In the midst of like-minded company, like here in this blog, I often speak of the “woodlot” – the place my family goes to, among other things, cut firewood, make maple syrup, grow sawlogs (and hopefully some veneer), and occasionally shoot arrows at deer (bow season starts tomorrow here in Vermont, so you can see I’m a bit distracted). In different company – especially around people who are new to the rural Northeast – I’ll refer to the same land as a “tree farm,” as I think it’s important to stress and re-stress this idea that we’re growing a crop – whether it’s logs or syrup – and depending on the sale of this crop to keep the land intact and a part of the working landscape.
There are a bunch of reasons why using the term “tree farm” is misleading (the fact that the land is a natural forest and not a plantation is probably the most glaring one). And the whole farming analogy is a bit apples and oranges too, I know. If you’re growing an ear of sweet corn or an heirloom tomato for market, you taste it when you harvest it. If it’s not good, you switch varieties, or modify your farming practices until it is good. With sawlogs, at least the way most of us do things, you’re sort of stuck with what you’ve got. And what’s more, most of us – even those who think we know a thing or two about wood – don’t have a firm grasp of what we’ve got even when it’s down. Yes, we know the difference between a sawlog and something with veneer potential. We can identify obvious defects on a log. But it’s probably safe to say that unless you’re a log buyer, you really don’t know what’s inside the thing you’re selling, which in the case of sawlogs is the whole point. Not only can’t we taste the product we’re harvesting, we can’t even see it.
I was thinking about this yesterday while at a portable sawmill workshop that was put on by the North East State Foresters Association. The class covered a whole host of things – from the wood business to milling technique to wood moisture properties – but the thing I found most interesting was how boards are graded. There are seven board grades and a whole host of acronyms and a pile of formulas that go along with each – we’ll try to get a story produced on this, though making it accessible is going to be a trick. The point for now is simply that it’s fascinating and illuminating for someone on the log production end of things to look at the board production end of things. To see how close the scale was to the actual board footage in a log. To see how the external defects (and the ones you can’t see) translate into board grades. To look at an oak sawlog and see not the mill price we’re used to but the board price – the $850/MBF for green select lumber, or the $1430/MBF for this same wood when it’s kiln-dried.
If you’re similarly interested in all this, you might attend one of these workshops yourself. If you’re a New Yorker or a Vermonter you’ve missed the boat, but those of you in New Hampshire can pick up the tour on October 6 in Durham at the Thompson School sawmill. In Massachusetts, classes will be held on October 15 in Turners Falls at the Franklin County Regional Tech. School and October 16 in Sandisfield at Nash Winn Milling. On October 17, the class will be at UConn in Storrs, Connecticut; on October 18 in Litchfield, Connecticut, at the White Memorial Conservation Center. And on October 19, the tour will end in Glocester, Rhode Island at the Washington Management Area. To learn more, click here.
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