Category: Virginia forestry

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Food plots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Webs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Forestry May 2012

The trees have lots of new growth.  Loblolly pines grow throughout the summer. In that, they are different from white pines and many others that throw up new growth only in the spring. But the spring time is the big growth spurt for the loblollies too. The trees on CP are now nine years old.  I recall how barren it used to look with a few pine springs barely visible among the weeds. It is good to recall this, since I have five acres of newly planted longleaf, which are looking even more desolate.  The picture above shows how trees have grown. Below is the new longleaf plantation.  Longleaf seedlings look like clumps of grass.  Of course some of the green you see in the picture really are clumps of grass or weeds. It will look good in a couple of years.  Eric Goodman also planted some bald cypress in the wet areas and third generation loblolly at one end.

Below is the closeup of a longleaf seedling.  We did good site preparation, with brown and burn last winter. This should give the little pines a head start.

 Below is a “vernal pond”, i.e. a big mud puddle, with lots of tadpoles. Amphibians need these sorts of things.  If the pond is permanent enough to have many fish, the fish eat the eggs and tadpoles. If it is too small, the pond dries out before the amphibians are through with their development.  These kind of ponds are not attractive, but they are a necessary part of the web of life.

Below the hunt club planted various wildlife food and warm season grasses to encourage wildlife, especially animals like Bobwhite quail.  Dominion Power, which owns the power lines, is paying us to offset the costs. It saves them the trouble and money of maintaining the cover.  I have 8 acres under those lines and not using it would be a waste. 

Below shows Boy Scouts clearing some paths.  I guess they win merit badges for woodsmen skills.  They need land to practice and I have the space.

Below shows my new sycamores. They are growing fast along the watercourses.  They volunteered a couple years ago.  I have been cutting out the box elders and other brush. The sycamores do well in moist soils and send down a thick network of roots that holds the banks. They are not much use from the forestry profit point of view but they are beautiful trees and they get really big. I am a little allergic to them. I cough when I cut a lot of branches. Sycamores have a very distinctive smell. I suppose there is some relation.  They always remind me of the brief time I lived in Indiana, on the banks of the Wabash far away.

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Joy of Forestry

This is my contribution to the next issue of Virginia Forests.  It is based on some earlier posts, but is arranged in a different way.  I have the joy of writing the article for the Tree Farm in each issue.  Below is my article.

If you want to grow longleaf pine, you need fire. Longleaf is a fire-dependent species. And we want to grow longleaf pine.  That is why we clear-cut five acres when we did the thinning winter last year.  After that, we sprayed to get at the poplars, which had grown from roots. In December we burned.  One of my friends got some longleaf seedlings that went in this spring. Other friends made fire lanes with their tractor.  I say “we” but I really mean them. All this happened while I was working at my “real” job outside the country.

I am the luckiest man in the world. People always help.  Together we are creating a demonstration forest in Brunswick County. It will showcase best forestry practices for this part of Virginia. The land includes already a wonderful stand of loblolly.  We will apply different silvicultural practices (various thinning densities, fire, herbicide treatments etc.) to show the different results.

The longleaf are near the edge of their range in southern Virginia, so it is less certain. If the climate changes, however, the range may move north. Longleaf once grew all around the South. Today they are less common because they are harder to grow than loblolly. That is why the State of Virginia is helping us grow them.  Longleaf require fire to grow well and are hard to establish. Once established they are great trees. The caveat is the long needles (hence the name long leaf). Ice storms can weigh down the branches and cause damage.  Individual longleaf are beautiful trees and a vigorous stand of longleaf is even more beautiful. I won’t live long enough to see my trees mature, but I hope to enjoy their vigorous adolescence.

My experience with forestry in Virginia has greatly exceeded my expectations. Owning forest land had long been one of my dreams and forestry fits well with my full-time job working as a Foreign Service Officer. I move from a lot.  I started in Brazil and worked in Norway, Poland and Iraq during the war. Now I am back in Brazil. Forests provide roots – literally – in my nomadic existence. I move; my forest abides. I would have a place to come back to, where I could watch developments over the years. This was my dream, at least, but I never thought it would come true.  I finally managed to buy some land on my fiftieth birthday, back in 2005. I thought I knew more than I really did. I read a lot of books. This was not enough. I was also a little out of my element in rural southern Virginia. I was born and raised in the urban environment of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  When I think back on my land “adventure” it seems pretty dumb. I clearly was in over my head. I was saved by the kindness of strangers who became friends.  

Local people gave me advice; hunt clubs assisted with land management; forestry officials were helpful; Boy Scout troops wanted to make trails; Tree Farm gave me management goals and there were lots of inexpensive seminars on everything from timber selection to wildlife management.

All I had to do was let people share my dreams and they contributed time and more importantly local knowledge and forestry expertise. Sophisticated people say that people like me are naïve, maybe so.  I believe in win-win outcomes and I don’t care if it sounds cliché. The secret of joy is finding ways to give people what they want in the framework of what you want. Maybe I don’t “maximize profit”, but I am morally certain that I get more than I would in other ways. I find that joy in my forestry and in the friendly people of Virginia.

I just could not do forestry without all the help I get.  I am neither smart enough nor rich enough to make it happen alone. My friends get to use my land for hunting and other recreation, but they use it in ways that I want it to be used. What is important to me is that my trees are growing robustly; that the water that runs off the land is clear; that the soil is getting better; and that wildlife abounds. I get all this. I get to watch the trees grow as long as I live and leave it to the kids.  Is there anything else anybody could reasonably want? Maybe a horse when I get too old to walk around comfortably, but that would be another story. 

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Wildlife Management

We (Alex, Espen & I) went down to the farms. I needed to discuss wildlife plots with the hunt club. I signed an agreement with Dominion Power about the eight acres on our Freeman property that run under their power lines. Dominion will cost share with us, i.e. they will pay for part of the seed, fertilizers, lime and labor that goes into making the land under the wires into a productive non-forest habitat.  

Trees fill in very quickly in Virginia and power companies spend fortunes keeping them down under the power lines & they tend to do it in ways that annoy people with herbicides. It is much better for them to partner with landowners and hunt clubs who can provide local knowledge and a love of the land. It is a win all around.  Dominion pays less to us than it would have to pay spraying or mowing crews AND it can brag about the ecological correctness of the results. We have a total plan for the tract too, BTW

The hunt club guys, many of whom are farmers who own equipment, have agreed to plant and maintain the wildlife areas, according to a plan made for me by a wildlife biologist. I cut & pasted the basic plan at the end of this post.

I  wanted to see what kind of damage the recent hurricane had done. We are far inland but Hurricane Irene still dumped a lot of rain and engendered high winds. My newly thinned pines were vulnerable to this sort of thing.  We suffered little damage, however. A few trees were knocked down, but not so much that you would comment if you didn’t know already.

Finally, I wanted to see the place where we will plant longleaf pine. The picture below shows the clear cut we did last January. Things grew back really quick. The yellow poplars were already about six feet high. To make sure the longleaf get a good start, we sprayed from a helicopter.

My pictures – up top shows the right of way where we will install wildlife plots. Below that is an existing wildlife plot on the CP acreage for reference. The next picture shows rabbit dogs. These little dogs chase the rabbits out of the brush for the hunters. Some of the local guys train their dogs on our land every week. There is an art to this. The owners know all the dogs by name (they look the same to me) and they know their lineage. When the dogs chase the rabbits, the younger, faster dogs go first. Older ones follow. They are slower but have more experience to pace themselves. Who knew it was so complex?  

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Dominion Virginia Power Wildlife Habitat Enhancement Program

John Matel Property (T-5727, N36.74 W77.74)

Brunswick, VA

Area: 8 acre Dominion Virginia Power right-of-way to be planted into a mix of native warm season grass, forbs and wildflowers

                -10ft wide firebreak will be established along one side of right-of-way (not under cost share program), will be used for understory burning of planted pines

Species Mix:

Species Rate (lbs of pure live seed/acre)

Big Bluestem      2lbs/acre

Virginia Wild Rye              2 lbs/acre

Partridge Pea     1 lb/acre

Black-eyed Susan             0.05lb/acre

Butterflyweed  0.5lb/acre

Seeding Date: March 1st to April 15th (May 1st at latest)

Site Preparation:

•             See attached NRCS fescue spray chart

o             Mow existing vegetation in late summer (late August/early September)

o             Spray existing mix of fescue vegetation in fall 2011 (September/October) with glyphosate (follow all label instructions)

o             May need a second spray in spring 2012

o             Sow seed mix between March 1st and April 15th (May 1st at the latest) with a no-till drill (1/4 inch depth)

OR

o             Lightly disk planting area, follow with cultipacker or drag a cedar limb to create a smooth, firm seedbed, sow seed with broadcast spreader (use carrier of pelletized lime to help disseminate seed) and follow with cultipacking or dragging to lightly place seed in soil (sow at ¼ inch depth)

o             Leave at least a 15ft buffer on all drainage areas (2 low areas), do not spray or plant in these areas

Maintenance:

•             Starting in year 3 or 4 after establishment being a rotational burning or disking regime

o             Burning: Burn 1/3 of the area each year between January and early April (not recommended due to transmission line)

o             Disking: Disk 1/3 of the area each year between November and mid-March

•             Spot spray as needed if competing vegetation becomes a problem

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Forest Pictures – Continued

A few more pictures from the farm visits.

Above is the CP forest road to SR 623. Below are some of the blackberry brambles. A few years ago they formed thickets all over the place. Now they are being shaded out on much of the land.

Below is the pool near the sycamore. We put in some rocks to stop the erosion. It used to be obscured by multiflora rose. I cut a bunch of them out, but most of the job was done by the shade of the growing trees. 

Below shows ferns, which are becoming more common as the trees shade more of the forest floor. 

Below is my American chestnut. I planted two seeds. One came up. 

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Farewell Forest For Now

Alex & I went down to the farms today.  It may be my last time in a long time. There was not much I needed to do. I cut down some of the brush that was shading my bald cypress. We are just a little north & east of the natural range of the bald cypress.  I figure if we have climate change, we will be right in the middle.  Since a cypress can live a couple hundred years, it will spend most of its life in that future.  Above are a row of volunteer sycamore trees.  I trimmed out the extra ones as well as the box elder that were among them. Below is my bald cypress, which is across the little road from those sycamores.  This area is not productive from the forestry point of view, but I am making it aesthetically more what I like.

The meadows are overgrown with yarrow & the white flowering plants are towering over and displacing my clover.  Yarrow is supposed to be a medicinal herb and is supposed to cure toothaches and be a disinfectant for cuts.  I don’t dislike the yarrow, but I liked my clover better.  It has been a little dry lately, which seems to favor the yarrow.   Larry Walker and the hunt club planted some wildlife mixture on the top plot.  It seems to have a variety of things, including at least some corn, sunflower and soy.  Below is the corn-sunflower-soy plot and below that is my overgrown yarrow plow and at the end is the same plot last year about this time.  You can see the whole posting at this link.

We established the plots in 2007.  There was still a lot of clover last year.  Actually, there is still a lot of clover now, but it is under the other stuff.  In any case, what we have is better than what we had.  The wildlife plots are on the old loading decks, used for the harvests.  The soil was compressed and very unattractive.  The meadows now are fairly self-sustaining, although not always in clover.  I still have a little trouble with the tree of heaven.  I am a little worried that the invasive plants will invade while I am in Brazil.  They are always waiting their chance.

There have been many changes on the farm.  The canopies are closing and as it gets shadier, we have a more open forest. Above is my beech forest, one of my favorite places on the farm.  Below is the creek bed. The creek moved a little in the recent rains.

The Freeman tract is doing well. Undergrowth is already starting to grow. The trees were very close together before the harvest-thinning, so most things were shaded out before. Beyond that, my soils are not really good.  This part of Virginia has very old soils. They did not benefit from the recent glaciation that improved some of the soils in the Midwest. And they were made worse by the cultivation of tobacco & cotton when people didn’t really understand principles of crop rotation. That means much of the land is not very good for crops, which is why it is under pine trees today. I am trying to improve my soils with the clover and biosolids, but there is a long way to go. Below is the newly thinned pines, planted in 1996, with Alex under them for a size comparison.  They grow fast. Now that they are thinned, they will grow even faster.

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May 2011 Forest Visit

The boys and I went down to the farms to talk to the hunt clubs and take a look at the forest. There has been a lot of rain recently, so everything was growing well. The McAden Hunt club replanted one of the food plots.  Corn and sunflowers are coming up. The sunflowers will be very pretty in a couple of months. I asked Alex to go down and take a picture for me. 

The deer plots are becoming more important to maintain a healthy herd. The deer population had burgeoned and there were too many, but the resurgence of local bear populations & the arrival of coyotes have checked the growth. The coyotes, especially, are hard on the fawns. These things are very dynamic and you never get a permanent solution.

I agreed to sell six acres of land to the Reedy Creek Hunt Club. They want to build a clubhouse, skinning shed & dog training places. I am never enthusiastic about giving up land for any reason, but I think the relationship with the club trumps six acres out of 300. RCHC seems like they want to keep the rural character of the place and I want to encourage the local hunting culture, so it is a good thing.

There was no particularly urgent work to be done. We need to plant our longleaf pines this fall or next spring and I want to do an understory burn followed by biosolids applications in 2012 or 2013. I cut down a couple of box-elders that were infringing on my cypress, but that is only a kind of a hobby action.

Of course, I will not be able to get to my woods very often with my Brazil assignment over the next three years. That is why I took the boys down. I want them to do the routine consultations.

It was a kind of hazy-humid day, so my pictures seem a little washed out. The top photo shows the boys walking up the road in our recently thinned pines. Espen was trying to skip stones. I told him that it worked better on water. The second picture shows our clearcut that will be planted with longleaf next to the completely uncut pines that are providing the control plot. Below that is our clover field, now getting overgrown. Next is the new field planted with a variety of plant for wildlife, including soy, corn and sunflowers. Just above this paragraph is Genito Creek that runs through our land. It looks like chocolate milk because of recent heavy rains.  It will clear out in a couple days. The silt forms natural levies along the banks. The trees arching over it are river birch, the southern member of the birch family. Below is the bend in my road. There is something attractive about a road bending into a forest. I liked it when I first saw this place, when the trees were knee high and each year it gets better.

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Four-Wheel-Drive

I went down to the farm to plant my American chestnut seeds. The American Chestnut Foundation sent me two of them for contributing to the Foundation. They are supposed to be from trees resistant to the blight that since it was discovered in 1904 has nearly wiped out what had been one of the most important forest trees in Eastern North America. The Foundation wants to have them planted in as many different places as possible in hopes of developing a really blight resistant tree. Of course, we may not know for decades or maybe never. My land is a little outside the native range of the American chestnut, so my two isolated trees could well survive even if they were not resistant, since the blight just might not get at them. I probably should not have taken them anyway; I will not be around enough to take care of them. I put them in good places on a north facing slope, cleared the nearby brush and put rocks & mulch around the places to mark and protect them, so I they have a better than average forest seedling chance. But I can check on them only until I go to Brazil; after that they are on their own.

I took down the new car. I bought a Toyota RAV4 to take to Brazil. It has 4-wheel-drive, which I expect will be useful in Brazil, and is a model that is sold in Brazil. There is a dealer in Brasilia, so I can get service and parts. I was going to get a Ford Escape. They have Fords in Brazil, but not have the Escape, so I figured it would be better to go with the RAV4. The RAV4 is a little more expensive than the Ford Escape, but not much & the additional cost and trouble of getting parts would end up costing more than the price difference. I also thought about buying the car in Brazil, but the Brazilian currency appreciated so much against the dollar in the last year that it just doesn’t make sense. That, plus the generally higher prices there means that it would cost nearly twice as much to get one locally. When you live overseas, you become a currency trader whether or not you want and currency fluctuations make really big differences for big purchases.

Anyway, I plan to get lots of use out of the car in Brazil. I can drive to a large part of the country from Brasilia, but some of the roads can be challenging. I tried out the new car’s 4-wheel-drive on my forest road. It rained yesterday, so there was some of that southern red mud that is both slippery and clingy. I took the car up my steepest and messiest road. The RAV4 easily made the hill. I could feel the wheels engaging differentially. I would never have tried it with the two-wheel-drive truck and I generally don’t like to use the steep road because it tears up the dirt. But I made an exception. I needed to test the car and if I am going to get stuck, I prefer to do it in Virginia, where I can call helpful neighbors, rather than someplace in the Amazon jungle. Besides, the tree harvest a couple of months ago paid for the car, so it seemed sort of appropriate.

The picture up top shows our new car in front of the trees which made it possible. Actually, not those trees, since the ones that we sold are gone, but the same sort formerly in the same general location. The next picture shows my forest hill road. I did clear off that tree that fell across the road. An ice storm back in January hit this particular part of the woods harder than average. The bottom picture is one of the food plots. The hunt club prepared it for replanting.

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Where My Trees Went

Forestry is special in its commitment to long-term stewardship and sustainably. I got involved in forestry because I love almost everything about it. I just feel happier in the woods. Alex has been coming with me on some of my visits.  He commented that everybody seems happy in the woods and I think they are.  The foresters are happy, so are the wildlife biologists, loggers and landowners.  

Forestry provides a great combination between short term efforts and long term dreams.  You get an uncommon combination that includes choices & accomplishments you can make along with something much bigger, on which all our success depends, that we can spend a lifetime trying to understand. I don’t have musical or artistic talent. I feel I have a kind of expression like those things in nature. I understand that my forest is part of a something bigger. I checked out where the water that ran off my land ended up. I posted stories about my harvesting and planning for future forests.  A couple days ago I got to see where the thinned trees go and how they turn into paper products.

The trees harvested off my land last month went to KapStone Paper Mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. The mill has been there since 1907, although not under the same ownership. The mill takes only pine and makes the kind of brownish paper used for bags and packing materials.  Next time I buy a bag of Kingsford charcoal, maybe the bag will have some of my fiber in the paper.  They produce paper with something called the Kraft process. You can read about it at the link.  The Kraft process uses a wider variety fiber sources than most other pulping processes. The important part for me is that it can use all types of wood, including the resinous southern pine that we grow.

They start off chipping the trees. The chips are heated and treated chemically. For the details of how this works, check out the link I mentioned above. They brought out three cups of fiber and water from various stages of refinement. The liquid was a kind of brownish color. I couldn’t help but think of the time Chrissy & I visited the Jim Beam distillery. They both have a kind of mash.  Of course, it was not the same thing in any other sense and there was no tasting at the end of this tour.

Paper making today is capital intensive and minutely coordinated. The big machines – They give them names, BTW, one called the Dixie Queen, for example – represent a big investment.  There is not much warehouse space to store the finished product, so everything runs through as quickly as possible. Trucks and trains are standing by to take away the rolls of paper as soon as they are good to go. Other inputs are also ready just when they need to be. The mill uses only virgin wood fiber to make paper, i.e. there is no post-consumer content. Lots of the chemicals used in the paper process are recycled over and over again. It is all a chain, with one event depending on the ones before, and since any stoppage is very expensive, they spend a lot of time making sure nothing breaks down.  It doesn’t take many employees to make the plant run. It surprises me every time I visit a modern facility. Factories were full of workers when I started working back in the early 1970s. Historical pictures and movies tell me that they were even more crowded before that. Parts of the KapStone facility obviously were designed for lots more workers, necessary with older technology.

The best part of the tour for me was visiting the guys working on the lines.  It is the kind of thing that restores your faith in the American worker. I met skilled and involved workers at every step.  They understood not only their own jobs, but evidently how what they did fit into the whole picture.  And they were eager to explain how everything worked.   
Most of the operation is computerized these days. The paper runs past at around 30MPH.  One of the guys explained that at that speed any little thing can cause a break, but the cause of the break will be way down the line.  They have cameras constantly recording the process, so they can go back until they find the place where it went wrong. This allows them to continually improve the process. One of the guys said something that was basic quality-control but worth repeating.  Results are what count, he said, but in order to get good results you have to have a process that you can observe study and improve. If you have the guys on the line articulating things like this, you know that your colleagues are really on the team. 

Paper-making requires lots of water. The water comes from the Roanoke River. The Roanoke river discharges into the Chowan and then into Albermarle Sound, the same places the water from my farms ends up.  I know it is silly but I feel a little propritary about it and I wanted to make sure the water was okay. They showed me their water treatment facility. During the short tour, I didn’t look at it in great detail. It has the usual settling, aeration & filtering. It was a serious operation. Remaining solids were deposited in a landfill on the site, which provides good wildlife habitat.  Our guides told us about improvements to the paper-making process that allow more paper to be produced with less waste. As a result, the landfill is filling up much less rapidly than anticipated.  The KapStone plant produces much of its own energy, producing energy from wood residues and from “black liquor,” a residue that remains after the paper-making process. In the old days, Black liquor used to be dumped into rivers and streams. Today it is a valuable biofuel that helps power the plant. After the black liquor has been burned off, chemicals used in the paper-making process are recovered from the ash and recycled. The KapStone plant relies on renewable biofuels  for about 60% of its energy needs. 

I was satisfied with KapStone’s commitment to the environment. It is important to me to know that my trees are grown, harvested and processed in an acceptable way. I can watch the growing part myself, but I have to rely on good people for the other steps. I found some. 

There are three things that I notice when visiting industrial plants. First, as I mentioned above, I am surprised at how few people it takes to produce so much. Second, there is so little inventory.  I remember working in factory warehouses groaning with products.  We filled orders from accumulated stock in those days. Today the products move right through plant, from raw material to buyer.  The third thing that has changed is that less is wasted, which translates into more efficient production and less pollution (which is waste, after all.) 

Let me tell you about the pictures. The top shows a truck loading pulp to move in the yard.  Below is a stationary crane that can move the wood around. Those are obvious, but the third picture down is a little harder to recognize.  It is a “de-barker” and it works very simply. The logs go inside and roll around against each other.  It knocks most of the bark off.  Below the de-barker is Alex, all grown up and manly looking.  The last picture is just stacked wood.  I just thought it looked cool.

Here are some related links

Nucor – another great North Carolina firm with great workers

ArborTech saw mill

Foresty

Roanoke Rapids