By Dave Mance III, Editor, Northern Woodlands Magazine

The idea of “good” forestry can be hard for a layman like me to pin down, in part because it occupies a place on a sliding scale that gets adapted to different scenarios.

If you’re a timber company managing 50,000 acres of spruce/fir in Maine, good practices might mean leaving a percentage of canopy around watercourses, using a herp-friendly herbicide as you steer the regeneration in your clearcuts, using a forwarder to minimize soil compaction in wet areas.

Of course a landowner managing 50 acres might define “good” as single-tree selection, no cutting at all around water, and using horses instead of any kind of machinery.

There are practical reasons for this sort of subjectivity – one size does not fit all; the perfect should not be the enemy of the good; money talks; insert your own cliché here.

But one of the dangers of the sliding scale is that it makes it awfully easy to slide into mediocrity and a muddled idea of what “good” and “best” really mean.

This problem is compounded by the inherently ambiguous nature of the pursuit; the story we write with our chainsaws plays out on a time scale of hundreds of years, so “good” is always relative – it’s qualified by what comes next, much of which we can’t even predict.

I was thinking of all this recently while on a trip in western Pennsylvania, where I visited with a group called the Foundation for Sustainable Forests. The group is a 501(c)(3) land trust and advocacy organization that buys and manages large chunks of woodland in an interesting way.

Their idea of exemplary forestry has been cultivated over the years by Troy Firth, a soft-spoken, sage-like figure who’s been overseeing the management of his 7,000 acres using techniques that rely heavily on experience, intuition, and observation.

In their words (channeling Troy’s words): “Emphasize art, not just science: Our scientific understanding is limited to a single generation of trees. Therefore, personal experience and intuition must play a role.”

I spent a great day out in the woods with Troy, Guy Dunkle, Pat Maloney, and Owen Ludwig, all of whom help manage Troy’s land. (Pat’s also involved in the maple side of Troy’s business – with 30,000+ taps, they run the second-largest operation in Pennsylvania and run it well; they averaged .48 gallons of syrup per tap this year.)

We toured some stands they were especially proud of, including abandoned pastureland that they’ve helped turn into productive, diverse woods, and one of those mature Alleghany cherry stands you hear about in folk tales, the 4- and 5-log trees gun barrel-straight.

I kept trying to quantify things as we walked, and Troy kept trying to deflect. “So you’ll thin these poles in 10 years?” “Don’t know.” (Actually, I think he may have responded with a simple shoulder shrug.)

At the core of his philosophy is the idea that a forest is constantly changing, and so arbitrary deadlines aren’t helpful. He has no use for charts.

I was reminded of the U2 lyric “vision over visibility” – the idea that you need to serve the big picture instead of what’s right in front of your eyes.

I was also taken by the way Troy’s management values an individual forester’s intuition and intelligence over group-think and rubrics.

Instead of a top-down prescription, the idea here is a bottom-up approach, where the stand dictates its own prescription, an observant forester takes note and then works to make it happen.

Foresters are encouraged to think outside the box; to try, and if they fail, go back in and correct the mistake; to learn and apply what they’ve learned going forward. (The low-intensity, high-frequency work they do allows for this kind of trial and error; when you treat big areas aggressively, you essentially put all your eggs in one basket.)

In their words: “[We] let conditions recommend the management rather than dictating conditions through management.”

In the smoking cherry stand I toured, the understory was largely maple, which was fine with them. They’ll keep a relatively closed canopy, cherry-pick the cherry logs when the value is maximized, and steward a maple forest next.

This malleability stands in contrast to the practice of growing the cherry to term, conducting an aggressive shelterwood or seed tree harvest designed to maximize value, and then regenerating the next crop of cherry in big openings, the idea being that this was a cherry stand, and we’ll do what it takes to keep it a cherry stand.

The silviculture they practice is relentlessly worst-first, and they aggressively treat invasives and undesirables.

Guy pointed out to me that their forestry sounds a lot like the forestry the late Irwin Post practiced, though whereas Irwin referred to his brand as “intensive,” based on the fact that he was micromanaging every stem in the woods, they spin their way as “low intensity,” since instead of walloping a stand with a big harvest every 30 years, they’re constantly taking small volumes of low-grade wood out, along with any fully mature sawlogs that are ready to go.

However you want to describe it, the frequency of the work is the novel part. A lot of forestry, at least around where I live, is practiced in 10-year (if not 20 or 30 year) intervals.

They’d argue it should be practiced yearly, or close to that. (I’m being careful as I write this, remembering that anytime I tried to attach a metric to something, Troy frowned.)

Another novel piece is their heavy reliance on horses to do the harvesting. The region they sit in is Amish country, so there’s a willing and able work force.

It was very cool to walk through large blocks of managed forest without seeing logging roads, no hint of mechanical disturbance on the earth, even while the stumps and tops denoted work.

I’m not sure how exportable this brand of forestry is. Their region is unique for its Amish presence and availability of horse labor; its high-value hardwoods also help the horse loggers get into the black, something they couldn’t do in a lot of cut-over New England woodlots.

There’s also the challenge of replicating practices that are intentionally vague. One of the things charts and guidelines do offer is the ability to export ideas efficiently. The FSF philosophy relies heavily on process, which is a harder thing to convey.

This is not to say, though, that there aren’t parts of this that could serve as a model elsewhere.

Getting back to that original question of what good forestry is, the work this group is doing out in western Pennsylvania sets a high bar that’s worth noting.

(Photo: A nice cherry/hard maple stand.)

Note: Northern Woodlands is a quarterly magazine that celebrates northeastern forests and the people who care for them. A fun read with a serious purpose. It’s published by the Center for Northern Woodlands Education, an educational nonprofit located in Lyme, New Hampshire.

This article is reprinted with the permission of the author from the Northern Woodlands Editor’s Blog via the Foundation for Sustainable Forests.

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[Posted: August 7, 2019]

8/12/2019