why we will thin early. There is disagreement re how thick pines should be planted. The latest practice is to plant thinner for the wildlife and pest benefits I mentioned, as well as the idea that a thinner forest will produce more chip-and-saw and saw timber … eventually.
The smartest thing a new landowner can do it to get to know the neighbors and make some local friends. They are the ones who protect your land … or not. Fortunately, the land I bought already had a hunt club associated with it and they were happy just to keep on doing what they had been doing. The hunt club maintains the gates and the “no trespassing” signs. In this rural area, everybody knows everybody else, so it is helpful if they know me too. Local friends are also very helpful in suggesting contractors.
Below you can see some of the diversity of the tree farm. In the front is a food plot (a little beaten down because they used it as a staging area for the thinning and biosolid applications. It will better next year.) The pine plantation is in the middle and you can see the mature hardwoods (oak, beech, tulip poplar & sweet gum) in the background. This provides a balanced habitat for wildlife. I think it just looks nicer too.
There are lots of things a forest owner needs to know and do. Fortunately, there are lots of people and organizations eager to help. One of the first things a new owner should do is become a certified tree farmer. Sustainable forestry is becoming increasingly important and the American Tree Farm System helps landowners understand and use the best practices on their own tree farms. The ATFS requires a forestry plan, which informs choices and is a key to making better decisions. It pays off. Another of the first stops is the local forester. The Virginia Department of Forestry can hook the new owner into networks of helpers and information and help fund programs benefit forests all over the state. The Virginia Forest Landowner Update is the place you can find out about events and programs for forest owners. Many of the events are free or inexpensive. I attended many field days and I learned about things like soils, pests, invasive species, better trees, taxation questions and a lot more from events available through the update. Finally, getting a good forestry consultant is a must. I hope someday to know how to do many of the forestry activities on my own (or make my kids do them), but I will never have the expert knowledge of a trained forester who works full-time on these issues.
I joined the Virginia Forestry Association and got the communication director job for the Virginia tree farm project of the ATFS. It is a great privilege and learning opportunity. My job mostly consists of writing articles for the Virginia Forests magazine four times a year and I get to write the story of the tree farmer of the year. The more successful tree farms you see, the more you understanding your own. I have never met or even heard about a tree farmer who didn’t love his forest, and everybody you meet is eager to talk about what they did on their own land and help others do good things too.
I have been happy with my forestry investment and the forestry community it opened for me. You cannot rush the trees, so I sometimes wish I had got into the business sooner and been further along. But I then I remember that I couldn’t. Besides the obvious lack of money (or more correctly mortgage credit), I didn’t have enough understanding of the forestry business. Liking trees is not enough. You need to know a lot more than I do, but I get along with a little help from my friends.
Forestry on Televison
Forestry seems to be enjoying some popularity. There are two competing logger shows on cable TV. The first was Ax Men on History Channel and now we have Extreme Loggers on Discovery and American Loggers. Of course, these programs show the most exciting, challenging and dangeous part of forestry. For me the growing and environmental aspects are most interesting, but those processes unfold slowly and prosaically. It doesn’t make good TV. They also show the forestry in big, natural forests. Tree farms are more civilized and easy to work. Nevertheless, logging can be indeed a tough job. Here are some pictures of logging machines.
I am a Virginia tree farmer. In addition to traditional forest products, I know that my land is helping to protect water quality, cleaning the air, giving wildlife a place to live and just making the world more beautiful. If you are interested in learning more about tree farming, please feel free to contact me for a personal point of view, or contact the tree farm system at the links below.
We all depend on each other in our interconnected environment and nobody can do it alone, so I joined the American Tree Farm System. This hooks me in to people who can help me do a better job and connects me to others who need me to help them. It makes me feel good that the things I do on my land and the plans are make are “forest certified” by an organization with long experience in making forests sustainable. I recommend that anybody who owns even small woodlots consider becoming a certified tree farmer.
A lot has been changing in the woods. We have learned how to grow more wood on the same land. We know better how to protect and restore soils. It has become more crucial to guard water resources and we have a whole new commitment to removing excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Besides markets for timber, we now have markets for ecological services. We have a lot of great partners in Virginia.
The health of my forest and our environment depends on the choices made by other Virginian and other Americans. That is why we all need to be concerned about each other. No individual or group can come up with a comprehensive plan for a sustainable environment. But together we can, as we all make decisions based on our own unique knowledge, intelligence, imaginations and priorities. Information is important in making choices and every tree farmer is on the cutting edge about his/her own farm. I try to share my experience through my blog on forestry. And I told the story of how I came to buy my own forests at this link.
