|
Parker
family members had grown trees commercially for 30 years
when they acquired 2,275 acres of redwood land near Fort
Bragg, Calif., in 1989. It was, in large part, the redwoods'
spectacular beauty that lured them from the deep South
to the North Coast, and preserving the forest has been
its own reward. But thanks to the family's intelligent,
conservation-based management, their investment in California's
future has also paid off handsomely on the bottom line.
The
Parkers' land, about 140 miles north of San Francisco,
is a regenerating redwood forest along both sides of the
lower Ten Mile River, a salmon and steelhead stream that
meets the Pacific two miles downstream from the property.
Old-growth redwood stumps are scattered among the younger
trees, while other stumps are the crumbled legacies of
Douglas fir.
The
family selected the property with the help of a consulting
forester -- the first in the U.S. to be certified by the
Forest Stewardship Council -- who continues to manage their
forest. Through an intensive restoration plan, they seek
the recruitment of greater age and species diversity throughout
their young-growth stands. For decades, the trend in redwood
harvests has been to cut smaller and smaller trees. But
the three Parker siblings -- Peter Parker, Gwendolyn Dhesi
and Adele Rodbell -- are taking small trees only as a thinning
program to increase the average age and size of their redwoods.
This approach clearly will bring ecological benefits, and
they're convinced it will bring economic ones as well.
The
family wants to showcase stewardship forestry -- from uneven-aged
management and habitat restoration to proper road construction
and stream protection. Peter Parker is a former board member
and president of the Forest Landowners of California, whose
motto is "Protecting Family Forests."
He believes owners of forestland have an obligation to the
public to be forest stewards, and actively promotes this
approach among fellow forest owners.
From
Forest to Pasture, and Back
Fort
Bragg is a coastal town in Mendocino County with a history
steeped in timber and fishing. Settlers started arriving
in the area in the late 1860s, and by 1873 a lumber port
was established at Noyo Harbor, south of town. By 1885
the Fort Bragg Redwood Company was employing a system of
railroads for the harvest and transport of logs, and by
the early 1900s many of the forest stands along the coast
had been cut. Over the following decades, loggers gradually
moved inland with a system of extended railroads, taking
trees from ever-steeper slopes.
In the
1930s Fort Bragg Redwood, by then renamed the Union Lumber
Company, started logging the old-growth on the rugged terrain
that today comprises the Parker lands. The company fed
its mill with the biggest timber and left standing the
smaller or slightly defective trees, including those with
curves, scars or large wolf limbs. After taking the trees
from that part of the Ten Mile drainage, the company sold
the property to a ranching family.
The
ranchers burned the 2,275 acres, seeded it with grass and
set 1,000 sheep out to graze. But the brushy new sprouts
from the blackened redwood stumps eventually outshaded
the sparse grazing land and left pastureland only along
the river bottom. When the wool market fell in the 1960s,
the ranchers stopped using the land for pasturage, and
in 1968 it was sold to Harwood Investment Company.
Over
the next 20 years Harwood logged the more accessible parts
of the property, generally selecting the larger-diameter
trees, particularly the residual old-growth, now valuable
despite some defects. About half the property was logged
in this fashion.
"We
Thought We Could Be Good Stewards"
Meanwhile,
in the opposite corner of the U.S., Ken Parker had been
purchasing small parcels of cut-over timberland in southern
Mississippi, some of it abandoned and foreclosed on. Starting
in the 1950s, he eventually owned 3,000 acres. When he
died in 1978, Ken Parker left the properties to his three
children, Peter, Gwendolyn and Adele.
In 1986
the siblings decided to sell their Mississippi holdings
and buy forestland on the West Coast. A clause in the U.S.
tax code, the Starker exchange provision, allowed them
to defer capital gains tax on the sale by purchasing another,
similar property within six months, an arrangement known
as a "like-kind exchange."
They
found a buyer and, in 1989, purchased the property above
Fort Bragg.
The
family decided to make the change for several reasons,
Peter Parker says, but the uniqueness and rarity of redwood
was a major consideration.
"It's
obvious that redwood grows one place in the world and there's
a finite amount of it, but southern yellow pine is interchangeable
with many different softwood species," he explains. "It's
excellent wood, but you're very much in the commodities
market. And so we saw a little bit of a specialty here
in redwoods.
"Owning
a redwood forest - there's just something about that," muses
Parker.
"Over and above the economics of it, stewardship in a redwood
forest has a little more challenge to it than stewardship
in a southern yellow pine forest. In a hundred years, those
southern yellow pine trees are declining. Whereas here you
can take a tree and say, 'I want that tree to grow for three
hundred years.' Hey, it will grow! Four hundred years maybe,
or five hundred years. That's not for economics, mind you.
That's just for land ethics.
"We
knew that California was much tougher in terms of regulations,
but we thought we could be good stewards of the land, so
that was OK."
None
of the Parkers live on the property, but all take part
in management decisions. Two siblings are California residents,
and all three visit the ranch frequently, as do their children
and grandchildren.
Productive
Redwood Land
The
climate along the coast of Mendocino County is mild - winter
temperatures generally remain above 40 degrees and summer
temperatures rarely exceed 80. Rainfall averages from 40
inches annually at lower elevations to 70 inches on the
higher ridges, and 80 percent of the rain comes from October
through March. During the rainless summers ocean fog adds
significantly to available moisture. In these conditions,
redwood forests are quite productive.
On the
Parker Ten Mile Ranch, elevations range from 100 feet along
the Ten Mile River bottom to 1,200 feet on the ridgetops.
The topography is convoluted, with small drainages cutting
into steep slopes and resulting in many east-west ridges.
Soils are deep and well-drained. Of the 2,275 acres owned
by the Parker clan, 2,000 acres are managed forest. Redwood
dominates, making up 67 percent of the forest stands, followed
by Douglas fir at 27 percent. Fir and western hemlock account
for 6 percent of the conifers, and the remaining 275 acres
are pasture and riparian zones. Among the hardwoods, tanoak
is generally relegated to thick groves on south-facing
slopes that did not return to conifer after the original
logging. Madrone, bay laurel, big-leaf maple and the moisture-loving
red alder are common but not abundant on the property.
Redwoods
from 50 to 65 years old dominate the current forest, with
most of the merchantable volume in trees 18 to 24 inches
in diameter. Young sprouts, saplings and pole trees prevail
in areas that were more heavily logged in the 1970s and
early '80s. Most of the mature or old-growth timber is
scattered on steep hillsides.
Old-growth
stumps are spaced widely, with 10 to 30 trees now sprouting
from each one. Because of the natural fire frequency along
this part of the Pacific Coast in presettlement times (every
25 to 30 years on average), understories were typically
sparse, while many of the mature redwood and Douglas fir
trees withstood the low-intensity fires.
Managing
for Growth and Diversity
Craig
Blencowe, Linwood Gill and Thembi Borras, all California
registered professional foresters, jointly manage the Parker
woodlands. Blencowe started his forestry career under the
guidance of Jim Greig and Ed Tunheim, who are well-known
for their uneven-aged forest management and single-tree
selection practices.
After
the Parkers bought their property in 1989, Blencowe and
Gill spent the first two years developing a forest management
plan. In 1992, their Non-Industrial Timber Management Plan
became one of the earliest such plans to be approved by
the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The
main goals of the management plan are to:
• Improve
the stands in terms of size, species and quality of residual
trees by selecting trees on an individual-tree basis;
• Favor
high-quality redwood while maintaining a balance of native
species; and
• Increase
the overall standing inventory by letting growth outpace
harvesting.
Stands
on the Parker Ten Mile Ranch currently average from 12,000
to 13,000 board feet per acre. The plan calls for an increase
in stocking from the present level up to 25,000 to 40,000
board feet per acre, meaning that for the foreseeable future
the Parkers will be harvesting at below the growth rate.
For
forestland owners with 2,500 acres or fewer, the Non-Industrial
Timber Management Plan, or NTMP, is an alternative to the
Timber Harvest Plan (or THP) normally required by the state
of California. An approved NTMP allows landowners to plan
timber harvests several decades into the future, removing
the need to apply to the state for each harvest as they
would under THPs. In return for this reduction in red tape,
a more in-depth evaluation of the harvest's ecological
impact is required, and the NTMP allows uneven-aged, sustained-yield
harvests only.
Normally,
NTMP harvests over a specified period are limited to the
amount of tree growth over the same period. In addition,
clearcuts are not allowed, and a good representation of
medium and larger trees must remain after harvesting. A
management benefit is that the NTMP provides the landowner
with a sense of security for long-term forest planning.
The
Parker NTMP designates 10 distinct management units determined
by road accessibility and historical harvesting boundaries.
Bigger
Trees
Many
trees are young and growing vigorously, resulting in an
increase in standing inventory of 5 percent to 8 percent
annually in even-aged stands. Blencowe and his colleagues
aim to diversify the stand age and structure while favoring
the best-quality trees in order to grow them to large diameters.
Increasing
the dominance of redwoods and growing larger, older trees
will bring the Parker stands closer to a "natural" redwood
forest in structure and composition, making them more like
the redwood forests that existed before the advent of logging.
"We're
trying to get those redwood trees up into the thirty- to
thirty-six-inch diameter class to get a high-quality tree," Blencowe
explains. "We're looking at not only growing a larger-sized
tree but a better-quality tree. While considering wildlife
needs, we still try to remove as many low-quality, suppressed
and damaged trees as possible.
"When
we thin, we may take out a white fir [grand fir] or a Doug
fir to favor a redwood. We're really trying to upgrade
the value of a stand. At the same time that we're removing
an economic product, we strive to increase the value of
the underlying asset."
The
family recognizes that improving overall stand quality
is an economic investment.
"There are relatively few people growing the bigger trees," says
Parker. "They're kind of the exception, and we're in that
exception.
"The
bigger trees - those nice, big redwoods with the high percentage
of heartwood - will command some premium now, but we feel
the higher percentage of quality wood also will be a good
bet in the future. When you have something that very few
other people have, sometimes you get the best price for
it. So we're bringing this forest back from a cut-over
pasture and sheep-grazing ranch to uneven-aged, large-diameter
trees with both economic and environmental management."
The
foresters plan to carry trees to at least to 80 years of
age, when dominant individuals will reach 30-plus inches
in diameter. Some trees are allowed to grow beyond this
size, but there is a cost: Falling a larger tree often
results in greater damage to the residual stand.
"We struggle with this uneven-aged business because collateral
damage occurs," Blencowe says. "And it just kills you to
see these eight- or ten-inch diameter trees get beaten up
when a big tree falls on them. That's a downside of the selective
process. You don't get that when you clearcut."
While
the owners expect the greatest financial return on redwood,
they're also managing the forest for a representative mix
of native species. Where stands have a high representation
of redwood and a low representation of grand fir and Douglas
fir, these whitewood species often will be retained. Although
the property is managed first for redwoods, the management
plan calls for encouraging the Douglas fir component in
particular because this species was an original member
of the stands and because it brings economic and ecological
diversity to the property.
This
is being accomplished by clustering some trees for harvest
(called "group selections") and by creating openings up
to a fifth of an acre, and planting these to Douglas fir.
Also under consideration are some larger group selection
cuts (up to 2.5 acres) in order to reintroduce Douglas
fir and diversify the stands.
Habitat
for Wildlife
The
current 50- to 65-year-old stands are too even-aged and
too lacking in structural diversity to support as much
wildlife as a more mature forest could. So the Parkers
and their foresters are recruiting larger trees and snags
as legacies in the stands.
"In
my opinion,"
says Parker, "if you leave a few thirty-inch and forty-inch
trees you're not giving away the farm. I think the family
wants to see that. There are a few bigger trees now that
for one reason or another never got harvested, and there
are second-growth trees that are getting pretty big in one
area.
"The
family philosophy is that you don't need to cut every one
of those trees. You can leave those and create a place
where you can go back and say, 'Hey, here's some forty-inch
trees and it's just good to have those.' This will result
in a diversity of tree sizes and a diversity of habitat,
creating some old trees that actually are second-growth."
Because
the Parker forests are being managed for more mature, large-diameter
trees, the Parkers expect the property to become even more
valuable for wildlife habitat. As the NTMP states: "Wildlife
habitat can be improved on the Tree Farm simply as a by-product
of ongoing management with little or no extra cost."
Osprey,
black bear, mountain lions and bobcats are among the many
species using the property. Two pairs of nesting spotted
owls have been documented there, and others appear to hunt
on the property. It seems to be a place where the territories
of several pairs and individuals come together, Blencowe
says. One night he and others listened as seven spotted
owls, three pairs and an individual, called back and forth.
The
lower portions of the Ten Mile River watershed provide
habitat for spawning salmon and steelhead, but many of
the tributary streams that bisect steep forest stands on
the Parker property are not fish-bearing. A large timber
company, the Hawthorne Group, owns the majority of the
watershed, including the lands upstream of the Parker property,
and the company is responsible for most of the water quality
monitoring and potential riparian restoration projects
in the watershed.
For
much of its way through the Parker property, the Ten Mile
River passes among grasslands and marsh. Because these
bottomlands aren't forested, the recent listing of the
coho salmon as threatened in Northern California should
not greatly affect forest management on the ranch. Skid
roads and all logging equipment are kept away from riparian
areas.
The
Parkers are setting up a program to monitor any impact
they may be having on the river's tributaries. They don't
have much control over impacts along the main stem of the
river because they own a relatively short stretch of the
watercourse. For that reason, says Gwen Dhesi, "it's more
important to us to look at the small tributaries to see
if we're having an effect on temperature or sediment."
"Recording
thermometers indicate that water temperatures in these
streams are well below summer maximums for salmon and steelhead," she
says.
"The biggest reason is that we've retained good tree canopy
cover over these streams."
Harvesting
With Care
Logging
on the Parker lands is restricted to the dry summer months
to minimize soil disturbance and stream sedimentation.
The harvests are conducted by three local firms. "The best
thing for us is to have loggers that we can trust and use
over and over again," forester Gill explains. All three
logging companies do both cable and tractor logging.
Around
half of the current logging takes place on the steeper
slopes the previous owner did not enter in the 1970s and
'80s. High-lead cable yarding is conducted on all slopes
greater than 50 percent -- and on some smaller ones as
well -- using a small, mobile yarder. Crews pre-designate
and flag yarding corridors and space them 100 to 200 feet
from one another, close enough to thin stands by cable.
Yarding corridors are felled after the sky line is in place.
This results in narrow corridors, because only the trees
directly in the way of the carriage that hoists the logs
to the ridgetop are taken out.
The
Parker operation was one of the first to use cable logging
for selective cutting, says Blencowe. Tractor logging is
the more traditional technique in Mendocino County, but
is only suitable on gentler slopes.
"We have voluntarily opted to use the cable system even when
we were previously approved for tractor logging," he says. "The
bottom line is that there is a lot less soil disturbance
with cable logging."
Roads
and Maintenance
Most
roads on the Parker property were built by the previous
owner. To enable cable logging, the Parkers did extensive
upgrading of some of the road systems. Old skid trails
were often linked with new roads to provide access to ridges.
While many steep stretches of original roads or skid trails
were retired, a few were incorporated into old road systems
in the belief that less erosion is incurred by using and
maintaining short sections of existing steep road than
by constructing new ones. Old sections of roads that were
no longer needed have been water-barred and left to recruit
back into timber. Blencowe and his colleagues try to limit
slope gradients on new roads to 15 percent.
Main
haul roads have been rocked and culverts have been installed
to protect all stream crossings. A downspout of corrugated
metal below the outfall of some culverts reduces the velocity
and impact of water on the downstream channel. Rolling
dips are often used in place of water bars. Logging contractors
do this work as part of the cleanup after harvests.
In addition
to being a forester, Linwood Gill is the property caretaker,
and he monitors and maintains the roads year-round. This
includes maintaining water bars, checking to see if culverts
are working properly and keeping the road systems clear
of logs.
Some
of the roads are shared with the Hawthorne Group, the industrial
forest owner whose property abuts the Parkers' on three
sides. Says Parker,
"Typically, they have come to us and said, 'We want to improve
this road.' So we'd supply the gravel and then they'd supply
the machinery, and we'd do a cooperative thing. If we're
going to go in and work soon, then we'll share the cost.
"But
if we don't have any particular plans in there for many
years, then we'll say, 'We're not interested in building
now. You go in and do what you need to do, but the quality
of the work must comply to the road building standards
outlined in our management plan.'"
Dollars
and Sense
"An
inventory of standing timber is best thought of as principal,
and tree growth as interest earned on the principal," says
Craig Blencowe. "Our goal is to harvest no more than the
periodic interest -- the growth -- while never touching
the principal, which is the standing inventory. At the
same time, we want to increase the value of the timber
stand."
Increasing
value comes from an increase in both tree quality and size.
"Here,
every improvement is designed to pay off," Blencowe says. "The
trees are getting bigger. The quality is getting better.
The road system is being put in and put in right, and is
designed to be usable with our logging systems indefinitely.
We're not going to lose our soil."
Blencowe
believes that fewer, larger trees are a better investment
than more, smaller trees, even when the annual increase
in board feet is the same. He explains the economic investment
in terms of volume growth per tree: "Instead of carrying
one hundred thousand board feet per acre, growing at one
percent annually, a lower inventory of only twenty-five
thousand board feet per acre will be growing at four percent
annually. The net growth is a thousand board feet per acre
per year in each case.
"But
the twenty-five thousand board feet stand is more valuable," he
continues, "since larger average tree size will mean more
quality wood per tree. Additionally, logging costs will
be reduced, since fewer trees will need to be cut to realize
the same volume."
Beyond
increasing timber inventory and improving wood quality,
harvests on the property have yielded an annual return
on investment on a cash flow basis that averaged 6.8 percent
for the years 1995 through 2000, according to Parker.
"Quick
cash, however, is another question," he adds. "If you absolutely
need to maximize cash availability, forestry may not be
the right place to be invested. You're not in a very liquid
situation."
The
Future
What
today is the Parker Ten Mile Ranch was virgin timberland
in the opening decades of the 20th century. Now, in the
early years of the 21st, the land supports a young and
vigorous redwood forest that provides habitat for a burgeoning
natural wildlife population.
The
goal of the family owners is to grow bigger, older and
higher-quality trees. This will maintain the property's
value, help supply society with wood, improve habitat and
generate income for the owners.
"To
accomplish all these goals simultaneously," Parker says, "is
a wonderfully gratifying effort."
The
family has created a partnership as a vehicle for passing
equity in the ranch to the partners' children. This was
a long process involving appraisers, lawyers and accountants.
But it successfully transferred much of the ownership into
the hands of the younger generation without fragmenting
the timber base, and without heavy tax penalties.
And
it's the enthusiasm and interest of the next generation
of family owners, says Parker, that's most important. "Their
continued dedication to a stewardship forest management
philosophy under the guidance of foresters Craig, Linwood
and Thembi," he declares, "is ultimately the best possible
assurance for the future of this forest."
(Back
to Stewardship Forestry at
Work)
(Go
to Chapter 2)
|
