How to Know When it’s Time to Harvest Timber on Forest Land

if you've watched a lot of my videos you might be able to see that I have a fairly conservative approach to managing my forests I'm typically not out to cut down all my big valuable Timber and cash out on it I've been harvesting some dead and dying trees doing some thinning trying to enhance the health of the forest with the idea of leaving the bigger healthier more vigorous trees to continue getting bigger but in recent years I'm starting to see it might be time to start doing more serious Timber Harvest on this property I'm going to talk a little bit about why that is if you have Forest land maybe what I'm doing here doesn't really apply to where you are or what you're doing but maybe there'll be a little nugget of something you can get out of this ideally I would let all these trees grow up to be big valuable Timber but I know that in a lot of parts of this property that's just not in the cards especially when it comes to Douglas fur which there is a lot of here this is one of the stumps of the recent trees I cut down out of the dozen or so trees I cut out of this area recently because they're either dead or dying I'm noticing they have something in common if you look at the stump you can tell a lot about a tree's growth when we look at the Rings toward the middle of the tree okay that's hard to see because it has a lot of pitch on it if we go to the undercut wedge that was taken out of it we can see the Rings better toward the middle of the tree when the tree was younger it was growing fairly fast these rings are about a/ quar inch apart some of them up to 38 of course we can't just take a look at the dead piece of wood we have to poke it with a stick seems appropriate if the Rings are a quarter inch on this side of it and a/ quarter inch on this side of it that means the tree was growing at about a/ inch in diameter per year for most of its life then it starts slowing down to the point where in recent years it's hardly growing at all around here when I see trees starting to make smaller growth rings like this there can be a few possible reasons for that one of those can be the trees are just exceeding the tree growing potential of the site any given site has a limited amount of water sunlight resources on a site like this it's shallow soil we have hot dry Summers there's limited water here what I'm finding here is when Douglas fur trees are small there's plenty of resources for them but when they get to a certain size they run out of resources another reason can be they're simply overcrowding too many trees in one spot competing for limited resources in a lot of cases when that happens you can thin out the trees and the trees you leave have more resources many times I've seen that happen where a tree slows down then you thin them out after that the growth rings start getting big again the trees start taking off another thing that can cause trees to slow down their growth is disease and insect attack if trees get attacked that starts to stress them it starts to interfere with their processes and they can start putting more resources into trying to fight off the attacks than they do into putting on new wood and in recent years on this property with all the trees I'm cutting down including the ones that are not dead and dying I'm noticing this slow down and growth and out of those reasons for why this might be happening I think it's all of them on a lot of parts of this property the Douglas fur trees are exceeding the growth potential of the site if it's a case where the trees are just overcrowding and they need to be thinned out I've noticed on the stumps you'll often see the Rings getting smaller but up in the top of the tree the Rings are still pretty consistent a lot of times when trees over crowd you'll have tall thin low taper trees they're close to the same size on the bottom as they are 30 ft up that's because they slow down their diameter growth at the bottom and keep it going up top as they're trying to reach up for sunlight to out compete the other trees but in recent years I'm noticing just like with this log here the decrease in ring size is happening even in the tops over crowding is happening a lot on this property and a lot of it does need to be thinned but even on the trees like this one that had plenty of spacing around it we're still seeing this tightening up of the growth rings the trees are slowing down then eventually getting attacked by insects and disease another stump here same deal it was a good vigorous tree when it was younger but it's really slowing down in recent years that slow down happened to it back here for a few years it was growing really slow I thinned this area right around this time it did respond for just a few years but then it started slowing down again that was the dominant Tree in this area there is a lot of competition around the area of these smaller trees pulling water out of the ground if this tree was still alive and I was to take these smaller trees out it would probably respond to that and speed its growth up but like we saw there it would probably be shortlived because this size of tree is exceeding the growth potential of this site a good indicator for that is I don't see a lot of old growth stumps here from when they originally logged the the old growth on a good growing tree site a lot of times you'll find a lot of big old growth stumps there are some parts of this property where there are some big old stumps but those are on parts of the property with deeper soil they're on the Shady Side Of The Hill or close to the creek where they can get plenty of water on sites like this one where these Doug fur trees are having a hard time I don't see any of those big old stumps when I look at the Doug fur trees around here on this one the Top's looking sick it probably has caners or bugs attacking it got this dead one this one's almost dead the very top of this one died here's another spot where we have Douglas fur that have some decent spacing to them some of these ones here are a little bit tight but from here it looks like this is a really healthy stand of trees if we step back aways from it if you look at the tops of the trees from a distance the top of this one's dead there's a couple dead tops over there there are also parts of the property where the larger Douglas fur are doing quite well it has better deeper soil it's on a Northeast slope where it doesn't get as hot and dry these trees are showing signs that they're still healthy they're still growing well some of them are overcrowded they should be thinned out in a spot like this they should respond well to a commercial thinning where you just take a few of them out then the ones you leave will increase their growth one of the ways I can tell these trees are still growing well if you look at this furrowed bark it has the Peaks and The Valleys these are like stretch marks over time the bark weathers into this more gray color this brown wood that's in the bottom of the valleys that is bark that's being newly exposed as it's stretching out as the wood underneath it grows in this slower growing tree you don't see that brown because it's weathering faster than it's growing but on a faster growing tree you get that brown where it's growing faster than it's weathering as the trees growing and stretching apart it's revealing the that new fresh Brown Bark what I'm also noticing here is there are a lot of remains of old rotten Douglas fur logs this is a tree that would have fell down a long time ago most of it rotted away this is just the core Center I can still see some of the growth rings they have about the same spacing as some of those stumps we were looking at earlier when the trees were growing well got more pieces of old rotten wood laying around here are the remains of a big Douglas fur tree that broke off at the stump here it looks like it had a lot of Scar and defects in it which could be why the loggers who took the original old growth here left this one because it had too much defect in it right up the hill from here another big old down log this part of the property has a lot of these remains of big old Douglas fur trees the point of all this is what this is telling me is this spot right here has a history of growing big Douglas fur even after they get big they still grow well they still put on a lot of wood for this area where Douglas fur do well and these trees are still growing that tells me these trees are not ready to harvest they're still growing they're still healthy this is a part of the property where it's best to leave these trees let them get bigger let them get more valuable I don't see any mortality the tops look healthy someday I'll probably come in here take a few of them out thin out some of the ones that are overcrowding just to keep the remaining ones healthy and growing at some point they can get so big that the Mills don't even want them at that point you might want to consider harvesting them but these ones are nowhere near that these are the kind of trees I want to leave because they're putting on a lot of wood every year look at all the brown in those stretch marks that bark has to stretch a lot every year to accommodate the growth underneath it this is a good Douglas fur growing site this is where I want to leave them growing now as we get back into the low lands of the property where there's shallower soils it's lower elevation we get more south facing slopes the Douglas fur just are not looking good there's a lot of mortality happening a lot of them are looking sickly not much foliage in the tops there's a lot of merchantable siiz Douglas fur in this stand but every year more of them die there are a lot of Douglas fur trees in here but what are we missing I'm not seeing any sign that there were ever any big trees in this area no stum no old logs everywhere I look around here I don't see a single trace of anything that would suggest that there has ever been large Douglas fur trees here at first glance From Below these Douglas Furs look like they're healthy but when I look up I see a different story dead tops about 200 fet up the hill dead trees if we look close at the bark there is no Brown in The Valleys of the stretch marks there are a lot of parts of this property that have a lot of this merchantable Douglas fur it's hardly growing at all anymore it's not increasing much in value in a lot of cases it's losing value because it's dying that spot up the hill where I showed you those fast growing Doug fur that is a good site that is a site that can grow a lot of wood those are trees to leave these ones down here where they're exhausting the potential of the site I think it's time to harvest them now that doesn't mean that I'm going to clearcut the place and just turn it into a land of stumps what I plan on doing is massively reducing the Douglas fur component which isn't doing well take out a lot of these Douglas Furs in the places where they shouldn't be in favor of trees that are already there that do well here when I look for the stumps of the old trees that used to be here I don't see Douglas fur what I see is these old cut off stumps from the hardwoods that used to be here these Madrones were cut down decades ago go they're still trying to sprout back decades ago the hardwoods were cut down because the belief back then was the hardwoods are worthless in this part of the world there's never really been a good hardwood Market there are various reasons for that the industry standard was always grow Douglas fur Douglas fur is the valuable timber tree around here standard practice in the timber industry has been to take out the hardwoods plant Douglas fur because that's what's going to be valuable decades later we're now learning that the lower elevation Forest the hot dry forests of Southern Oregon Northern California don't grow Douglas fur as well as other places do like the higher elevations or the coast or Northwest Oregon and Western Washington Douglas fur does amazingly well in those areas but these areas with our hot dry Summers Douglas fur gets to about this size and then it starts dying unless it's on a really favorable site like I showed you up the hill earlier in a spot like this if I take out this Douglas fur that's no longer doing well well here all these madone and Oak Sprouts will start growing again leave a few of these scattered Pines and Cedar the pine and Cedar can be more drought tolerant places like these where I cut down the Douglas fur it will help release these Oaks around here the Oaks don't have a lot of Timber value but they have a lot of wildlife value maybe these kind of places that just aren't that suited for growing timber are better for growing wildlife and getting a lot of trees like this on the place that are just Prime size for Timber value they're big enough to have a good amount of wood in them but they're not so big that they have a lot of big knots in them I wish I could just leave them here let them continue to grow but just like this one the ones over there where those stumps are the bugs kill them and that's what's happening on these marginal sites like this at first glance this looks like a really healthy tree but when you get a closer look look at all this pitch running down it as the boring insect are attacking it it tries to push them out with the pitch the trees can fight off the bugs to a certain degree they seem to know which trees are stressed and it's probably a matter of time before they get this one for those of us who have Forest Land part of the value of it is the monetary value of the Timber if your trees are healthy and growing that's like interest every year the trees become more valuable your property and the value of the Timber becomes more valuable while that's happening I think it's a good idea to leave the timber let it continue getting more valuable there are of course some exceptions to that but in these parts of the property where the Douglas fur are not doing well there's a lot of value there there's a lot of monetary value there on the parts of this property where there's a large amount of timber that's just not growing much anymore that interest on that value is shrinking and as it gets to the point where the mortality exceeds the growth rate the value is actually dropping so financially that's time to harvest in this case I probably should have actually done done it a few years earlier before trees started dying as much as they are now a lot of these trees are ready to go I'm ready to do some logging on this property the problem is the market is not so much price of logs right now is relatively low this spring after the ground dries up and my roads aren't muddy if log prices go up like there's some indications they might I'll probably start doing some logging if they don't I have a real dilemma do I wait for log prices to come back up knowing that a lot of the trees will die or do I sell them when log prices are still not that great so I can recover that volume that would have died otherwise one of the reasons I think time is of essence here is because of some alarming things I've seen in other parts of the county some parts of the county at similar elevation to this have alarming amounts of Douglas fur die off the die off I'm seeing here is actually fairly light compared to some areas I've seen in the county I've seen places where the more ality of Douglas fur can be 80% 90% close to 100% whole hillsides where all the Douglas fur are dead the bugs went through and just wiped them out in a lot of those cases these trees are in a similar size and age class as the ones we've been looking at today I've seen some mapping done of where this mortality has happened I've also seen a map that has a projection of where it's likely to spread and the lower elevations of this property is in that area that is one of the reasons why I want to liquidate a lot of the Douglas fur off of this property before that happens here to summarize what I think is supposed to be the point of this video in my case if I have timber that's growing well it's increasing in value at a good rate I like to leave those trees let them continue growing in value but if they're slowing down they're going into decline thinning them out is not going to help that much I think that can be a good argument to harvest that Timber or in cases like here where there's Douglas fur in places where it just doesn't do well that is an argument for taking the Douglas fur out to replace it with other trees that do well in those areas especially in a case like this where those trees are already established that's my story I'm sticking to it unless I come up with a better one

Channel: Wilson Forest Lands

Views: 21,111

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Id: AHS2cuongrw

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2024