National Association of Conservation Districts

National Association of Conservation Districts

NACD's mission is to serve conservation districts by providing national leadership and a unified voice for natural resource conservation.

Forestry Notes

June 2008
Volume XVII, Issue 7

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  1. Could 'Wood' Be the Answer?
  2. Touring the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center
  3. Oregon Partnership Brings Everyone Together
  4. Forestry Briefs

1. Could 'Wood' Be the Answer?
Conference raises the discussion level on smallwood and wood fuel
In Oregon’s Yamhill Soil and Water Conservation District, just 35 miles west of Portland, the local wine market has long relied on its aging oak population to produce barrels for the wine. “As those oaks expire there are not going to be enough barrels available,” said Michael Crabtree, resource conservationists with the Yamhill SWCD.

The district has started working with the wineries to set aside plots of land for new oak growth. “Many of these vineyards have small woodlots that they are managing,” said Crabtree.

It’s just one example of where small-diameter wood is being utilized.

To gain more perspective on potential markets, one of Yamhill SWCD’s associate directors, Hank Wyman, attended the Smallwood 2008 and Bioenergy and Wood Products conference in Madison, Wis. Wyman was one of 30 people receiving NACD/Department of the Interior sponsored scholarships to attend.

“I came to the conference to broaden my know-how of woody biomass,” said Wyman, “and to learn how we might make better use of materials for energy production, particularly on small woodland plots.”

More than 300 conservation professionals and entrepreneurs flocked to the three-day May conference. Presenters offered insight for new markets where small-diameter wood material can be used. And, of course, the discussion of using wood as a fuel source, both for heat and as a transportation alternative, was a popular topic among those in attendance.

Ben Thorp, consultant for the Flambeau River Biofinery, offered attendees what he deemed a common sense look at the processes by which wood can be converted to fuel. The method for obtaining the biomass, though, said Thorp, is the most important part of the process. “You have to get it in a sustainable fashion, you have to get it in an environmentally-friendly way, and you have to get it at a price that supports (the process of conversion).”

Presenters also addressed many of the concerns facing the wood-to-fuel industry, including the high costs of transporting the material from harvests and thinning operations, the need for a sustainable local supply, and the uncertainty of present fuel market shifts.

Most of those in attendance felt the discussion itself was a positive sign for wood-based industries.

“Woody biomass seemed to be a strong theme at the conference,” said Sue LeVan, the Forest Products Lab’s program manager for technology and marketing. “The questions being asked by audience members indicated that there was a lot of interest in the harvesting of biomass for bioenergy and biofuel.”

The conference’s host state of Wisconsin is thick with forest growth. In the opening session, Wisconsin State Forester Paul DeLong noted that, despite outside perceptions about Wisconsin, it actually had more forested land than agricultural land, and that of those 16 million acres of forest, more than half are owned privately.

To take advantage of its landscape, the state now has a number of operations making use of wood fuel. Muskie Capital Brewery, a brewpub located in the state’s most northern region in Hayward, has relied on wood pellets to heat its restaurant and brewing facility for the past two years. In the southwestern corner of the state the Meister Cheese Plant relies on the bi-products from a nearby hardwood sawmill to satisfy its wood heat-powered system.

“We have a 24-hour, seven-day a week demand for steam,” said the plant’s owner, Scott Meister. “With this wood system we were able to displace 90 percent of our natural gas purchases with wood chips.”

Before this relationship began two years ago, the sawmill sent two truckloads of its bi-product 150 miles to a paper mill each day. “It’s been a mutually beneficial partnership,” said Meister, “and the return on investment has been very satisfying.”

On Thursday, conference-goers had the option to attend one of three tours: the Forest Products Lab in Madison, the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center in Baraboo, or to Wisconsin Rapids for a Mobile HewSaw demonstration.

The conference was sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service, the Forest Products Society, the Biomass Energy Resource Center, Marth Wood Supply Inc., the Pellet Fuels Institute, and the U.S. Department of Interior.


2. Touring the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center
Smallwood played an integral role in the construction
The Aldo Leopold Legacy Center is nestled in the beautiful Baraboo countryside just north of Madison, Wis. where visitors from all across the globe can visit and learn about the land ethic—the ethical relationship between people and land—eloquently essayed in Leopold’s famous work, “A Sand County Almanac.”

The visitor’s center was constructed a mile from where Leopold and his family restored the land on an abandon farm along the Wisconsin River. Recognized by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design as the greenest building in the world, some of it constructed using small-diameter wood.

“We were able to use material that would have otherwise been used for paneling or pulp,” said Steve Swenson, a staff ecologist at the Legacy Center. The rafters in the main building were built using eight-inch roundwood instead of four-inch by 10-inch beams. Roof trusses were built for the stewardship garage and three-season classroom using eight-inch roundwood that clear span 30 feet. 

“It cut our costs considerably to stretch the utility of our locally available material.” said Swenson. “The white pine we used was  every bit as strong if left in the round, not to mention it was planted by the Leopold Family in the 1940s.”

The Aldo Leopold Foundation’s 300-acre reserve is managed by a staff, including a handful of interns. There are also 12,000 acres nearby that are managed by private landowners, WI Department of Natural Resources and United State Fish and Wildlife Service who manage their lands as natural area.

Leopold spent close to two decades working for the U.S. Forest Service in the southwest region and in 1924 was transferred to Madison’s Forest Products Lab. Several years later he was appointed a professor of game management in the Agricultural Economics Department. He purchased the 40-acre plot in 1935, and worked to restore it regularly on weekends with his wife and five children.

Oak is much more common to the area than pine, but Leopold had a special passion for the pines he planted. In “A Sand County Almanac” he admitted as much. “I love all trees,” he wrote, “but I’m in love with pine trees.”

Those working the property have made an effort to maintain the land’s historical connections; because of this the pine has remained. Said tour guide Betsy Van Den Elzen, “They’re part of the cultural landscape.”

One third of the staff at the Legacy Center is made up of those doing work on the ground. In April, the group did a controlled burn to restore prairie land, and this summer it has been treating several invasive species, most notably garlic mustard. To properly eliminate the plant, it must be treated with glyphosate (e.g. brand name RoundUp), and likely retreated annually for up to seven years until the seed bank is exhausted.

For more information about the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center and its use of smallwood and eco-friendly construction, visit http://www.aldoleopold.org.


3. Oregon Partnership Brings Everyone Together
It’s never easy to reach a comfortable compromise with groups who don’t see eye-to-eye. In most sections of the country, progress—for either side—is nullified by agendas that have already been set in stone. But in the Clackamas River basin, in northwestern Oregon, progress has been made through organized discussion. And that partnership was recognized earlier this year as one of the Two Chiefs’ Partnership Awards.

The Clackamas Stewardship Partners (CSP) was formed in 2004 in an attempt to explore new stewardship possibilities in the region. The Clackamas Ranger District of the Mt. Hood National Forest, the Clackamas River Basin Council and the Clackamas County Economic Development Commission began to work with the U.S. Forest Service to prioritize restoration projects that could be packaged with a planned Forest Service thinning operation.

“We’re a very unique county in a way,” said Rick Gruen, the district manager for the Clackamas County Soil and Water Conservation District and the past chair of the Clackamas County Economic Development Commission. “We’re very urban, yet we’re also very rural. Half of our county is national forest land, so forestry issues are a big concern.”

But differing objectives created some initial distrust and slowed down progress. In an attempt to better organize and sharpen the group’s mission, the Clackamas County SWCD assisted the group in securing an innovations grant from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board.

“We didn’t want to do just a stewardship contract and be done with it,” said Gruen of the group’s overall goals. “We wanted to sustain it so that one project leads to three, leads to ten. Really, that’s how we do business in the forest.”

Said Gruen, “And, besides the restoration goals of the healthy forest restoration initiative we really saw a great rural economic development opportunity, too.”

The group began a series of brainstorming sessions and from those developed its mission statement: Enhance ecosystem health and economic viability of local communities within the Clackamas Watershed. We are committed to a collaborative process that employs stewardship contracting and other innovative tools to meet restorative goals.

To find success at the discussion table, the group set a series of ground rules to help its partners find common ground. A few of those rules included:

The district, said Gruen, could act as the intermediary for the broad range of partners asked to participate.

“We acted as the Switzerland of agencies. We could walk both ends of the spectrum—talk comfortably with the environmental groups, and equally comfortably with the timber interests, and use that neutrality to bring the parties together,” said Gruen.

Gruen went to a biomass conference in Montana in 2004 and picked up an important lesson. “What I took from it was that the definition of collaboration was the deliberate coming together to find a solution.”

There was consensus among the members that the work CSP was going to do was crucial to accomplish local restoration objectives. They also recognized the need for the stewardship contracts to be more than just a one time project. They needed to be sustainable for the industry to make this a new way of doing business on the forest.  

“Largely, we’re all at the table with different objectives,” said Gruen. “It was getting an understanding by what we meant by restoration … and it was the realization that if we didn’t thin overstocked timberlands, we didn’t have money to do restoration.”

“Eventually, we all came to agree on what our desired outcomes were, how we’d work together, and what our visions were for the group.”

That understanding and cooperation helped the group have further success after its initial few projects were completed. Without the willingness of everyone at the table to come together, said Gruen, the group would not have been able to achieve the same results.

By the end of 2006 the thinning projects had helped pay for more than $300,000 in restorative efforts, with an additional $100,000 saved from receipts for future projects.

At present, CSP has worked to develop seven stewardship contracts that have helped to thin a total of 1,350 acres. In all, $650,000 in receipts has been retained to fund additional projects, and the Forest Service has approved additional restoration projects for 2008 that will generate approximately 3 million dollars over the life of the contracts to further support local restoration activities.

The Two Chiefs’ Award was icing on the cake for CSP, said Gruen.

“We had a big to-do at our board of county commissioners’ meeting,” said Gruen. “It was a tremendous honor and validation for the hard work that’s been done by this group, and to advance opportunities to get future work done.” More importantly, said Gruen, it pushed the county commissioners to take on strong sustainability goals for the county, and to look at how they can maintain and preserve the agriculture and natural resource-based industries in the county.

For more information about the Clackamas Stewardship Partners, contact Rick Gruen, district manager for the Clackamas County Soil and Water Conservation District, 503/656-3499, or email him at rick.gruen@or.nacdnet.net.


4. Forestry Briefs
Temperate Forest Foundation’s Eco-Link
This quarterly publication brings contemporary issues relative to forests and wood into the hands of professionals and classrooms. Using a scientific advisory board to insure a balanced discussion on the issue, recent issues of Eco-Link have addressed topics including climate change, wildlife and forests, and forests as financial assets. The importance of alternative energy and fuel sources are spotlighted in the current issue titled Biomass Energy II – and can, along with back issues, be viewed at http://www.forestinfo.org/Products/eco-links.

Carbon Storage in Wood Products
A new report by Dovetail Partners highlights carbon storage in wood products and why it should be considered in carbon protocols.  Storage of carbon within wood products thus far is being ignored in policy discussions and in developing carbon protocols, as has the low energy intensity (and even lower fossil fuel intensity) of wood products in general. The omission is significant since in the United States alone carbon stored within wood products is over one-third that being sequestered annually within the nation’s forests. To download the report, visit http://www.dovetailinc.org/reports/pdf/DovetailCarbon0408hz.pdf.

Three New Agroforestry Notes Available from the USDA National Agroforestry Center

These AF Notes will be mailed in very early June to over 7,000 natural resource professionals across the country. They are currently available in PDF format on the NAC website at http://www.unl.edu/nac/agroforestrynotes.htm.

2010-2014 SFI standards
NACD participated in the 18-member External Review Panel for the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) recently in Washington, D.C. The panel reviewed the first year of SFI operations as a non-profit organization – the SFI program having over 151 million acres in a rigorous sustainable forestry certification system across Canada and the United States. The 2010-2014 SFI Standard development process will begin in June, and will be entirely web-based. A full survey will be available soon to download and allow those interested to formulate comments prior to submission. Those interested should monitor the web site: http://www.aboutsfi.org/standardReview.cfm.