How Much Left

[Tmac47]

Tmac
If'n we were all growing Loblolly pine in the south, the we wouldn't be cutting grandpa's trees either. ;)

True enough.  I was just responding the the "planting trees..." comment.

Old growth hardwood and natural regen pine is certainly slower growing.

Longleaf can see similar results to loblolly, so don't leave them out! ;)

[Ianab]

Radiata pine in NZ will produce top quality saw logs (with good management) on about a 23 year rotation, so you can plant for your retirement.

But if you want to grow Rimu or Kauri, plan on about 400 year rotation. Rimu will sell for about $8 a bd/ft rough sawn, but 90% of the local forestry is Pine. 8 % is Douglas Fir. 2% is "everything else"  The economics of the long term species just doesn't work.

So while you can grow pine etc in the right climate, many species need a much longer term approach, and a bit more forward planning than a crop like Corn....

Ian

[SwampDonkey]

Stand dynamics, silvics and timing is just as important as silviculture, like thinning. If I thinned spruce out like southern pine, I would have a bunch of cow shades with no market. No mill will touch'm.

Planted jack pine is about the most crooked and limby mess of trees you ever saw. Not planted tight enough. Natural dense stands of jack originating from fire is straight as gun barrels and self pruned well. It's not a long lived tree like white pine either. It can benefit from thinning, but beginning at pole stage, not sapling. Pruning is not economical as it's not a high value tree. I'm pruning fir, but for my needs, not someone else. I don't make work out of it and it's not for the economics but for the clear wood. I do it at times when there is no 'opportunity cost'. I will be the miller, hopefully. ;D

[terry f]

    Tmac, I don't doubt any of your numbers, and that rate of return would make timberland a top investment. But out here in the real world it would be tuff to get four harvests in a lifetime, and what mesquite buckeye said about grandpa rings true. Part of my land is a thin layer of dirt covering nothing but rock, other parts are rock covered by a thin layer of dirt. Some parts are good site that grows well, other parts might have a crooked 30 foot tall, 100 year old ponderosa pine just trying to make a living. Five months covered in snow, and three months with no rain, make tuff growing conditions. I would guess that in the south or farm belt, timber would have to compete with yearly crops and beat them, or they wouldn't be planted at all.

[Ron Wenrich]

One of the big problems with landowners is that they can't tell you the difference between a logger and a forester.  The logger comes in and tells them that you don't need a forester, we'll just do a diameter limit cut.  Or they do a selection cut.  The landowner feels he got a good deal, since they're leaving the small trees to grow. 

Try growing pine plantations in PA.  There is no market.  Thinning pine means you need to sell either for shavings or for pulpwood.  We have that market in the SE, but that still isn't enough to entice landowners to convert land over to pine.  The other market is for log cabin stock.  That market has pretty well dried up.  There are no stud mills in the state.  Wooly adelgid is taking care of the hemlock, weevil goes after white pine.  Without the markets, pine based forestry goes out the door.  Most plantations are on strip mines where they can get a quick forest cover. 

So, that leaves us with management based around several type species.  What you manage for is dependent on where you're located.  Cherry is prevalent in the tier counties, as that is prime cherry country and a well established market.  Oak markets are well established in most of the state, so that's what most guys manage for.  Tulip poplar is big in the southeast corner, but markets are cyclical.  You could also manage for maple, but few foresters do, because they have had oak drilled into their head, since that was the big market at the time.  We do very little planting in the state, and most forests come from natural regeneration.  Standard rotation for oak is about 75 years. 

Typical is to do a diameter limit cut, then come in 30-40 years later and do it again.  I saw a stat one time that said 50% of the timber in PA is sold this way.  The other option is to do selection cut, sometimes sold as uneven aged management.  That's where you simply take out the large diameter timber and a smattering of lower diameter wood so the aesthetics look good.  Then you come in every 20 years and do another one until there is nothing left but small trees.  Thinning in the small diameters doesn't happen.  Where is the need for a forester?  The consultant has become more of a marketing agent than a stand management agent.

I remember talking with a German forester on the net a good number of years ago.  He talked about the management of different strata of the forest.  They were allowing their beech and oak to grow to 36".  They made up the canopy.  Then they had the middle strata which consisted of wood that they coppiced for fuel wood.  The lower strata consisted of the lower understory, which would include regeneration. 

We don't do anything like that here.  We tend to look at it as a crop with the end game being to produce as much fiber in as short of time as possible.  We tend to disregard the other products the forest offers.  Many of them are hard to cash in on, as the timber is the low hanging fruit of the stand. 

[Tmac47]

We live in a day-and-age where people spend premium prices for food labeled "organic".  Why?  Because it feels good to do the right thing.  Why do they think it's the right thing?  Because they're being told it's the right thing.

When you get down to the science of it all, there's no difference in the nutritional content of regular fruits and vegetables vs organic, yet people still perceive organic as the superior product.

There would be no market for organic goods if no one was propagating that message, however, they are and they're pretty darn good at it.  So much so, that people are willing to spend more money, because of perceived value.  Like I said, there's no nutritional difference and in some double-blind taste tests I've seen, statistically people tend to prefer the taste non-organic foods.

So, what's the answer?  Well, firstly foresters need to simplify their message.  The industry is guilty of being accurate to the point of uselessness.  They suffer from the curse of knowledge and often give landowners too much information.  For example, if I'm describing an atom to someone unfamiliar with atoms, I'm going to use something they're familiar with, like the solar system.  "Electrons, rotate around the the nucleus of an atom, much like planets orbit the sun."  Is this an accurate description?  No!  But, it's one people can understand.

Landowners contact me, all the time, who simply want to be educated on the management process.  They don't want to be experts, but time-and-time again, I see people in the industry overloading landowners with so much information, they're even more clueless.  As someone who grew up around the industry, but only recently got "in" it, I ask a lot of questions to get a feel for what they want, connect them with a forester, and let the forester hand-hold the landowner through the process.

I'm using marketing techniques to create a market for foresters and timber companies where none has existed before.  I'm trying to bring the value perception to landowners, so that they'll actually manage timber the right way.  That includes management for more than just investment, but also for wildlife and aesthetics.

How am I doing that?  I use concrete images and simple messaging:


 

In the end, it's not really about markets.  It's about creating perception.

In the next decade we're going to see a huge shift in the ownership of land.  The people inheriting it have no idea what to do with the land and the only people spreading a message are generally the likes of the Dogwood Alliance, Sierra Club and other unfriendly organizations.

If the industry doesn't start spreading their own message now, traditional businesses will continue to suffer and mine will continue to grow.

[beenthere]

traditional businesses will continue to suffer and mine will continue to grow.

What is your business?

[Tmac47]

traditional businesses will continue to suffer and mine will continue to grow.

What is your business?

I have a website that connects foresters and landowners.  We've moved into two more states in the last month and are continuing to see a steady trend of growth.

We were featured in the latest issue of Forest Landowners Magazine.  I'm very thankful for the work they're doing over there!

[Raider Bill]

traditional businesses will continue to suffer and mine will continue to grow.

What is your business?

I have a website that connects foresters and landowners.  We've moved into two more states in the last month and are continuing to see a steady trend of growth.

We were featured in the latest issue of Forest Landowners Magazine.  I'm very thankful for the work they're doing over there!

Anyone in SE Tenn [Athens area]?

I'm going to start looking into a pre commercial thinning of my loblolly.

[Ron Wenrich]

I usually keep it pretty simple.  I just tell them you don't kill your best milkers.  They seem to understand that.  You don't need pictures. 

[Tmac47]

I usually keep it pretty simple.  I just tell them you don't kill your best milkers.  They seem to understand that.  You don't need pictures.

Sure, you don't need pictures  ;D

However, a lesson I learned from a great forester early on was that a picture speaks a thousand words.  I think I've heard that before somewhere...

When he gives his landowners reports, they generally consist of several pictures and barely enough writing to get a whole paragraph.  They eat it up!  It proves that he was actually out there and they don't have to use their imaginations, which have no grid for timber operations anyways, to understand the value he's giving them.

He manages for baseball players, football players and general wealth that folks down south would consider celebrities. So, in a way, his methods speak for themselves.

Again, it's all about creating perception and value.  Pictures always help:



 



 

[beenthere]

Tmac
I see your point, but what do the two pics you posted tell you?

The first tells me that the company selling that brand of paint is not being truthful, if trying to imply the paint can be put on in the rain. Maybe the pic isn't an ad for selling paint. ;)

The second is a bit of stretch to the truth, as we know the car isn't communicating to the pigeons.

And I may just be twisting the intent of the pics too.  Which raises a point about pics and how we look at them.

[Tmac47]

Tmac
I see your point, but what do the two pics you posted tell you?

The first tells me that the company selling that brand of paint is not being truthful, if trying to imply the paint can be put on in the rain. Maybe the pic isn't an ad for selling paint. ;)

The second is a bit of stretch to the truth, as we know the car isn't communicating to the pigeons.

And I may just be twisting the intent of the pics too.  Which raises a point about pics and how we look at them.

The ads are certainly not the poster-children of honesty, but I think you prove the point that no one's really dumb enough to try and paint in the rain or park under a powerline of pigeons.  However, they are still powerful images that communicate a message in seconds.

That's more my point.  Pictures can be powerful in communicating a message.

What message does the industry communicate?  Well, they don't really.  Think about other industries:

• Beef, it's what's for dinner.
• Cotton, the fabric of our lives.
• Milk, does a body good.

Because the industry is so polarized by competition and fragmented, the message is fragmented, landowners are alienated and the market shrinks.

[Ron Wenrich]

Wood is wonderful.  That was the industry line about 20-30 years ago.  Then came the sustainability issues and they got caught up in certification. 

The industry isn't really all that fragmented.  Its regionalized because of the diversity of the crop, and the different uses of each species.  There is good competition that keeps timber values up in most areas. 

The landowner base is fragmented, which leads to the problems of management.  In areas where government owns the acreage, management is generally pretty good, at least here in PA.  They have a wide diversity of products ranging from recreation to timber products.  Compatible products where landowners generally have single use. 

I got a postcard from a timber buyer yesterday.  They have a picture on the back showing a stand of timber.  They will come out and give a timber appraisal.  Not a whisper of forest management.  In my area, the larger mills have procurement foresters.  The only ones that do any active management is the one paper mill, and they've cut back.  The others cut sawtimber, so any management comes from "selective" harvests.  The one mill cuts all red oak over 14".  They do no inventories or write any management plans. 

The state does provide a list of practicing foresters.  We have no licensing, so the state list only provides those with BS degrees in forestry.  There are a lot of mills on that list.  The state used to do a lot with the private landowners, but has done away with it.  Seems like education is up to the individual landowner.  I haven't seen a Tree Farm sign in years. 

[terry f]

    Ron, are you saying the Germans are on to something with that management. I can see where a forester is more of a marketing consultant at the end game, finding better markets, but telling someone they need to hire someone at 10 or 12 dollars an hour to thin their trees, that will pay off 20 years from now, would be a tough sell. Like you say with the low hanging fruit, I would think most owners don't actively manage their woods, or think too much about them. Tmac, I was looking for that forest owners mag, but couldn't find it. I did come across a good site called forest landowners of California, has lots of cool tools, (my land plan) is one of them.

[Tmac47]

The industry isn't really all that fragmented.  Its regionalized because of the diversity of the crop, and the different uses of each species.  There is good competition that keeps timber values up in most areas.

I guess from a market standpoint, you're right, however I'd still make the argument that one of the biggest reasons there's no singular message in the industry is due to fragmentation.  Sure, the timber industry is unique in that everyone knows everybody else, but in my experience people rarely work together on educating landowners, marketing, or even sharing prices.  Three simple things that would have a huge impact on landowners.

The landowner base is fragmented, which leads to the problems of management.  In areas where government owns the acreage, management is generally pretty good, at least here in PA.  They have a wide diversity of products ranging from recreation to timber products.  Compatible products where landowners generally have single use.

I would say that landowner fragmentation is an effect of industry fragmentation.  There's a reason Landowners have difficulty understanding the value of management, don't trust timber companies, and have to pay around $300 to get timber prices from places like Timber-Mart South.

Each of these issues (and there are more), all help in creating a larger market that discourages landowners from doing anything.  The industry should be making it easy for landowners, yet every time I get a call from a landowner, even the ones that are actually doing stuff, by the time we get done talking it's clear that:

• They don't trust timber companies (foresters included)
• They don't have a management plan
• They have no idea what the timber cutting process looks like
• They've heard more horror stories than happy ones

Obviously, good things are happening in the industry, but the reality is that no one knows about it, because no one talks about it on a national level.  If anyone is talking about it, it's the Landowner Organizations, but let's be honest, only a fraction of landowners are part of organizations.  The vast majority have no clue that timber management is even a thing.

I got a postcard from a timber buyer yesterday.  They have a picture on the back showing a stand of timber.  They will come out and give a timber appraisal.  Not a whisper of forest management.  In my area, the larger mills have procurement foresters.  The only ones that do any active management is the one paper mill, and they've cut back.  The others cut sawtimber, so any management comes from "selective" harvests.  The one mill cuts all red oak over 14".  They do no inventories or write any management plans.

We always connect landowners with an independent forester and really try to get a feel for what the landowner wants.  Part of that process is just asking the right questions.  Once that happens, we can push the snowball down the hill.  Generally we get two situations, people either haven't done anything with their timber for 30-40 years and need to thin or they've got a LOT of young wood and need to pre-commercial thin.  The point is that most landowners just don't know and they don't trust anyone.

The state does provide a list of practicing foresters.  We have no licensing, so the state list only provides those with BS degrees in forestry.  There are a lot of mills on that list.  The state used to do a lot with the private landowners, but has done away with it.  Seems like education is up to the individual landowner.  I haven't seen a Tree Farm sign in years.

They do.  However, I've talked to the President of Alabama's Forest Landowner's Association and he says that landowner's are still in the position of cold-calling someone they don't know and feel like they can't trust, because it's just another list of names.

9 times out of 10, he said they end up calling him and he gives them a shorter list...and they're pretty much left in the same position, haha.

And you're also right that education is up to the landowner.  So, where do they go?

[Ron Wenrich]

We're pretty much on the same page.  Up here, Penn State has a price list of what stumpage is going for and what gate prices are.  They are region specific to the state.  They're pretty active even at the industrial level.  The stumpage report is free, but some of the workshops have a fee for materials.  I see a lot more on urban forestry than in years past.

Guys at the state tell me that landowners see the list and ask which ones they should pick.  The state boys can't do that or the consultants will hang them out to dry.  Chances are, they do nothing.  The only action you normally see is when gypsy moth start to munch on large areas. 

The government used to do a lot of landowner education.  Their most successful program was Smokey the Bear.  Now you can't have a controlled burn.  I don't think there is any industrial group that is interested in landowner education.  Most are self serving and have an eye to the certification mess.

When I was doing active consulting work, we would send out newsletters and hoped to get a response.  We were in the 0.1% range for responses.  People did keep them, but most of our work came from cold calls.  Even listed as a consulting forester in the phone book for 30 years have only netted a few calls.  I get more calls from my work on the Internet compared to any other system. 

Where do they go?  Increasingly, it is the internet.  We get quite a few landowners come through the doors.  They get free advice.  I don't know how many follow it or how much of an impact it has.  The amount of landowners to do this is minuscule. I think the best method is for landowner organizations, but I don't know who would organize them.  Maybe extension service.  Our local extension office has a forester on staff, but she's more in the urban and recreation side of things. 

[mesquite buckeye]

I guess I am one of those weird people who fall into the class of being both a landowner and educated about growing timber. Growing up from German heritage in NW Ohio, the German timber management ethic was not yet dead at that time. Most all the farms had 5-10 acres set aside in timber, which was used mostly on the farm for new buildings and other wood needs such as heat. Trees were used at the first sign of decline. Firewood was cut from the tops and low value materials. Good, straight trees were saved and let grow. This was enough to keep the forests in pretty good shape, generally.

My father eventually moved to central Missouri, which is blessed with lots and lots of hardwood timber. Unfortunately, most of the timber "management" there is high grading, which has gone on pretty much since settlement. Many tracts are filled with trees that colonized abandoned farmland since the 1960's, as small pieces of tillable land became uneconomic to farm, or just became too degraded by erosion to be worth farming.

There is a long standing distrust of loggers by landowners, who feel, whether justly or unjustly, that many of the loggers are thieves. Timber harvests are like the lottery, with landowners not knowing the value of their timber dealing with people who work timber for a living. Who do you think comes out best in such an arrangement?

Here is a personal example. My father needed money during the farm depression in the 1980's. He asked around with his friends who had been happy with a logger and so on. He contacted a man who made a lot of promises about how much veneer this and sawlog that was there, and they worked out a shares deal. Started out pretty good as the high value trees were being cut, but as it went on, lots of loads were going out the back gate, from which dad got nothing. Trees were dropped whichever way they leaned, with no regard for the future growth or what got smashed, like lots of pole walnut and cherry. All the best trees were gone, all the worst were left.

I bought the farm in 1991. It took 5 years just to clean up the tops and smashed trees, along with initiating pruning and thinning in the better parts of the woods. If we couldn't find a valuable tree, we would leave the straight low value tree instead of the crooked one. If we found a good, high value tree, we gave it room to grow and pruned it. We reduced the grapevines and poison ivy that were so big (up to 8"dbh grape and 4-6" dbh poison ivy) that 90 foot trees were overtopped. Some of the bigger individual vines covered more than an acre. Things slowly got better. It was amazing to see how fast the trees filled back in after we thinned, as well as how they started to get fat much faster than the ones we didn't touch.

Sorry to ramble on so, but there is a point to this. Probably 10 years ago, we needed to thin the areas we thinned originally again, and we were getting lots of 8-12" poles out of that, which we just squared up on the mill for timbers. One of the neighbors who was a farmer, college educated, asked how we were getting timbers out of those skinny logs. He said he could never do that with his trees, as they were too crooked.
He had the same trees we did, he just didn't do any selection or thinning. Ours were all straight because those were the ones we left when we thinned the doghair stands. Growing good timber is a choice and an effort. One landowner got educated that day. He later bought a sawmill, but I don't think he does any timber management to this day other than cutting down and milling a tree. I hope that in some small way, maybe some of the locals will  see the results of what we have done and we can have an effect on their actions taking care of their own land.

Here is what I see: Farmers are getting bigger and bigger. The emphasis is and always will be cropland and crop production. Even the prospect of management disappears with these people as they are so busy with the crop portion of their land. Timber is considered a place to hunt, waste land, and perhaps a place to get an occasional paycheck. Much of the rough land is being bid up as hunting and recreational land by people who do not make a living in agriculture (mostly townies, not meaning to be derogatory, but mostly people who don't know much about nature or growing plants). These people generally know even less about the forest than the farmers they bought it from. I ran into one of the new neighbors while we were out cutting grapevines. He asked what we were doing. I told him about cutting vines, selection, thinning, pruning and so on. He said he needed to do that on his land. I was out walking the property line later and found no trespassing signs nailed every 50 feet the length of the line, lots of them nailed to black walnut poles in the 8-12" range without a single branch to 30-40ft. One of them was on a walnut on my side of the line (Thanks neighbor) which I promptly removed and tossed back onto his side.

I think maybe the best hope is to get the smaller landowners with enough time to work on their woods and perhaps convince the new, urban woodland owners to take an interest in managing their trees. Some outreach from extension people might help. So far the history on this is not good. Conferences for managing trees for timber are typically poorly attended, while conferences for managing your land for deer are packed. The smarter of the big farmers will eventually realize on their own that a substantial part of their assets are not producing the income they could and will invest as is appropriate to generating a profit, whatever level of management that might be.

I think the best news out of all of this is that since management, at least in the hardwood forest, is unlikely to improve much in the near term, higher prices will result for high quality timber products produced from well managed forests, since less of them will be produced from degraded forests. ;D

I personally am saddened by the state of affairs, where immediate gain is the only motivation. The long term interests of all of us and of the nation are degraded when this potential to produce large quantities of high value timber is wasted, while the downstream industrial and consumer product jobs move overseas. :(

[beenthere]

And as I understand, and to put it simply, the Germans depleated their forests in WWI as well as WWII. They had to import all (or nearly all) their wood from WWII forward. They cultivated new forests like gardens, and because the importing pipeline was working well for their timber/wood needs, they protected their forests from much of their own needs.
Summary is that their forests were picture perfect and any "weeding" was used locally and the product brought good money.

[mesquite buckeye]

Maybe so. My family moved here in the 1880's. It was a different time.

[Tmac47]

I guess I am one of those weird people who fall into the class of being both a landowner and educated about growing timber.

Well, you are a member of a forestry forum, haha.  I would guess, anyone here would fall into that special minority  8)

[terry f]

    Mesquite, if your dad hadn't cut the trees, and you had bought the farm with them, plus 30 years more growth now, what would be your strategy. Would it be the germen way of using the new and leaving the old, select veneer cut, it seems the choices would be endless when you have a well managed trac to start with instead of rehabbing mistakes from past ownership. Your dad had to do what he had to do, and a lot of people might be in that boat now, but I'm sure he wasn't happy with the end result, especially loads going out the back gate. I'm sure a lot of foresters can drive through the countryside looking at different properties, and think, if that was mine, I'd do it this way.

[mesquite buckeye]

It would be a different world, for sure. My sister bought another piece of the old farm and has some timber that wasn't all cut last time because it was too small or hard to get to at the time. The land there is richer, the trees faster growing. I saw an oak that probably was 15-18" at that time now is a spectacular mid thirties now. Unfortunately, I could see a black streak from one of the old branch scars. Definitely wetwood at least, if not hollow. Trees like that that don't get cut become rotten snags. We get a lot of droughts, some of which weaken or kill trees, diseases that knock out patches of trees, insect attacks, especially following drought. I'm guessing that a lot of those big ones would have been harvested by now, as they would be pushing 30-40" by now and also could be defective.

The good thing about the woods being really messed up meant I wasn't so much locked into what was already there, allowing me to start pushing the stand the way I thought would be best. We have a LOT of outstanding stuff coming that is now from 6" to 20" dbh We are starting to cut the first trees that have matured out to the point of needing to be cut because their degrade is going faster than their growth. I'm thinking the really big veneer trees are only going to come off the best spots on the farm. Lots of really good trees will likely just be high quality sawlogs as they mature. It would have been nice to have some veneer trees coming off the farm, but it is looking like those will be cut by my nephew in another 30 years. If his son is interested, the CRP trees should be ready by the time he is 50 (he is 3). Not my grandson, but same timeframe. ;D

[Tmac47]

The government used to do a lot of landowner education.  Their most successful program was Smokey the Bear.  Now you can't have a controlled burn.  I don't think there is any industrial group that is interested in landowner education.  Most are self serving and have an eye to the certification mess.

Yeah, that's the fragmentation I've been referring to.  This attitude is having a detrimental effect on the industry and discourages landowner involvement more than anything, which in essence shrinks the market for management and even timber sales.

Smokey the Bear is a great example of what having a simple and concrete message can achieve.  The industry would be wise to revisit the drawing board and come up with a similar campaign that actually promotes management.  I mean, let's get real here, trees are the greenest and most organic form of energy you can get.  It's carbon neutral and cheap and the bio energy market will continue to grow, yet you've already got the environmental religious are already campaigning against it.

When I was doing active consulting work, we would send out newsletters and hoped to get a response.  We were in the 0.1% range for responses.  People did keep them, but most of our work came from cold calls.  Even listed as a consulting forester in the phone book for 30 years have only netted a few calls.  I get more calls from my work on the Internet compared to any other system.

Yeah, getting landowner feedback is a tricky business.  It has a lot to do with timing, messaging, and perceived value.  The perceived value part is a broader problem, because people have no grid for the benefits of management.  They'll listen to a financial adviser when it comes to their 401k, because financial houses spend millions of dollars creating a value perception, but when it comes to getting forestry advice there's already so much distrust.

Again, I'm speaking in broad terms.  I know foresters that have the trust of their clients and do amazing work, but that's only because they developed a relationship over a period of years.  This trust simply does not compute on a broader scale.  People tend to retell the horror stories and forget everything else. 

Where do they go?  Increasingly, it is the internet.  We get quite a few landowners come through the doors.  They get free advice.  I don't know how many follow it or how much of an impact it has.  The amount of landowners to do this is minuscule. I think the best method is for landowner organizations, but I don't know who would organize them.  Maybe extension service.  Our local extension office has a forester on staff, but she's more in the urban and recreation side of things.

Well, I think the problem, again is fragmentation and...how to say this without offending anyone...a lack of understanding in how to connect with people via the internet? Haha.

Six months ago I was on the ground with a landowner who said he spent 3 hours one day trying to find advice on what to do with his timber and my site was the only one he found that was, "Worth a *DanG".   He has 500 acres of timberland in South Georgia that he wanted to cut and reinvest in the market for a more liquid asset.  He also came from a family that cut timber and he kinda knew what was up.

So, why did he find information on my site and not state sites?  Well, understanding simple search-engine-optimization is one part of it and generating accessible content is another.  There are GIGABYTES of hidden information on a lot of these government and university sites in the form of PDF's and cryptic page descriptions.

There are actually Landowner Associations that generate great content as well, but it's inaccessible and you sure won't find it Google.  What I mean by inaccessible is that it's not searchable and the user-interface is terrible.  I think a big problem is simply web development and understanding how to create content that's easy to find, consume and share.

This could also just be a matter of the industry and people not understanding the internet.  Which, again, is why it would seem that I've stumbled upon a good niche.  More by accident than anything :D  We can thank the good Lord for that!

[Tmac47]

There is a long standing distrust of loggers by landowners, who feel, whether justly or unjustly, that many of the loggers are thieves. Timber harvests are like the lottery, with landowners not knowing the value of their timber dealing with people who work timber for a living. Who do you think comes out best in such an arrangement?

There's a term in business called the 20/80 rules.  Where 20% of your clients cause 80% of your headaches, 20% of your customers generate 80% of your revenues and so on.

In the timber industry I think the same rule applies.  20% of the industry are crooked and make the 80% that are great look bad.  Plus, most organizations do a terrible job of promoting their foresters, so no clear message ever reaches landowners and they're left to remember the horror stories and forget anything else.

I've talked to a baseball player who had 2,000 acres and contacted a logger to do a timber sale through.  In his own words, "I figured if someone's been cutting timber for 20 years, they should know what the hell they're doing."  It's just another example of someone not doing enough research and not having a real outlet to find reputable people.

We always tell people to use a forester and find out who they're representing.  If they're representing the seller, then they should recognize all the risks involved.  I like to tell people that foresters are real-estate agents for timber.  They tend to understand the importance of using a real-estate agent, probably because the Realtor organization spends millions of dollars in marketing...

Here is a personal example. My father needed money during the farm depression in the 1980's. He asked around with his friends who had been happy with a logger and so on. He contacted a man who made a lot of promises about how much veneer this and sawlog that was there, and they worked out a shares deal. Started out pretty good as the high value trees were being cut, but as it went on, lots of loads were going out the back gate, from which dad got nothing. Trees were dropped whichever way they leaned, with no regard for the future growth or what got smashed, like lots of pole walnut and cherry. All the best trees were gone, all the worst were left.

:(  I'm really sorry this happened to your family Mesquite.

He had the same trees we did, he just didn't do any selection or thinning. Ours were all straight because those were the ones we left when we thinned the doghair stands. Growing good timber is a choice and an effort. One landowner got educated that day.

<---- you can't post GIFS? :O

When I started my business, I assumed (wrongly), that my competition would be other timber companies.  Ha!  You want to know what my competition is?  Landowner ignorance.

We've talked to over 3,000 landowners in the past year and less than 10% of them are managing their property.  Sigh.  However, we're taking steps to educated them and using real life examples that they can relate to.  It's helping and we're slowly moving the snowball downhill.

Timber is considered a place to hunt, waste land, and perhaps a place to get an occasional paycheck. Much of the rough land is being bid up as hunting and recreational land by people who do not make a living in agriculture (mostly townies, not meaning to be derogatory, but mostly people who don't know much about nature or growing plants). These people generally know even less about the forest than the farmers they bought it from. I ran into one of the new neighbors while we were out cutting grapevines. He asked what we were doing. I told him about cutting vines, selection, thinning, pruning and so on. He said he needed to do that on his land. I was out walking the property line later and found no trespassing signs nailed every 50 feet the length of the line, lots of them nailed to black walnut poles in the 8-12" range without a single branch to 30-40ft. One of them was on a walnut on my side of the line (Thanks neighbor) which I promptly removed and tossed back onto his side.

I think maybe the best hope is to get the smaller landowners with enough time to work on their woods and perhaps convince the new, urban woodland owners to take an interest in managing their trees. Some outreach from extension people might help. So far the history on this is not good. Conferences for managing trees for timber are typically poorly attended, while conferences for managing your land for deer are packed. The smarter of the big farmers will eventually realize on their own that a substantial part of their assets are not producing the income they could and will invest as is appropriate to generating a profit, whatever level of management that might be.

I was talking to a forester out in MS today.  He said he recently talked to a landowner with 3,000 acres who contacted him and said, "I'm tired of not making any money on my timber.  It's costing me a fortune!"  He said he's amazed at how many people out there, with a ton of land, aren't making any money and don't know it's a simple as a little forestry advice.

A forester I worked for in high school manages 1500 acres and has it broken up into sections.  They cut timber and burn every year, somewhere on the property.  It's a slick operation and they've got very active wildlife.  Newly elected Senators and state officials visit their tree farm every year.

I think the best news out of all of this is that since management, at least in the hardwood forest, is unlikely to improve much in the near term, higher prices will result for high quality timber products produced from well managed forests, since less of them will be produced from degraded forests. ;D

I personally am saddened by the state of affairs, where immediate gain is the only motivation. The long term interests of all of us and of the nation are degraded when this potential to produce large quantities of high value timber is wasted, while the downstream industrial and consumer product jobs move overseas. :(

Yeah, it's crazy how landowners do nothing, then expect any sort of significant return.  However, I think if something can be done to create conversation around the value of management and the industry can produce a simple and clear message, things could change for the better.  However, turning the titanic around is no small feat. Grrr...