From tree farm to forest farm - forestry consultant Henry Kernan - includes related article - Private Forests

American Forests, March-April, 1994 by Henry Kernan

The reasons for and rewards from wise woodland maanagement have changed enormously over the past 50 years.

HALF A CENTURY AGO woodland managers were concentrating--rather narrowly, it now seems--upon producing wood fiber alone. My recent midwinter rummaging among old records turned up a plan typical of those timber-haunted times. The several long-folded pages had the date of April 1947 and the name of the farm forester. All my savings were by then in forest land, for which he had prepared a type map and management recommendations. The type map showed a 1,176-acre medley of farms abandoned to old fields, pastures, and logged-over woodlots, mostly of maple and hemlock. Here and there sun-loving, light-seeded pioneer trees were making a comeback. Elsewhere fields had remained for years without tree growth. Somehow a few forest stands in steep, rocky, or swampy places had survived two centuries of human endeavor. The management advice I got was to plant the open areas, harvest the mature timber, and remove the trees of inferior quality and species for an admittedly nonexistent firewood market.

Not mentioned in those folded papers and scarcely perceived by us at the time were the values which were to give my years of ownership their most abundant rewards, values that have turned out to be more authentic than the ones that prompted my purchase.

I had participated--as a consultant for the northeastern states--in the then-American Forestry Association's post-World War II survey of the nation's timber resources. They had been essential to the six-year war effort, and there was rising concerns about their shortage. The production of wood seemed to be the all-important purpose of forest management. Therefore, timber sales from my forest lands were fully expected to pay what were then inconsequential property taxes and even yield a return on the investment.

The much-feared timber famine has not come about. Timber sales from my land are very far from paying the taxes or returning a profit. Tree values have risen at a rate that has allowed taxes to push aside illusions of dollar profit. Instead, the profit has resulted from unsuspected subtleties of forest ownership--in the breadth and depth of long acquaintance with these lands and dedication to their welfare. The presence of trees, their numbers, size, and longevity create and maintain the ecology of a forest.

Yet, the phrase Tree Farm no longer describes the multiplicities of woodland ownership. More appropriate to this wider vision is the idea of Forest Farm.

My woodlands are on both sides of the Charlotte Valley near sources of the Susquehanna River in upstate New York. Observers with a romantic bent--having James Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer in mind--call it Leatherstocking Country. Sugar maple dominates the forest and landscape, with cherry, ash, and oak in lesser amounts. Elm and birch no longer exist as timber trees, while chestnut becomes more and more a fading memory of the homespun era. The conifers are hemlock, spruce, and pine.

During the mid-1700s Schoharie Germans launched canoes and built cabins where the river loses gradient at the foot of Quaker Hill, my hill. They must have been Tories, loyal to the British king, for they called the river Charlotte after George III's wife, and decamped to Canada after Yorktown. Their Yankee replacements continued for two centuries to clear, farm, and abandon land again to the forest. Their prodigious energy and work permanently changed the landscape with the stones they gathered by the millions and formed into walls, ramps, and foundations, and with the walls and cellars they dug. Their dammed and diverted streams turned mill wheels that ground grain and sawed logs. They exploited the forest for the logs as well as for firewood, potash, tools, maple sap, tanning bark, fencing, charcoal, railway ties, and the chemical products of destructive distillation. Such activities, destructive and wasteful as they were, are the background of the forest in which I work and in which I find so much diversity, beauty, and interest.

Despite the energy and skill with which those farmers, early and late, handled their horses and plows, their axes, saws, and rakes, they did not entirely do away with the old-growth forest. Even Leatherstocking Country has patches of, if not exactly wilderness, at least remnants of the primeval condition. The steep, north-facing side of Quaker Hill was too much for horses. Giant hemlocks stand there today as they did when the Schoharie Germans were busy with their canoes and cabins. Beneath the hemlocks are dwarf maples and yew, mushrooms in season, and porcupines in the crevices of the shale rock. Dwarf spruce grow on the boggy shores of my lake where there is no sign of human presence. Giant hardwoods line the lake's rocky outlet to the Charlotte River 600 feet below.

Elsewhere in the forest, earlier farmers and loggers left visible traces of their work: piles of hemlock bark intact after nearly a century, skidding trails, stumps, stone walls, and maple trees once tapped for sap. Successive rounds of logging that took the best and left the worst have downgraded even the best stands to a condition that will take many years to correct.