Spring 2020 ForestLife

For love of the land and heritage: Phillips Family Tree Farm

SIX GENERATIONS OF CREATIVE, CONSCIENTIOUS STEWARDSHIP—PROTECTED IN PERPETUITY

Mature pine at the Phillips Family Tree Farm in 2006 (note Gary in the center!)

Gary Hendrix and his family own and operate the 900–acre Phillips Family Tree Farm, located east of Redding, California. The Phillips Family Tree Farm was one of Pacific Forest Trust’s first conservation projects, with a Working Forest Conservation Easement (WFCE) established in 1998. PFT pioneered this innovative method of giving landowners the means to permanently conserve their forests for a variety of public benefits while keeping them in private ownership and productive forestry—allowing both economic production and resource protection. (Find out more at pacificforest.org/wfce.) Gary is a member of our Klamath-Cascade Advisory Council and a past President of Forest Landowners of California, and was once California Tree Farmer of the Year. We asked him about the impact the easement has had on his family and their land, more than 20 years later.

Gary Hendrix: My generation grew up thinking that all we did to get this land was to be lucky enough to be born into this family! In the late 1990s, we were looking for a way to protect our property in perpetuity. We knew some family member—or more than just one—would be born someday who didn’t care about the land.

We read in the paper that PFT was coming up to the area to talk about what conservation easements were. It sounded good to us, and we worked with Laurie and Connie to design an easement specifically for our tree farm.

There are seven family members with ownership shares that deserve credit for getting this easement put in place. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion: our lawyer said “You’ll never get seven people to agree on anything!” But we did. Ultimately, we all agreed that we wanted a biodiverse, multi-aged forest in perpetuity, no matter who owns it. That is what the easement does for us.

PFT Outside-the-Box Award boxes made by Gary Hendrix with the distinctive blue stain

There are now six generations that have been stewarding this land, including my grandchildren’s generation. My son Gregg and his daughter Sarah are the ones who manage the land and the mill now. She is a marvelous young lady who graduated from UC Santa Cruz, went to Nepal with the Peace Corps, and returned to become her dad’s apprentice. She’s learning all the ways of running the mill, and she recently bought out one of the seven original family members and is taking his place on the board.

We have a sawmill, a planing mill, a machine shop, and a box factory. We make wooden boxes for whatever you can imagine. Our number one product is high-quality lumber for the building industry. We only cut dead timber, which has a blue stain that is unique and in high demand.

Gary Hendrix shovels sawdust and scrap wood into the steam engine that powers the mill (circa2004)

We have the only commercial steam mill left in the United States. We’re on the National Registry of Historic Places. We’re also completely off the grid. We have a 50 KW generator for some of the more modern equipment and cloudier days, but mostly it’s solar.

We humans are here for less than the blink of an eyelash, geologically speaking, and yet as human beings we have the potential to change the entire world—in fact, we are changing it. With land ownership comes responsibility for stewardship: We all need to take care of the gifts we’ve been given.

I’m not going to be around forever. But thanks in part to our work with PFT, I feel good about what I’m leaving behind.