Green Horizons

A healthy forest of vigorously growing hardwood trees can yield numerous, profi table thinnings over your lifetime IF you manage it like your animal herd. The unhealthy and poorly performing trees should be culled from the forest to provide more growing space for high quality trees. Thin the forest too much, however, and you encourage trees to grow as they do in pastures, with limbs low down on the trunk. This lowers the commercial value of your growing stock.

Managing your forest can be compared to winnowing samll calves and underperforming cows from the herd. By managing the best trees, and those on appropriate sites, productivity and yields will be optimized.

Attractive financial returns don’t grow on sick trees or trees with poor genetics. Your animal herd isn’t improved by leaving your worst animals. Similarly, your forest isn’t improved by cutting out all the "good" trees and leaving the junk. That’s called High-Grading. Oh, sure...you might think you made decent money on your once-in-a-lifetime timber cutting. But that’s only because you don’t understand how much more you can make over time by practicing "Low Grading." Your initial thinning will produce less income per acre with Low Grading, because you are removing the lowest quality merchantable trees along with trees that are mature. But that changes as the quality of your forest continues to improve. As quality improves, so does your rate of return. The result of decades of High Grading can be seen all across the landscape. Forest quality has declined tremendously due to this practice.

High Grading often leaves trees that are slow-growing or have poor growth form due to genetically inherited traits. These inferior trees produce the seeds that form the next generation of trees in your forest. Poor genetics breeds more poor genetics. Livestock producers understand this well. High Grading leaves small trees that are old and have stagnated. They stopped growing at a decent rate years, if not decades, ago. They were stunted by surrounding trees that competed better for sunlight and moisture. These stagnant trees seldom return to a reasonable rate of growth no matter how much growing space they get. A stagnant, six-inch diameter oak is often 65-75 years old, the same age as the 20-inch diameter sawlogs harvested off the same tract.

Forest management that selectively removes over-mature or low value trees puts a land's growth potential into better trees, and may result in even bigger profits in the future.

An unmanaged forest is doing well to produce an annual return on your investment of 2-3%. However, practicing proper forest management can increase that to a 6.1% annual rate of return on an average Ozark site after just 10-15 years.

Forest management requires time to reap the financial benefits. Sounds like most investment strategies, doesn’t it? Tree crops are grown over decades, not in a mere handful of years. Many side benefi ts can be realized from the forest while waiting for trees to reach maturity. You can lease recreational uses such as hunting, hiking, camping, and mushroom picking to help offset the expenses of taxes, insurance, etc... all while still using the property for your own enjoyment, including hunting. Both the Forest Landowners Association, www.forestlandowners.com, and the Missouri Forest Products Association, www.moforest.org, offer hunting lease insurance at very reasonable rates for both landowners and their hunting lessees.

Cattlemen do not sell their cows without knowing such factors as coat condition, frame size and weight, so why sell your trees with out knowing how many board feet you have, by tree species and quality?

Other sources of income can come from harvesting firewood, mushrooms, berries, wild grapes, hazelnuts, hickory nuts, walnuts, woody burls, and decorative dried "woody florals" (pinecones, dried mushrooms, bittersweet, etc.). Many "value-added" products can be made from these such as dried mushrooms, wild grape and raspberry jellies, cracked nuts, decorations for florist arrangements, carved walking sticks, and bowls turned from woody burls. Visit the MU Center for Agroforestry website at www.centerforagroforestry.org for additional information about value-added products.

To learn more about profi table forest management and locate a forestry professional near you, contact Hank Stelzer, MU Forestry Extension, at (573) 882-4444 or email stelzerh@missouri. edu.

**Federal and state tax laws offer tax advantages to managed forest landholdings. For additional information, visit www.timbertax.org. An Agroforestry in Action guide to tax considerations is available at www.centerforagroforestry.org; select the Publications link.