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

American Forests, March-April, 1994 by Henry Kernan

That is a big order for a big resource. We small-forest owners have something over 300 million acres, many of them in units thought to be of uneconomic size and in poor condition for productive management. Our traditions are private and entrepreneurial. Some argue that they are not compatible with the more spatial and temporal needs of forests and suggest more public ownership, or at least intervention. Moreover, study after study has shown that the interests of small, private forest landowners go beyond wood fiber alone and even beyond the concept of multiple use into the most fundamental workings of highly complex ecological systems, systems that intimately involve humans and human management.

Can we small-forest owners meet the challenge?

Fortunately, ever-deeper probing into the ecology of trees and forests is revealing procedures to reach and sustain high levels of productivity in the broadest sense. By applying them, we can justify present attitudes and patterns of ownership.

I have heard forest management compared to the farming of corn and cotton. Fields are plowed, planted, harvested, and left fallow over winter for the next crop. Trees are a crop, says a popular slogan. Are they different from corn and cotton?

In fact, they are different. And the ecological complexities in which they exist are almost beyond comprehension.

Forests are also compared to an ocean--vast, immutable, and silent. Again the comparison is deceptive. Forests more continuously through the process of disturbance, renewal, and change toward maturity and old-growth. On the way, they provide for the specialized habitat requirements of many forms of life. For example, some 20 species other than the spotted owl appear in the late successional stages of the Douglas-fir. Few of the forces of disturbance--fire, wind, insects, and disease--occur so drastically as to destroy the complex ecological system of the natural forest. For example, the spontaneous recovery of Mt. St. Helens after volcanic devastation astonished observers.

Man's most drastic disturbance is logging, followed by fire, overgrazing, and shifting agriculture, called swidden; these do not provide for the legacy of renewal. The result can be permanent loss of forests or the insipidity of uniform spacing and species.

The stages of forest succession most favorable to diversity are the early ones, before crown closure. Precommercial thinnings and wide spacing of crop trees prolong those stages. Occasional logs rotting on the ground, snags, slash, green trees left singly or in clusters, and corridors of standing trees are legacies to sustain the forest system. Next, the saplings become too high to provide browse but are not yet large enough to produce mast or provide denning holes.

Then forms of life appear that perpetuate the forest: lichens, amphibians, insects. Grouse must have logs for drumming, and oak trees must have jays to disperse their seeds. The mark of a skillful, considerate timber harvest is to retain some features of the natural forest, features without which sustained productivity is not assured. With them the harvest can be a means to renewal and continued vigor of the natural forest.