Green Horizons

In October 2007, our farm became certified in the Missouri Tree Farm program. This year, in Missouri Wildlife, we will run a series of articles recounting why and how this came about. Others have suggested several times that details of this living history may prove useful to some folks and interesting to many more. This is the third installment of the series.

We had settled upon the objective of a productive, healthy and sustainable forest and developed a detailed management plan for each of the 23 stands in our forest based upon carefully gathered inventory data and the advice of skilled professional foresters. With our forest boundaries secured and cattle excluded, we were ready to bring the plan to life.

Growth of the most desirable trees in all our stands was stifled by overcrowding. Foresters usually refer to this dilemma as overstocking. Some of our stands were overstocked with so many trees of the same species that growth was stunted, sort of like an under-fished pond full of too many sunfish. Other stands had many of the really desirable trees for forest wildlife and timber production either crowded or shaded by invasive trees like tree-of-heaven or invasive plants like multiflora rose. Several of our stands, thanks to a long history of grazing, were overstocked with honeylocust, Osage-orange, prickly-ash and other species the cattle would not eat.

Our first action to meet these and other challenges to our productive, healthy and sustainable forest was a blanket program of timber stand improvement (TSI). For us, TSI meant whatever alterations were required to move the composition of the stand toward our objective. The small trees we wanted to eliminate, less than 3-4 inches in diameter, we usually cut down. The larger trees we wanted eliminated were girdled, by cutting a ring all the way around the trunk which penetrated clear through the bark and about a half-inch into the wood.

Because this process can be labor intensive and because we wanted to treat each tree targeted for elimination only once, we applied herbicide to each stump and to each girdled tree trunk. If we were so fortunate as to have a tree targeted for elimination which might have marketable value, and there were several such trees, they were marked for sale and left standing for the time being.

For us, there just was not enough time available to accomplish 240 acres of TSI ourselves. We chose to hire it done by some excellent young foresters willing to operate chainsaws safely and very effectively and capable of instantly and accurately identifying individual tree species. Our consulting foresters were well schooled in forest management and perfectly capable of making decisions which balanced economic and silvicultural considerations in implementing our plan. They very rapidly delivered exactly what we had in mind. The results of their services have exceeded our expectations in many, many ways.

From a purely economic perspective, TSI cost an average of $75 per acre for our forest inclusive of all costs for labor and herbicide. Some stands took more time, some took less. Our inventory before TSI suggested that our forest was producing wood at about $40 - $50 per acre per year.The growth rate after TSI to reduce overstocking may be as high as $140 or more per acre per year for some stands. TSI was implemented on our stands with a plan for re-entry every 10 years. So we invested $75 per acre one time and can expect to recover that investment many times over when the stand is harvested.

It is my sincere belief that anyone owning any acreage of timber and desiring it to be a productive, healthy and sustainable forest should immediately apply prescribed timber stand improvement. The good news is this makes good economic sense in the long run. The great news is there are several sources of cost share dollars available to help landowners implement TSI. From a purely economic perspective, then, there was absolutely no reason at all for us to put off doing TSI. We needed it right away. If we could afford it, I believe anyone could.

Immediate benefits of TSI? Sunlight, water and nutrients formerly taken in by the eliminated trees are now freed up for all those we left standing. They are growing rapidly. They are producing more food and cover for wildlife. It seems to me that we have even more deer and wild turkeys than we had before TSI and they all are in excellent condition. The floor of our forest has many new oak seedlings, something we have been short of for a very long time.

Each of our treatments has left the forest more productive and healthier than it was before. Now that is sustainable! Next time, our first timber sale.