Al Robertson’s love of forests began in Germany, where he lived for several years after college. He purchased 60 acres of land in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom in 1979 and has spent the decades since learning about and managing the forest there. In 2019 he was named Vermont’s Outstanding Tree Farmer of the Year. He has served on boards of the Vermont Woodlands Association, NorthWoods Stewardship Center, and the National Woodland Owners Association. About a decade ago, Al put his land into a conservation easement and created a trust so that the property can be used as Sheffield’s town forest for perpetuity.
I grew up in a little town in New York called Lewiston, on the Ontario border near Niagara Falls, on the edge of the Niagara Gorge. My house, on top of the gorge, was 300 feet higher than town. When I was a kid, we played in the gorge. Our parents didn’t know about it, but we dubbed around in that area. Nobody ever got killed, although we came pretty close a few times. Growing up, I was outside a lot. Not necessarily in forests, but outside.
I went to school at Clarkson, in northern New York, and got a degree in civil engineering, then had an ROTC obligation and ended up in Germany. When I got out of the Army, about three years after I got over there, I stayed over as a civilian working for the Army, maintaining the military communities in Europe, for another four or five years. That job required me to travel around to different facilities. I got a very nice, leisurely introduction to the people and the country when I was there.
The Germans are inveterate woods walkers. It’s part of their genetic makeup. The country is just filthy with trails, and those trails have been there for millennia. Once I was out of the Army, I started volksmarching. Volksmarching is basically an unstructured, non-competitive walk/run/hike over a predetermined trail with checkpoints. The idea is just to finish the event. These events ranged from 5 kilometers to 10, 20, 30, and 42 – with 42 being a marathon. You’d show up about 8 o’clock in the morning, check in at a little desk, they give you a little booklet. You’d walk around on this trail, and there’d be signs telling you which way to go, and every once in a while, you’d run across a guy at a little table, and he’d stamp your entry card, and you’d keep on going. At the end of the trail, there was a lot of kuchen and beer.
By the time I left, I’d completed about 8,000 kilometers of these trail walks. When I started, I weighed about 220, and when I left Germany, I was a marathoner. I saw some incredibly beautiful places over there. I’d also fallen in love with the forests. It was really an educational experience.
Germans really do love their woods, and they need their forests for the way their country is organized. The towns are separated by forests. They’re very, very protective of their forests and their agricultural areas, and those areas don’t change very much. All of the building that goes on is in the towns. The forests are both privately owned and publicly owned. There are municipal forests, federal forests and reserves. The people who run the forests – the forstmeister – are gods over there.
The forstmeister have very specific responsibilities that don’t include selling product. They’re basically silvicultural. When they cut a tree down, they leave it there for an agency outside of their organization to market the wood. It’s a very pure, unadulterated ability to do what you want to do in the woods without having to worry about the money aspect of it. It means that a lot of their decisions are based on their best idea of what forestry is scientifically, as opposed to having to worry about the bottom line. And they grow some really incredible trees.
When I came back to the U.S., The first thing I did was try to figure out where could I buy some forest. I went in with the idea of buying 10 acres and ended up with 60 acres in Sheffield. Like most of the land in the Northeast Kingdom, it was pretty beat up. A portion of it had been sugar bush, the rest was basically an incredibly overstocked jungle. You could not walk through it. There were no trails, no indications of anybody ever having been there. Some portions had probably been farmland many, many decades ago, but even the areas that had been a sugar bush were incredibly overgrown. I bought the land for $350 an acre, and therein lies probably the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. If I hadn’t already bought a house in Maryland, where I was working in the Civil Service, I could have bought 800 acres.
The good news there is, if I had bought 800 acres, there’s no way I personally could have done anything more than hire a forester and a logger. Having 60 acres has allowed me to do everything by myself. I have had several really, really good foresters in the 40 years I’ve been managing the land, and with their advice I’ve been able to do what I want to do on the land.
For the first 20 years of ownership, all I did was build trails on weekends. Developing a trail system similar to what I saw in Germany was probably a good way not to get into trouble silviculturally. I was doing this all by hand. I didn’t have a tractor. I had a pickup truck and me and a garden way cart. I’m the only guy in the world who’s harvested a lot of spruce-fir, 4-foot billets of pulp with a garden way cart. I went through three carts. At that time, in the ’70s and early ’80s, you were getting $75 a cord for spruce-fir pulp. Those were good times. I had a good site contractor, and after I would get the road cleared, he’d come in with a bulldozer and back- blade it so I could have a real trail. I’ve got three miles of trails on that 60 acres now. That has allowed me to practice the kind of forestry that I learned about in Germany.
The methodology that I am using is called dauerwald. It is a concept that originated in Germany in the 1880s. They had been harvesting trees on the same land, using the same methodology, since around 1100. They were wearing the land out. They had also eliminated a lot of the tree species and a lot of animal species. Because they needed the wood, they changed a lot of the ecologies on a lot of land. They did away with a lot of hardwood forests and planted a lot of softwood forest. They were doing a rotation about every 50 to 100 years – the same tree back on the same land, over and over again. Around 1880 they determined that they needed to allow all of the tree species that are indigenous to the area to grow, and to develop forests that were more in line with what nature had there before people screwed it up.
Interestingly enough, here in Vermont, I would tell people this and get a look like, “Does this guy really know what he’s talking about? What is this dauerwald?” Well, a couple of years ago, professor Tony D’Amato from UVM, and two other people from out west, published a book called Ecological Silviculture. On about page 30 of this book, they talk about their realization of what they were trying to teach, that it started with dauerwald. They have taken the dauerwald concept into forest management, moving it forward into more, better ways you can do it. Now I can tell people I’m following this ecological silviculture from UVM, and that sounds a little more scientific.
The precepts are – number one, you don’t drive in the woods. You do all your harvesting from trail systems. They’re doing single and group tree selection – in Germany, in the forests that have converted to dauerwald, you don’t find any clearcutting at all. They’re taking these trees out one or two at a time. It’s a very light touch. They let trees basically grow until their time is over. When they start to see a tree declining, that’s when they harvest it. They also allow more species of trees that are native to these areas than they used to allow.
The best way to describe my forest is as an Acadian forest. The prime species are red spruce, yellow birch, sugar maple, tamarack, and white cedar. There’s a lot of maple, but no oak, and not much else. It’s kind of a transitionary forest between northern hardwoods and boreal. It’s actually going away up here now because of climate change. What I did the first 20 years and what I continue to do today is thin out the softwoods, but I don’t see them coming back as successfully as the hardwoods. So, it’s morphing into northern hardwoods. It’s going to be not nearly as dependent on spruce-fir as it is on maple, yellow birch, black birch, and black cherry.
The spruce were keeping up with anything that was competing with them much more successfully 40 years ago than they are today. The yellow birch are clearly overcoming that. They can grow a lot faster, and they’re shading out the spruce. I’m not seeing the kind of spruce regeneration I was hoping for. That’s not necessarily due to climate change – I have a really healthy population of snowshoe hare, and they like to eat spruce. They don’t have any natural enemies up here. We’ve got bear, moose, deer – they’re in the orchard all the time. But no bobcats, and we’re just beginning to get coyotes. These are not dumb rabbits. They’re fearless and they’re smart, and they don’t go away. I do a lot of thinning in the softwood patches, and the one thing that those hares need is a really dense young stand of spruce-fir, and they’re running out of that habitat on my land, so I think eventually they’ll move on.
I’ve done a lot of assisted migration/resiliency planting the last 10 years. I’ve been planting red oak, black cherry, black birch, and European larch. Those species are south of me, but they are now able to grow up here. I couldn’t grow an oak to save my life 40 years ago, and today they’re doing quite well here. I try to space them out all over the property. I’m going to be losing my ash, and I’m trying to keep the diversity up on species. We don’t have any EAB here yet, but it’s coming. It’s inevitable.
I set up the trust around 10 years ago to make my land a town forest for Sheffield. That trust has a three-person board: somebody from Vermont Woodlands Association, somebody from NorthWoods Stewardship Center, and a member of the Sheffield select board. I own it right now, but when I get old and decrepit, the trust will be activated. The trust will hire a forester and will be required to manage the land in accordance with the management plan.
I wanted to make sure that this land was kept in the dauerwald tradition forever. That can happen with a trust. I think it’s in good hands. Ecological silviculture has so many things going for it. This is not only good management, it also sequesters more than the average amount of carbon, and you end up with some legacy and reserve forest characteristics.
I planted an orchard in 1984. It’s in the middle of the forest, so I don’t get a reliable harvest, but I get enough to make anywhere from 30 to 40 gallons of hard cider a year. In another sign of climate change, the trees that I planted were Zones 2 and 3. They were far northern apples, because that’s what it was when I bought the land. Now I’m in Zone 4. I’ve got trees that are producing apples in the middle of August, and that is not good. The idea was that I would be making the cider in my basement at 50 degrees. The basement now doesn’t get down to 50 degrees until late October or November. So I’m harvesting apples in August and having to press out the sweet cider and keep it at 30 degrees until October when I can start fermenting it. It’s too warm too soon for a lot of these apples now.
You don’t want a good-tasting apple for making hard cider. The more stringent and bitter they are, the better. You need a few of the sweeter varieties for the sugar, but you’re looking for apples that really are disgusting, ugly, bitter, stringent. Wild apples make great hard cider. The more varieties you get in cider, the better. I probably never have a batch of cider with less than 10 to 20 varieties of apples. When I don’t get enough apples from my orchard, I get in my car with a couple of bushel baskets. There are over 100 wild apples trees on Route 122 between here and Glover, and I just stop along the road and pick apples off the wild apple trees. People will say, “Yeah, I’ve seen Robertson up there in his smart car picking apples again.”
My favorite thing in the world is a walk in the woods with a good forester. You can get such an education. I’ve got a lot of good forester friends. Vermont is eminently lucky to have the stable of county and private consulting foresters that we have. We clearly have an edge over most states in that respect.