VARDAMAN VIRTUAL FORESTRY COMPANY

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FIRST THINNING OF A PPIC®; FIRST GUIDANCE OF IT BY PTAEDA2V

Three statements are part of the conventional wisdom about how to manage fast-growing plantations:

One, row thinning must be allowed if you expect to get any bids.

Two, the wood from them, especially under 15 years old, probably won’t bring normal prices.

Three, timber buyers sometimes make mistakes in estimating volumes and then bid too much, so don’t tell them anything.

We think that all three are harmful myths. Read the report below, and decide for yourself.

We made the first thinning of a PPIC last month. It is located in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, contains 40.4 acres, and was established 12 years ago by us. To decide how to do it, we first measured all trees by one-inch DBH classes on 40 1/40-acre plots on a square grid 220 feet apart and heights of three dominants and two codominants on half of these plots. We then entered the average per-acre stand in PTAEDA2V. After first removing all defective trees, we made repeated runs removing all good but smaller trees until the remaining stand contained 165 trees per acre. We then instructed the foresters to mark for cutting all defective trees plus all others smaller than 7.2 inches DBH.

We made no attempt to alter the spacing of the crop trees. We have often published articles showing why we want to retain all trees that have shown their high quality by fast growth during the previous 12 years of competition in the stand. Therefore, some small areas seem crowded, and others seem empty. There are no open rows for logging access.

In the sale announcement, we provided our per-acre estimate of the number of trees for sale by DBH class, length, and volumes in cubic feet outside bark and standard cords as follows:

We received two sealed-bids. The higher one was in line with the prices reported by our office at McComb, Mississippi and posted on www.vardaman.com. We accepted it and closed the sale 72 hours later. By the time you read this, cutting will be complete.

The high bidder was Robert Pollard, Charles Donald Timber Co., Natchez, MS. I later questioned him about his bid, and his answers are in boldface below. Everyone told us that we wouldn’t get any bids if we didn’t allow row thinning. How can you do it? I cut timber in this manner every day on the U. S. Forest Service lands near here. I’m used to getting my equipment into and out of tight places. What equipment do you use? A Bell 3-wheel cutter, a skidder, a dozer, and a knuckleboom loader with a shearing head attachment. Did the information we supplied about number and size of trees help? It sure did. We always make our own volume estimates, but it helps a lot to have someone else’s ideas to compare with.

One swallow doesn’t make a spring, and one bit of anecdotal evidence doesn’t disprove conventional wisdom. As time goes on, we will report results in many similar cases, for we think that acting on the three myths seriously reduces returns from timber investments.