We Said NO To $40,000 - What Would You Have Done?

hey everybody adam here with hometown acres welcome back so i want to share with you guys a little story about how we almost let a logging company come in here and destroy our woods so about two months ago there's a logging company in the area they signed a contract with a neighbor two doors down from us and since they were in the area they approached the next door neighbor which would be my next door neighbor and they got him to sign as well so then they approached us and they said hey we're doing the two properties next door to you would you be interested in getting a quote on us coming in and timbering your property so i said sure give me a number to think about because i know the property was last logged in 2006 and i also know the value of having your woods timbered and properly managing it if you don't do anything you'll have some really nice trees but those old mature trees are going to be hogging up the canopy and there's going to be no sunlight getting down to the forest floor to allow the next generation of trees to grow vigorously so if you're properly managing your woodlot it is a good idea to get your property timbered every 15 to 20 years just because again it helps the forest rejuvenate and not only that but it helps your property work for you you know normally you're paying property tax and all that stuff and it's costing you money to own land but if you've got a nice timber stand you can actually reap some benefits from the land that you have so the logging company has their guy come back and walk through my woods for two days and kind of take inventory of what we've got and he comes back to me and says we'd be comfortable making you an offer of forty thousand dollars to come in and log your property and my jaw kind of hit the floor i mean that's a lot of money i didn't think we had that much back here but it's not as good as it's cracked up to be and i'll tell you why once i got the contract and read the fine print that was taking everything 14 inches and bigger not at breast height but at the stump which means that breast height you know two three feet up off the ground you're probably getting down to trees that are 10 12 inches which is borderline saplings i mean that would almost come back here and clear cut our property so that was the first red flag i had with this logging company but i thought well maybe they don't know what i use the woods for i'll give them another shot so i went back to him i said hey i don't want to take everything 14 inches at the stump i said can you give me another quote taking a few less trees out i said i'm really looking more for a timber stand improvement than clear cutting the property and he came back and he said okay if we do everything 20 inches in diameter at the stump which would be about 16 inches at breast height he said we could do about 20 grand and i thought you know all right they're already gonna be here they're gonna be doing the neighbors property they come over and do ours they'll be able to hit three properties all at once it kind of makes sense i was about ready to sign the contract and move forward with it because i'm thinking heck i'm going to have a ton of treetops back here for firewood this is going to be a win-win plus if we timber it now we'll in another 20 years we'll be able to do it again but before i sign the contract i said are you going to go back and paint trees so i know which ones are coming out and which ones are staying and he got all hot and bothered by that he was we don't do that we don't paint trees we don't have time to do that we just go back in and cut and i said well i'm sorry but i'm not just signing a blank check for you to come back in here and cash in on my woods i said who's back here to keep you honest and keep you from taking trees all the way down to 14 inches like you originally wanted to i work a full-time job i can't come back here and measure every tree that you guys take down and watch you but if you come back here and paint trees i can take a quick ride back through the woods and kind of take inventory of what's staying and what's going just makes me a little bit more comfortable as a landowner what my property is going to look like when you're done but he would not go for that so i politely said hey sorry if you can't go back and paint trees i don't want to move forward at this time and boy did that bother him he slammed my garage door stormed off and i think that tells you a lot about the character of that guy and what his real intentions were for my woods he didn't care about improving our timber stand here or coming back and harvesting again another 20 years he just wanted to make a quick buck off of our property and here's how you avoid that you don't work with the timber company or the logging company directly you hire a forester the forester will come back here paint trees every tree that they paint they'll write it down on a list take inventory of what you have in your woods and they'll put together a spreadsheet and they put it out for bid and then all of the logging companies go and bid on that spreadsheet you know say there's a million board foot of lumber back here in these woods you're going to get the highest bidder and you know what is coming off of your property so i think that's the route we're going to go we're not turned off to logging our property all together but we're just going to go a different route by hiring a forester to come out here now with all of that said my neighbor did move forward with these guys and they came over to his property and they took everything 14 inches and bigger at the stump so let's take a quick walk over to his property and see what his woods look like now that they're just about done before we head over to the neighbors i wanted to give you guys a quick pan of what our woods looks like right now this area is pretty heavily populated with a bunch of 16 18 20 inch red oak trees just to give you something to compare to from the mess that we're gonna go see over at the neighbor's property well here's what you have to look forward to if you decide to timber your property now again this doesn't scare me because this isn't as heavy as we'd cut our property this was 14 inches and larger at the stump we were looking at 20 to 22 inches but what this does by cutting it this heavy is it increases the amount of time in between harvests so the way that we plan to do it we should be able to re-harvest every 15 to 20 years but the way they did this it'll probably be at least 50 years before this property could be timbered again my neighbor will never see that you know i will barely be able to see that i'm 30 now i'd be 80 years old by the time this property would be able to be timbered again but you can see what it does here to open up this canopy i mean there's there's not much left up here so that'll get a lot of sunlight down here and promote that next generation of growth now when we do decide to harvest our property my plan is taking that money that we get from the timber and investing in a nice piece of equipment like a mini excavator with a hydraulic thumb or something it would make it easy to come back in here and start cleaning this up i know even a mini excavator is going to take forever to clean this up it's you really need a full-size excavator but it's still going to be a lot better than coming back in here with my grapple and my tractor just because this ground is so uneven and with the grapple in the tractor you got to pull into these piles and grab them so you've got sticks and twigs and things that are going to poke up through your brush guard and radiator grill and and overheat the tractor whereas an excavator you'll be able to sit back here and reach in and grab that stuff and bring it out and put it into a brush pile here's something else you can expect is the carnage left behind from the logging process just skidding these trees out of here they're going to get brushed up against trees that are left behind and the problem with that is it reduces the value of this tree the next time you go to harvest it it's not going to kill it but it's definitely going to leave a scar there here's a good example of that scarring you can see this original scar here's when they harvested the property back in 2006 and here's a fresh one from 2022. just see the damage it does to the trees but boy they sure did leave a lot of firewood back here now if you're planning on cutting on a property that's recently been timbered you've got to be careful because in the contract that we ended up not signing there was language in there that stated they've got a full year to come back here and get timber off the property so let's say this red oak log right here even though it looks like a tree top and it looks like they're leaving it behind if you come back here and cut that for firewood and they came back to try to get it and it was gone they could actually sue you for the value of that tree because technically they purchased it from you and then you took it back so you've got to be careful make sure the loggers are done and you've got confirmation they aren't coming back to get anything else all right so we're over back on our property and since we spent most of the morning talking about timbering your property and getting the most value out of your trees as you can i thought we'd do a little bit of timber stand improvement here this afternoon the problem with our property is we've got a lot of areas that are very dense with grapevines and what grapevines do is they slither their way up the tree like this one here and the weight of those grapevines will just try to suck that tree back down to the earth and as you can see the grapevines once they get to the top or the crown of the tree they also create their own leaves and the leaves of the grapevines will actually shade out the leaves of the tree that they're growing up so they're almost like a parasite and in this case here this tree had the potential to be a really nice lumber tree and it just killed it before it ever got a chance to make it to harvest so we're going to come back here and try to cut as many grapevines as we can and what you do here is you want to cut them at shoulder height and then cut them again down at the ground so you've got an idea of which ones you've cut and which ones you haven't now it won't get the grapevines out of the tree like in this situation here but what it does it lets a lot of the water drain out of those grapevines which reduces the weight they will eventually wither away decay and die and once they start to rot they will slowly start to release out of the trees that they've encumbered [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] hmm so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] boy tarzan would have a field day out here but anyways guys i think that's going to about wrap this one up if any of you out there have timber available for sale i highly recommend looking into a forester they do charge a little bit of a commission on the timber that you sell but it's going to be well worth your while to have somebody in your corner getting you the highest bid and also looking out for you as the landowner for future timberings 20 30 years down the road also if you've got grapevines in your property highly recommend getting those cut down as soon as possible to prevent further damage to any timber you do have if you guys enjoyed this one give me a big thumbs up click that subscribe button we'll catch you on the next one thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Hometown Acres

Views: 330,566

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Id: _4Xc6-aRv5Q

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 20 2022