Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORTS
OF 3/15/02*
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Southeast Forest Economy
HOW TO MAKE PRODUCTIVE INVESTMENTS WITH NRCS SOIL SURVEYS
If you want a demonstration of this profitable procedure and are willing to take a one-hour airplane "flight" over south Alabama without leaving your computer, print out and save this e-mail. Then follow these directions carefully:
| 1. |
Click on http://www.statlab.iastate.edu/soils/nsdaf/. In the column down the left side, click on "Soil Surveys and Maps." |
| 2. |
Click on Soil Surveys and Maps in center of page, then on red "by State," then on "Alabama," then on "Butler County on line," then on "Butler County 1997 (htmlpdf with maps). |
| 3. |
Click on "Text and Tables: PDF File." |
| 4. |
In the list of items down the left border, click on "Tables." |
| 5. |
The screen will appear almost blank. In the tool bar near the top of your screen, click on the icon for "Actual Size." You will discover that you are on p. 135. Scroll down to and print pages 147-150 inclusive (the SI-50 for each species and soil). |
| 6. |
Go back to the heading "Soil Survey of Butler County, Alabama." At the bottom of the page, click on "Index to Detailed Soil Maps in GIF." Now you’re airborne. |
Begin your search by clicking on page 6. You are over the center of Section 1, Township 11 North, Range 15 East. Out the windows of your plane on both sides are some of the most productive timberlands in the United States. Here are large areas of soil series with SI-50 of 85-105: MIA, LuB, LuC, RbA, LyA, and Bob. How could you tell this unless you had brought along your Soil Survey? (Without the Soil Survey, you couldn’t be sure about it even if you were driving along the roads below.) Large portions of these lands are productive enough to be superb investments.
Now continue the search by clicking on Sheet 1. Scroll up and to the left to discover that you are
over the center of Section 6, Township 11 North, Range 12 East. The soil series of the largest area is
DwD. Table 8. Woodland Management and Productivity, p. 147, shows SI-50 for loblolly pine to be 75.
Just southeast of it is an area of CoA with a higher SI-50 for loblolly, but its SI-50’s for hardwoods
are higher, and the stream may require a Streamside Management Zone. For a detailed explanation of why these
areas are less desirable investments, click on
www.vardaman.com/greensheets/rearr.php
Section numbers are placed in the center of each section, and corner locations are marked. The sections are almost never squares. Therefore, to divide one into its 16 forty-acre parcels, you must split it into fourths N&S and then E&W. To discover why we repeatedly urge the need for rearrangement, print out any section in the county and divide it into its forties. How many of them will require two or more different forest-management plans within its borders? How many contain a soil series with productivity below your requirements?
This exercise usually shows that, even if you own only 40 acres, you actually own what might be called a "timberland mutual fund." Its parts will produce different ROI’s, some or all of which are below your minimum requirements. Now you can see that "forest management" has an important extra dimension: it’s not enough to do the best you can with what
you have; you must also "rearrange" some of it into cash or more productive assets, just like every mutual fund manager on Wall Street.
The county of your ownership may not be as accessible as Butler, but recent data on your tract may be available. Call your NCRS office. You can find how to reach it the same way we found Butler. If you discover that you own unproductive land, the sooner you sell it, the richer you’ll be.
Our Tracking Reports
We e-mail Reports early Friday, so the busiest days are Friday and Saturday, which are added to the preceding Sunday through Thursday. (We start our weeks on Friday, but WEBTRENDS starts its week on Sunday.) One tracking report appears at http://www.vardaman.com/report. A calendar appears in the upper left corner of the screen. Click on "Wk 9" to see details of visits Sunday 3/3 through Saturday 3/9: 637 unique visitors studied the site in 1,742 visitor sessions with an average length of 14 minutes, 47 seconds. Visits for individual days are shown by bar graphs. By switching back to 2001 on either report, you can check on figures for many previous weeks.
The other tracking report appears at http://www.se-timbersales.com/report. Click on "W9" as described above to see that 370 unique visitors studied the site in 878 visitor sessions with an average length of 3 minutes, 3 seconds.
|
Name of Tract
|
State
|
County
|
Land
|
|
Willis
|
Arkansas
|
Lee
|
Yes
|
Fees for Listing Sales
We charge $30 for standard listings of land/timber sales on www.se-timbersales.com. Lengths of visits shown by our tracking report depend on what’s offered and how well the seller presents it. If you want to list your sale in the standard way, e-mail its parts to us. When you see that these have been posted correctly, send us a check for $30.
*This report was e-mailed to 5,060 persons indicating an interest in it; we will send one each Friday until you tell us to stop. The term "knowledge worker" was created by Peter Drucker years ago. According to him, their jobs "require a good deal of formal education and the ability to acquire and apply theoretical and analytical knowledge…Above all, they require a habit of continual learning."
|
