VARDAMAN VIRTUAL FORESTRY COMPANY

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

When Virginia Vardaman creates her flower garden, she spends hours with imagination, catalogs, and rough sketches of beds and then works hard preparing the soil. To appraise her results months later, she goes out in the heat and mosquitos every day. But she loves it and is good at it after 20+ years of diligent application, and her husband Jim, who never hits a lick in the yard, and the neighbors enjoy a beauty pageant all year long.

If you own or want to own a forest of planted loblolly-pine trees, you can test various plans for it in air-conditioned comfort and no bugs without leaving your desk. All you need is our software, PTAEDA2V+ECONVR, and a PC. And like gardeners everywhere, you will succeed in direct proportion to the amount of time you spend in thinking and testing.

To illustrate what you can learn about how your forest will develop biologically, let's use PTAED2V in a typical plantation and observe the effect if we change a single item in its makeup. The plantation is one of the two described in Jim Vardaman's presentation at our 1996 seminar; you can read or download it from our Internet site (www.vardaman.com).

If we prescribe a per-acre planting density of 363 at a spacing of 12 feet by 10 feet, but members of the planting crew converge even a little bit (as they often do) and plant more, the stands at age 13 will have the following characteristics:

So you pay more to plant more, but get smaller, less-valuable volumes.

The canopy of the stand in the presentation is 15% hardwood. If at the outset we had reduced the hardwood by even small amounts, the stand at age 13 would have the following characteristics:

So in response to reduced competition, the trees grow faster, maintain more live limbs for fast growth in the future, and contain more volume.

Analysis with ECONVR (also part of the software) will reveal the financial effects of these changes, but you don't need it to document what you may have suspected by commonsense: the individual trees in a plantation are acutely aware of each other and react to small changes in their relationships. And to be successful in making money growing trees, you must understand this. You must work in your forest as diligently as Virginia works in hers.