VARDAMAN VIRTUAL FORESTRY COMPANY

The Most Direct Link to Knowledge Workers in the Southeast Forest Economy

THINKING AHEAD AND ACTING IN TIME ARE ESSENTIAL TO PROFITABLE FORESTRY

Owners of timberland have their capital tied up for a long time. Sooner or later they see that mistakes made along the way never go away; their consequences just get bigger and bigger as time passes. Sooner or later they also realize that timberlands are economic assets, should produce a good money return, and deserve careful planning and prompt action.

Nothing demonstrates this better than tracts offered as possible PPICs. Here are typical examples:

1. Two sisters sold all merchantable timber except oak trees more than ten inches at the stump. Since the original stand was mainly pines, all they have left now are scattered oaks, all of low quality, that prevent the development of other species.

2. To improve habitat for quail, a farmer planted four rows of pines and left 50-foot untended strips around his cultivated fields, thereby occupying 15% of his total land. When PPMC offered $90 per acre per year for the cultivated fields but couldn't use the quail strips, he discovered the real cost of his experiment.

The consequences of both actions could have been predicted with simple economic analyses if they had asked. Neither of these conditions will improve until the owners invest the sums needed to eliminate them. Neither stand will grow enough timber to produce an adequate money return on the land underneath them. Both owners lost a year of profits.

By the time these tracts came to us in early August, it was too late to do anything about them for another year. Mechanical site-prep is needed to remove the present stand on Tract 1, and all contractors with adequate equipment had long since been signed up by others. Removing the pines on Tract 2 would damage the crops adjacent to them and perhaps create a Pales Weevil problem for seedlings to be planted in January. The extra-large seedlings required for both tracts were all gone.

In the last three months of every year, we get calls from landowners wanting to plant their tracts now, and we can't help. Seedlings must be planted in January or February while they are dormant and there is adequate soil moisture to enable them to get ready for the warm, drying winds of every spring. This is impossible because:

1. If Pales Weevils present a danger, all pines previously on the site should have been removed by the previous June 30.

2. Extra-large seedlings are all gone.

3. All sites except some cultivated fields require site-prep. Whether it's done chemically or mechanically, the work must be completed by 30 September of the year prior to planting.

Converting natural stands of timber or the agricultural fields of the piney-woods section of the South to modern plantations is a highly-profitable maneuver, but it requires thinking ahead and acting in time. We'll be glad to help.