World-Wide-Matel

When I lived in Brazil twenty-five years ago, I was only vaguely aware that the Brazilian agricultural frontier was pushing west. I knew about a significant number of farmers from Rio Grande do Sul moving into western Parana, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso & Goias. But Brazilian agriculture was not efficient and I heard the soils out west were acidic, poor and subject to rapid exhaustion. Lately, I have been watching Globo Rural (a Brazilian agricultural TV show) on Internet and have been impressed by what looks like efficient and forward looking agriculture. Today I read a really good briefing article on Brazil’s agricultural miracle. It is a good news story thirty years in the making and it sort of crept up on us such that we didn’t notice. But it is big, a game changing development.

The way I think of a place like the Brazilian states (such as Mato Grosso) story is to compare it to what it must have been like in Ohio in the early part of our Western expansion. Ohio entered the Union in 1803 and at that time was largely potential. Twenty-five years later, it was a settled and very productive part of the United States. The transformation was fast and so big that it was not properly noticed because by the time it was finished it seemed so inevitable. But it wasn’t. The same goes for Brazil.

I went down to the State of Parana last year to look at some Brazilian forestry operations. I was massively impressed. They were taking timber in a sustainable manner and were heavily into improving silvaculture. The Amazon, BTW, is up north and the deforestation is not related to the developments I am talking about. That is a serious problem, but a different one. In fact, good silvaculture and agriculture in the south and central west takes the pressure off the rain forests.

They used to joke that Brazil was the country of the future and always would be. Looks like the future might be now. I have to admit that I was not optimistic twenty-five years ago, but all that I read and see has changed my mind. It gives me lots of hope for turning around what is so far the world’s biggest failure – Africa. Maybe in twenty-five years we will be talking about the African miracle.

Let me excerpt from the story from the briefing from the “Economist” and we can talk about it. You can read the whole thing at the link above.

"In less than 30 years Brazil has turned itself from a food importer into one of the world’s great breadbaskets. Between 1996 and 2006 the total value of the country’s crops rose from 23 billion reais to 108 billion reais, or 365%.

"No less astonishingly, Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), state support accounted for 5.7% of total farm income in Brazil during 2005-07. That compares with 12% in America, 26% for the OECD average and 29% in the European Union.

"Since the biggest single agricultural failure in the world during past decades has been tropical Africa, and anything that might help Africans grow more food would be especially valuable. In other words, you would describe Brazil.

"Since 1996 Brazilian farmers have increased the amount of land under cultivation by a third, mostly in the cerrado. And it has increased production by ten times that amount. But the availability of farmland is in fact only a secondary reason for the extraordinary growth in Brazilian agriculture. If you want the primary reason in three words, they are Embrapa, Embrapa, Embrapa.

"Embrapa is short for Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, or the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. It is a public company set up in 1973, in an unusual fit of farsightedness by the country’s then ruling generals. At the time the quadrupling of oil prices was making Brazil’s high levels of agricultural subsidy unaffordable.

"Embrapa received enough money to turn itself into the world’s leading tropical-research institution.

"When Embrapa started, the cerrado was regarded as unfit for farming. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Embrapa did four things to change that.
First, it poured industrial quantities of lime (pulverised limestone or chalk) onto the soil to reduce levels of acidity. Embrapa scientists also bred varieties of rhizobium, a bacterium that helps fix nitrogen in legumes and which works especially well in the soil of the cerrado, reducing the need for fertilisers.

"Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture, making possible the enormous expansion of Brazil’s beef herd.

"Embrapa has recently begun experiments with genetically modifying brachiaria to produce a larger-leafed variety called braquiarão which promises even bigger increases in forage.

"Third, and most important, Embrapa turned soyabeans into a tropical crop. Soyabeans are native to north-east Asia (Japan, the Korean peninsular and north-east China). They are a temperate-climate crop, sensitive to temperature changes and requiring four distinct seasons. Embrapa worked out how to make it also grow in a tropical climate, on the rolling plains of Mato Grosso state and in Goiás on the baking cerrado. More recently, Brazil has also been importing genetically modified soya seeds and is now the world’s second-largest user of GM after the United States. This year Embrapa won approval for its first GM seed.

"Such improvements are continuing. The variety of soya now being planted [in Brazil’s Northeast] did not exist five years ago.

"Lastly, Embrapa has pioneered and encouraged new operational farm techniques. Brazilian farmers pioneered “no-till” agriculture, in which the soil is not ploughed nor the crop harvested at ground level. Rather, it is cut high on the stalk and the remains of the plant are left to rot into a mat of organic material. Next year’s crop is then planted directly into the mat, retaining more nutrients in the soil. In 1990 Brazilian farmers used no-till farming for 2.6% of their grains; today it is over 50%.

"Embrapa’s latest trick is something called forest, agriculture and livestock integration: the fields are used alternately for crops and livestock but threads of trees are also planted in between the fields, where cattle can forage. This, it turns out, is the best means yet devised for rescuing degraded pasture lands.

"The fields of Mato Grosso are 2,000km from the main soyabean port at Paranaguá, which cannot take the largest, most modern ships. So Brazil transports a relatively low-value commodity using the most expensive means, lorries, which are then forced to wait for ages because the docks are clogged.

"Partly for that reason, Brazil is not the cheapest place in the world to grow soyabeans (Argentina is, followed by the American Midwest). But it is the cheapest place to plant the next acre.

Big is beautiful

"Like almost every large farming country, Brazil is divided between productive giant operations and inefficient hobby farms. According to Mauro and Ignez Lopes of the Fundacão Getulio Vargas, a university in Rio de Janeiro, half the country’s 5m farms earn less than 10,000 reais a year and produce just 7% of total farm output; 1.6m are large commercial operations which produce 76% of output. Not all family farms are a drain on the economy: much of the poultry production is concentrated among them and they mop up a lot of rural underemployment. But the large farms are vastly more productive.

"From the point of view of the rest of the world, however, these faults in Brazilian agriculture do not matter much. The bigger question for them is: can the miracle of the cerrado be exported, especially to Africa, where the good intentions of outsiders have so often shrivelled and died?

"There are several reasons to think it can. Brazilian land is like Africa’s: tropical and nutrient-poor. The big difference is that the cerrado gets a decent amount of rain and most of Africa’s savannah does not (the exception is the swathe of southern Africa between Angola and Mozambique).

"Brazil imported some of its raw material from other tropical countries in the first place. Brachiaria grass came from Africa. The zebu that formed the basis of Brazil’s nelore cattle herd came from India. In both cases Embrapa’s know-how improved them dramatically. Could they be taken back and improved again? Embrapa has started to do that, though it is early days and so far it is unclear whether the technology retransfer will work.

"A third reason for hope is that Embrapa has expertise which others in Africa simply do not have. It has research stations for cassava and sorghum, which are African staples. It also has experience not just in the cerrado but in more arid regions (called the sertão), in jungles and in the vast wetlands on the border with Paraguay and Bolivia. Africa also needs to make better use of similar lands.

"Still, a word of caution is in order. Brazil’s agricultural miracle did not happen through a simple technological fix. No magic bullet accounts for it—not even the tropical soyabean, which comes closest. Rather, Embrapa’s was a “system approach”, as its scientists call it: all the interventions worked together. Improving the soil and the new tropical soyabeans were both needed for farming the cerrado; the two together also made possible the changes in farm techniques which have boosted yields further.

"Systems are much harder to export than a simple fix. “We went to the US and brought back the whole package [of cutting-edge agriculture in the 1970s],” says Dr Crestana. “That didn’t work and it took us 30 years to create our own. Perhaps Africans will come to Brazil and take back the package from us. Africa is changing. Perhaps it won’t take them so long. We’ll see.” If we see anything like what happened in Brazil itself, feeding the world in 2050 will not look like the uphill struggle it appears to be now."

Posted by Broadnax at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Boer goats were developed in South Africa.  They are bigger and more solidly built than most goat breeds, which makes them better as meat goats.  They are not as agile as other breeds, which is good since they are not as likely to climb onto structures and through fences.   They were really developed as land clearing machines.  They can climb steep hills and will eat almost everything in their paths, including thorny bushes and vines, such as multiflora rose, blueberries, kudzu and honeysuckle. That is why I am interested in them.

I want the goats to eat down all the brush that grows underneath my pine trees, especially after we do the thinning.  They would be well-adapted to that job, since they can and will eat all the common brush that vexes me.  In addition, they also fertilize as they go.   There is also a growing market for goat meat because of the growing immigrant populations from Central America and the Middle East.  It seems almost too good to be true.  They don’t need much care, but unfortunately, I don’t think I can give them that.

Since I was taking Alex back to school at JMU, I took the opportunity to visit the goat farm of Jeff and Loretta Whetzel in rural Rockingham County.   They are semi-retired.  Jeff joked that goats are his hobby and he is lucky to break even.   I enjoy the same situation with my forestry, so we understood each other.   The Whetzels started raising goats only a few years ago and are kind of easing into the business. 

The goat business is still mostly a small-farmer operation in Virginia.  Although goats have been resident on American farms since the first settlers landed in Virginia and founded Jamestown, they have never been a big business.   But the changing demographics might be creating business opportunities for goat farming.

Goats are fairly easy to take care of and do well in Virginia.  Goats are criticized as “desert makers” because of their voracious appetites and promiscuous eating habits.  But this is not a problem in Virginia, where we have enough rain and good soils to make the grass and brush grow.  Goats are browsers, not grazers.  That means they eat mostly leaves and brush, unlike cows that eat mostly grass, legumes and forbs.  (Of course, goats also eat grass and forbs; they just have a wider diet.)

Goats will eat pine needles and so you cannot put goats into a working pine forest until the trees are tall enough that goats cannot reach the tops or the vital branches of the crop trees. For practical purposes, this means the trees need to be about ten feet high (about five years old for a loblolly pine in Southern Virginia), since goats can reach up about five feet by standing on their hind legs. They will eat pine bark, but only if there is not other things to eat.  Presumably this would never become a problem if the goal was brush clearing. Jeff says that pine needles in the goat diet are beneficial, since something in the resin helps prevent worms.

The goats are very friendly. They are like dogs in that they follow you around. I can see the attraction of having them around.

But after talking to Jeff & Loretta, I realized that I cannot put goats on my lands unless and until I have to more time to devote. For one thing, I would need a lot of them to eat down 80 or 100 acres. I would also have to build electrified fences and dig some ponds or other water sources. My farms have flowing water, so that could be done. But you have to watch them. They require some grain supplements etc. And they need protection.

Coyotes are a problem.  Jeff and Loretta have a big dog called Yogi that chases them away. He is a Pyrenees sheep dog, very big and tougher than coyotes, developed by shepherds Spain to fight off the local predators.  He looks a lot like the podhale dog in Poland.  This is another reason why I cannot put the goats on our land and be there to watch.  The goats can be left more or less alone for a long time, but a dog cannot. We have coyotes, along with some bobcats and a few bears, in Southern Virginia too, so we need that protection.

Anyway, I have to put my goat plan on hold for at least the next couple of years when I am in Brazil.  We are thinning eighty-six acres this year. I plan to burn under those trees in 2012.  After that and after the brush grows in, maybe it will be time to deploy some Boer goats.

Links to some related posts are here and here.  

Posted by Broadnax at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I used my new GPS to find the goat farm of Jeff & Loretta Whetzel (more on that in the next post).  I am a late adapter of the GPS for the car. I had one a long time ago that I used in my forestry, but it was not really good enough for precise measurement.  This one (see above) is nice and was much cheaper. It tells you when to turn etc.  I made it speak in Portuguese so that I can practice. Of course, vocabulary is limited. Also can play audio books.

Above you can see road work.  We had to wait around fifteen minutes while the cleared out the rocks.  They are widening the road.  The rock is shale, which is common in the Eastern Mountains.  It is very good for paving running trails as it breaks down into flattish chips and forms a springy surface. 

Below is kudzu growing along US 211 (also called Lee Highway, BTW, a continuation of the Lee Highway that runs near my house) and doing the one thing it is good at - holding a steep bank. The government encouraged Kudzu planting in the U.S. because of its extreme ability to grow. That was not an entirely wise idea. What makes it a great cover for everything also makes it a troubling invasive, since what grows over rocky hillsides also grows over trees and other plants, choking them off.

Most of the way after the mountains is the way home from Old Rag Mountain, so I have been driving this way for twenty-five years. The area up to Warrenton is very built up, and much of US 29 has become a big strip mall. This includes areas near the Manassas Battlefield. It kind of takes away from the historical feel.  But after Warrenton, it has not changed that much.  It is still very rural, green and pleasant. Fauquier and Rappahannock Counties are among the nicest in Virginia. It is a great pleasure to pass through them. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found this about wind power. All the swells love wind power until it comes anywhere near them. They can often even get the local Indian tribes to claim it violates some sacred something or other to make the opposition more PC. Evidently it spoils the view from some burial grounds. I am not making this up. Who knew the dead were so sensitive?

BTW - You can see from the chart nearby that the U.S. is now the world's leader in wind energy, with more than 1/3 of the total world production. You might not guess that from all the caterwauling you hear about the U.S. falling behind in these things. Any guesses about which state is the leader?

Posted by Broadnax at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I made an unexpected trip to the farms yesterday. I wanted to look at a piece of land near the Nottoway River.  FM wants to buy the timber and wants me to buy the land. In other words, he gets the wood; I get land to grow new trees. It is a long-term proposition for me. I couldn’t even thin until around 2025. On the other hand, I can get the land cheaper and grow the trees later.  

The land would not be only for forestry. There is a lot of road frontage and the property is across from the Nottoway River, which you see in the picture. (It was a very foggy morning, as you can see and chilly. It later got hot and humid.) They would leave the trees near the streams etc, so it would remain wooded and attractive. There is a public boat launching place across from one corner of the property.  It was a very foggy morning, as you can see and chilly. It later got hot and humid. Under the right conditions, I could sell off some lots right at the corner with the river, where people could build “farmettes” or cabins. I have no idea how that works, but I bet I can figure it out. That would help pay for the land.

Land is inexpensive these days because of the recession. It won’t stay that way forever and this may be a good time to buy. But the timing is always tricky and I don’t have that kind of money to just risk.  The forest land and its produce will essentially fund large chunks of my retirement, or not. In a rational market, this land would become more valuable. Markets are always rational … in the long run.  But as John Maynard Keynes said, “Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." 

Anybody want to come in on a forestry investment?  Or maybe buy a beautiful home site near an officially designative senic river? Well, I have to figure out the finances. I really just don't know.

Pictures

The first picture shows the boat landing on the Nottoway River. The picture under that is the part of the property I was looking at that was cut in 2001. This is natural regeneration and would remain on the land.  I would have to mange it a little, but the trees look healthy. As comparison, you can see my trees on the CP property (same day. The sun came out.) They are only six years old (planted 2004) but they are bigger by a couple feet and fuller because of better genetic stock and some management.  The second lastpicture shows the pines on our Freeman property.  They were planted in 1996 and will be thinned later this month (first thining). They need thinning. Light will reach the ground and it will be better for wildlife. The last picture is a dog that just wandered by. He has a tracking collar, so he is probably a hunting dog. I offered him a piece of ham from my sandwich.  He took it but remained a little spooked.

Posted by Broadnax at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hunters are the backbone of rural society. People who live in cities and suburbs rarely appreciate that fact. I thought of this in relation to my own land and was reminded when Chrissy’s sister Diane visited a friend who lives in western Virginia. The friend owns some forest land in the Shenandoah.  Local hunters watch over it,  make improvements and generally take care of the place.  She was a little surprised at the role of local hunters. I used to be too, but not anymore.

The hunters on my land have been there for generations. Much of what I know about the land comes from them. They knew how long the roads had been in place. They remembered when the streams had flooded and when they had gone dry.  They had experience of fires and storms.  And they loved the land and understood the relationships with the animals on them.

Deer hunters are working to create better habitat for the animals they hunt and improve the herds.  They always have done this.  Much of the county’s wildlands were conserved by hunters.  Lately the equations have changed a bit.  The burgeoning wildlife and especially deer population has shifted emphasis from any deer to quality deer. Hunt clubs are actively managing the herds through selective  hunting, feed plots etc.  I get a magazine called “Quality Whitetails” from an organization by the same name that provides a place for the exchange of information and experience. It is very interesting the things hunters are doing in the conservation field, literally out in the field.

Another big factor is development and urban encroachment. A generation ago, there were a lot fewer deer and they were spread over a bigger area of undeveloped land. Today deer populations have grown to almost nuisance levels in some areas and this is exacerbated by the fragmentation of the forests.  This is another reason to emphasize quality of the herds over mere numbers.  The numbers problem is no longer a problem.

Hunting keeps people closer to the land.  One of my friends down in Southside Virginia spends most of his free time working on conservation projects on land his hunt club leases. He helps restore wetlands, makes wildlife corridors etc. He has helped a lot on my farm, at no cost to me since we work in our mutual interest. This guy doesn’t hunt very much anymore in the traditional sense.   He just really enjoys the conservation and wildlife management aspects of hunting.  Most of the hunters I know enjoy the sport more for the insights it gives them into nature than the actual shooting deer, which is only one part  of a full-year, multi-year effort.

The numbers of hunters has been declining over the past decades.  There still are enough, but if the trend continues, this will be a serious threat to the health of rural communities and the rural environment.  Somebody else – probably at taxpayer expense – will have to do what as work hunters do joyfully and for free. In fact, they actually pay to do it.

I am not a hunter myself, for the same reasons that the number of hunters has been declining.  I was a city kid, with no hunting tradition. I am also a terrible shot.  I support hunting by working with the hunt clubs  on my farms and supporting some hunting organizations, such as Quality Whitetails, that provide hunting education and advocacy.

Beyond the environmental benefits, hunting has a long tradition in American culture.  It is very different in the U.S. than it was in many parts of the world.  In Europe, hunting was a rich man’s sport.   When the ordinary people hunted, it was usually called “poaching,” especially when talking about bigger game, a crime that was severely punished by the aristocrats. Besides just wanting to keep the animals to themselves, aristocrats sensed the fundamental democratizing nature of hunting.  Besides giving the common man access to weapons and the training to use them, hunting allowed individuals a personal connection with nature, unfiltered by the hierarchy of the old world.  It also provides a means of support. One of the older hunters down near the farms told me that when he was young, hunting wasn’t just a hobby; it was needed to put meat on the table.  One of the things that impressed former-peasant immigrants to the early America was that they COULD hunt.  They were the owners of the land and didn’t have to kiss the ass of the local baron or “his” deer and elk untouched in the forest where only the fat-cats could hunt.  

So this is my paean to the pastoral pursuit of hunting in our great America, whether it is deer, turkey, geese, quail, ducks or bears (yes we have a few on the farms now).   We should appreciate what hunters and hunting have done for us.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Biofuels can be a part of our energy future, but are not a solution and they will never play a dominant role.  That one of the big ideas I took away from a talk on biofuels at the Wilson Center, called Biofuels: Food, Fuel & the Future. The reason we use fossil fuels is that they are so wonderfully concentrated. Coal, gas or oil represent millions of years of concentrated power of the sun captured by photosynthesis. Any crop we grow captures only one season of energy or maybe a couple decades in the case of trees. This is a fundamental limit even if we can figure out how to efficiently capture the energy stored in corn, sugar, wood, palm oil or switchgrass.

We noticed the BP oil spill because it is quick and compelling, but scientists have long known about the Gulf dead zone, a more persistently serious problem. This is a vast area of the sea near the mouth of the Mississippi where fertilizer runoff (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) have caused extravagant growth of algae. When the algae die back and decompose, it sucks the oxygen out of the water, making life for fish impossible. Much of this fertilizer runs off of corn fields. To the extent we turn more corn into ethanol, we increase this problem. We tend to notice fast developing problems like the BP spill while the slow motions ones, like the dead zones, escape notice. 

 
One of the dangers of something like the BP spill is that people panic and politicians and special interests take advantage. You can see this already in the calls for more biofuels and other alternatives.  Remember the cause of the dead zone in the paragraph above. But it gets worse. The nitrogen fertilizer for the corn is often derived in part from natural gas and we have to account for the fossil fuels that go into planting, moving and refining the 1/3 of the American corn crop that becomes ethanol.
 
W/o massive government intervention, there would still be an ethanol industry. It would just be a lot smaller. Ethanol has a good use as an oxygenator added to gasoline. It makes gasoline burn more effectively & cleaner. In the early 2000s it replaced MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether), which had itself replaced lead as an octane enhancer a generation ago. But a little ethanol is good; a lot is less useful.  Gasoline packs a lot more energy per gallon than ethanol. As you add ethanol beyond a small amount, it begins to decrease mileage. There are also other problems related to corrosion and evaporation, but I will let anybody who cares learn about that elsewhere.
 
Suffice to say that the push to use more ethanol as transport fuel moved it from being a high end additive to extend gasoline mileage to a low end commodity. Since it is less efficient & more expensive than gas, it raised the prices. Yet the push for more ethanol continues because it is driven by politics, not by economics or common sense.
 
Let’s digress a little. You can make alcohol from almost anything that grows on earth. You can see that from the vast array of alcoholic beverages available worldwide, made from potatoes, corn, cactus, grapes, apples and even watermelon. But it is easier to make ethanol from some things than it is from others. It is relatively easy to make ethanol from sugar cane. That is why Brazil has an ethanol advantage. It is significantly less efficient to make it from corn and so far prohibitively expensive to make it from cellulous (i.e. switchgrass, wood chips etc).     

The U.S. does not have a competitive advantage in making ethanol. For one thing, corn is not a great feedstock and to make that worse we (the U.S.) has a relative advantage growing corn as food for man and beast, but when we make it into ethanol, we manage to negate our natural advantages, converting a product we do well into a product that we do merely okay. Beyond that, corn ethanol tends to be produced near where corn grows, i.e. in the middle of the country. Much of the demand for liquid fuel is on the coasts.  Ethanol cannot be transported via gasoline pipelines because it is corrosive and tends to create evaporation problems. Transporting ethanol by road and rail is relatively expensive. On the other hand, ethanol from Brazil is cheaper and closer – in terms of transport – because it is produced near ports in Sao Paulo state and can be easily sent via sea transport to places like Norfolk. That is why we have to subsidize ethanol production in the U.S.  by $0.45 a gallon AND put a tariff of $0.54 on ethanol from Brazil.  

In other words, public policy is pushing us toward one of the most expensive energy alternatives made even more expensive by public policy.
 
What about cellulosic ethanol? This can be made from materials that now go to waste, such as forestry waste or stalks and sticks from crops. We can also easily grow some crops, such as hybrid poplars or switchgrass, specifically for energy. The biggest problem is that we still cannot do it efficiently. Nature has been evolving for millions of years to prevent wood from easily being converted (i.e. fermented or rotted).  There are better alternatives. The more you have to process something, the more costs you add.  Wood chips, for example, CAN be turned into ethanol. But it is a lot easier to make them into pellets or burn them directly to make heat or electricity.

The problem is liquid fuel. Gasoline makes great liquid fuel and alternatives cannot compete. Direct government attempts (such as subsidies and mandates) to change this equation don’t work well for that reason. Beyond that, alternatives and gasoline are locked in a feedback loop. If alternatives, such as biofuels displace a lot of gasoline, the price of gasoline drops relative to the biofuels in question, making them less competitive.

Government has a role, but it is supportive and indirect. Government should not try to pick particular technologies. The ethanol debacle should have taught us that. It can help with infrastructure and basic research. Real, sustainable gains come from increasing productivity that lowers costs or costs of doing business, rather than tries to pay them down with taxpayer money.

A final interesting concept they talked about at the seminar was “peak gasoline.” People talk about peak oil. Peak oil is the theoretical spot where we have used up half of the petroleum available on earth. It is a slippery concept that is meaningless w/o specifying a price. At $5 a barrel, we reached peak oil years ago. We may never reach peak oil at $500 a barrel.  Peak gasoline is an easier concept.  Given the changing nature of our society, our driving habits and mileage efficiency, we probably reached the maximum amount of gasoline we will ever use. We cannot expect consumption to rise forever. Consumption is already dropping. Of course, we have not and may never reach “peak energy.”

There will be no magic solution to the energy problem. We choose our energy portfolio based on cost, convenience, availability and mere preference. This is how it will always be. It is an ongoing situation, not a problem that can be solved. No matter what elegant and wonderful solutions we devise (and we will come up with some) we will still be talking about the same sorts of things fifty years from now.  It is good to remember – despite the current pessimism – that our energy situation is better than that of our ancestors in terms of the amount of work we need to perform for each unit of energy. But as energy gets easier to get, we want more of it.

The picture up top is the inside of the Wilson Center. In the middle is the outside of the of the Reagan building, where the Wilson Center is located. In the lower middle is a sign warning that if you step on the grass, motion activated sprinklers will flow. It is an idle threat. I tested it and stayed dry. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

China is now the world’s biggest consumer of energy. It passed the U.S. as the world’s bigger emitter of CO2 a couple years ago and accomplishes these things with an economy 1/3 as big as ours. Low energy efficiency and excessive dependence on dirty coal explain why China falls high on the list of ecological disasters. Over the next fifteen years China will build 1,000 gigawatts of new power-generation capacity, the total amount of all electricity-generation capacity in the U.S. today. The big environmental problems will increasingly be beyond our borders. We have to drop our America-centric viewpoint.

As environmentalist, we have to be concerned about our world, not only our back yard, and the world is generally dirtier than our back yard. Oil spills like the recent BP catastrophe are routine in Nigeria. In fact, you would not be far wrong if you characterized the whole coast of this part of Africa as one big spill eternal. In all fairness to the Nigerians, natural oil seepage was common even before, but not like this.

But before we get too excited about the ecological cost of fossil fuels, consider what happens to forests when poor people depend on biofuels (i.e. wood). The people of Haiti have created a wasteland out of a naturally ecologically rich island. The problem is charcoal production. We can see how this used to work in Europe if you want a historical perspective. Europe’s forests returned during the 20th Century because the stress was taken off when Europeans shifted from biofuels to fossil fuel. But charcoal was not the only thing destroying forests. Horses did their part. Horses eat a lot of grass and grass cannot be grown in the heavy shade of forests. As long as horsepower was really horsepower, large areas had to be devoted to growing horse food. I know everybody likes horses, but it is not good to have to depend on them. Fossil fuels replaced this too.

The Soviet Union was an ongoing ecological disaster in itself and the evils done by communist central planners lives after them. You can see the example in the Aral Sea, now perhaps better referred to as the the “Aral Depression”. This used to be a really big expanse of water, complete with a fishing industry. But during the 1960s, the Soviets built dams, dikes and canals to support their planned cotton industry. The Aral Sea literally dried up. I have seen the dramatic pictures of boats in the middle of fields used as examples of global warming, but it is merely garden variety central planning that did this. It gets worse when the wind picks up sand and salt from the erstwhile seabed and blows it all over the place.

As you probably have noticed by now, I have been picking up my ongoing ecological disasters from FP-Online. The last one they mention is the Pacific garbage patch. This is a kind of Sargasso Sea of plastic bottles and wrappers concentrated by the current and floating on the ocean surface. The currents pick up garbage from the coasts of North America and Asia and send it in a continual loop in the Northern Pacific.

I think the world is in a kind of development race. As societies develop, they get cleaner. America was much more polluted a generation ago than it is today. As China, Nigeria or the countries of the former Soviet Union develop we can hope they also become more environmentally responsible. But it will be a dirty couple of decades as we wait for it. Fortunately, they don't have to make the same mistakes that we did. They can jump the line to the best technologies. Our duty is not to stand in the way of those developments.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is obvious that a 100 acre forest ecosystem separated into ten parcels is not the same as one that is fully intact. Even a lightly traveled road cutting through forests may be hard for wildlife to cross. Watch a turtle or a salamander cross a road.  Roads divide and can destroy local reptile and amphibian populations as well as change drainage patterns, accelerating runoff and worsening erosion. Small forests also mean practical management and harvest problems. Maybe it is just worth it to deploy a crew or expensive equipment to harvest a few scattered trees.   

Government big and small suffers from the admirable if often misguided urge to complete tasks assigned to it w/o thinking through the larger systemic consequences of what happens if it succeeds.  Of course, this is a problem for all fallible humans, but because of the challenges of agency and its ability to command resources, government has it worse.
 
My homeowners’ association shows on a micro level what scales up to bigger problems for bigger organizations. We have had a recurring problem with successive homeowners’ boards to get them to do little or nothing about a “problem” with shade and drainage.  (Yes, for me a good outcome in this situation is that nothing be done.)  I won’t go into details.  Suffice to say, we have an area with growing trees that do the things trees do; they shade, drop leaves and create humid conditions near ground level. These are good things from the environmental prospective
 
People say they like the trees and nature, but they don’t seem to like most things about them. I have found that very often they want to protect the environment, as long as it is not too inconvenient.  You get the picture? So with monotonous regularity, we get calls to “fix” the problem in back of our houses.   

People have complained that there are too many mosquitoes and I hear that a couple people have demanded that the board install French drains, a kind of open storm sewer trench filled with gravel and rock, to quickly channel water away from the houses so that mosquitoes cannot breed. Sounds reasonable.  Here’s why it’s not when you take the time to understand the problem.
 
First, the mosquitoes in question are Asian tiger mosquitoes.  They are another of the many gifts we have recently received from China like the Asian long-horned beetle. These little pests have the nasty habit of being active during the day. The thing to remember about tiger mosquitoes is that they are “container breeding insects,” products of co-evolution with humans that breed only in man-made objects such as pots, discarded bottles, rain gutters or even folds in plastic tarps where water pools up. They do very well in cemeteries because of the presence of plastic flower vases. They specifically do not breed in puddles with dirt bottoms, of which, BTW, there are not many anyway in the area in question. So a French drain would do nothing to slow the mosquito population and in fact the standing water in a man-made drain might increase their breeding opportunities.
 
Second is a bigger thing – the Chesapeake Bay.  Industries, Federal & local governments  eliminated most significant point source pollution (i.e. industrial and sewage plant discharges) years ago.  Today most of the pollution comes from dispersed non-point source runoff.  Agriculture is still the largest source, but it is diminishing.  The only category where this problem is growing is in runoff from urban and suburban areas. What you do in your yard and around the house affects the crabs and fish in the bay and silt covers growing water plants.  One way to mitigate this problem is to slow the runoff and allow water to soak into the ground, where it will find its way into water tables and/or be cleaned by natural processes, i.e. simple things like silt settling, nitrogen and phosphorus being absorbed by living plants etc. Slowing the water flow is also important to avoid storm surges that overwhelm and erode stream and waterways.  This has become more and more a problem as the amount of pavement has increased.  The bottom line is that you don’t want to do things that would discharge rain water more rapidly. A drain system is designed to do just that.  
 
Of course, that assumes the system will work, which may not be a valid assumption.  The saving grace, from an environmental perspective, may be that the drains rarely work as promised to quickly shunt away storm water for long distances.  They tend to clog with mud, making them useless unless constantly maintained.  Actually, they are less than useless, since you have the initial expense of building them and then their presence tends to make it more difficult to grow plants that would do some of the ecological services such as slowing and filtering storm water. 

Specifically for the mosquito problem, what needs to be done is for everybody to get rid of pots, containers, tarps etc that can hold water. This may include very small things, like a broken cup or piece of plastic. All homeowers should also make sure that their rain gutters are not clogged. If all these things were done, the population of tiger mosquitoes would collapse locally, although the chances of all these things being done is slim to none and slim has just left the building.
 
As for the more general moistness problem, the best possible solution is to plant shade tolerate ground cover under the trees and celebrate the ecological benefits of a small moist forest floor environment.  (I have done that on the section in back of my house and there is no longer a problem with erosion or mud.  Interestingly, the ground level is a couple of inches higher now than it was five years ago, as the plants have slowed and captured silt, just like they are supposed to do.) If Association wanted to spend a little more money, we could build a rain garden to create an even more diverse environment.  A low cost solution would be simply to stop mowing the “grass” in the area under the trees.  In places the workers have neglected or consistently forgot about, a decent cover has volunteered. 
 
So if we sum up the possible solutions, the best is the semi-passively systemic – working with nature solution.  Next best is doing nothing at all, actually doing less than nothing if we stop mowing. The worst is the active what we might call an engineering project to build drains that will cost a lot ot establish and require subsequent maintenance.  So which do you think keeps on popping up?
 
The more passive, but effective solutions do not “solve” the mosquito problem. That is true.  (BTW – tiger mosquitoes are easily managed if you just wear long pants. They are low fliers and don’t tend to sting above the knee.) The more active solutions actually make the problem worse and cost a lot of money, but they have the illusion of action and leadership can loudly claim that they are working on the people’s concerns.  Beyond that, contractor can make money off the projects.  They come with nicely done sketches and bogus statistics beautifully graphed on shiny paper.   They dislike it when you ask people to walk across the street to see the clogged French drains installed a couple years ago, now providing only mosquito heavens and lots of mud.  Of course, not many people will follow you when you ask them to look for themselves. There are too many mosquitoes and too much mud.
 
I am afraid that this is how it goes. Big solutions make lots of people happy and some people rich, even when they don’t work – especially when they don’t work because there is more activity required to fix each problem serially created by the initial solution.
 
We should remember that if it is not necessary to do anything it is necessary NOT to do anything. But with an attitude like that, you are unlikely to get elected to anything. Very often the politician code is just the opposite, more like "Something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it." Much easier to promise and to be like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise.

BTW – I have written on this subject before and if you follow this link you can see what happens when a really big rain lands on area.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went down to the farms yesterday and did some spraying, chopping and rock moving. Above is the baldcypress in our wet area.

On the plus side, the road that the utility company repaired along their right-of-way has settled nicely and their plantings are growing vigorously. I also saw a lot of quail and almost a dozen wild turkeys.  I tried to sneak up on them, but they flew off. I think they have good eyesight.

Posted by Broadnax at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I bought a couple gallons of Chopper Gen2 and some backpack sprayers. The boys and I went down to the forests to check up on them and spray down some of the vines. I have mixed feelings about spraying.  I would spray the whole place if I was really doing intense pine management. They usually do this with helicopters and it would cost me around $6000. I don’t like to spend the money and I don’t like to spray everything.  I want some diversity, but the vines are getting out of hand. The backpack sprayers allow more precise applications and they cost much less. The materials cost a couple hundred dollars and labor is cheap, essentially free. Getting the boys involved with the land is also a good idea. So that is what we did.

We got an early start, but only worked until about noon. It was getting too hot and I didn’t want to kill the boys or make them not like the forest.  We got the easy targets, i.e. the places within easy reach of the roads and paths. I like to do these things in iterative ways. This will give me a chance to see how it works and decide if I want to do it more widely. It will also give me something useful to do on my visits.  I can spray down some of the offending vines each time I go down and do it selectively.

I talked to Larry and Dale Walker from the hunt club. They also work at a forestry company and showed me their operation last year. You can see pictures and read about that here and here. They are honest guys and their firm does a good job.  We talked about thinning on the Freeman property. It would be good to do it this fall. This would be my first significant harvest and I look forward to it.

The utility company put in new poles. They ripped up the dirt a lot, but have since leveled it out and reseeded it.  The grass is coming up. The wires and the right-of-way are useful, despite the fact that they take up eight acres of my land.  The opening provides good wildlife habitat and the long, narrow aspect produces a lot of the “forest edge” so favored in wild ecology. From the practical point of view, the most useful thing about the right-of-way is the road. The electric company maintains the road and they just finished fixing it up. It was really rutted before, but they put in rocks over the washouts and made little stone banks to divert the storm water. All this will provide good infrastructure for the thinning operation.  If for what they did, I would have to do it and/or the timber companies would have to do it and that would cut into what they could pay me for the wood. It is a de-facto subsidy for me.

The pictures are from the farms. You can see the roads along the right-of-way. The picture of Alex and Espen shows the grassy path Larry Walker made down to the creek. It is a “wildlife corridor” Alex is looking very buff these days. They are hard workers and strong boys. They can get a lot more done than I can. My clover fields are looking good. Other wild plants are beginning to seed in and this is okay.

Posted by Broadnax at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Japanese honeysuckle is very pretty and it has a sweet fragrance.  That is probably why gardeners planted it all over the East Coast.  I suppose its robust vigor was also a factor, but it is precisely that aggressive robustness that makes it such a formidable invasive species.

I didn’t hardly even notice it growing on the CP last year, as I pulled down the trumpet and grape vines.  But these earlier infestations were small potatoes compared to the Japanese honeysuckle, which seems to have grown exponentially this spring.  That’s the way exponential growth works.  As it doubles and redoubles, you don’t see it until it is too late to stop before it covers everything.  Well, it isn’t quite that bad, but I can't just let it stand.  I ordered some “Chopper Gen2 and next week the boys and I will go and address the problem using the backpack sprayers.

Chopper Gen2 has evidently replaced Arsenal AC in the constellation of BasF forestry management products.  I have been reading about vegetation control.  The Japanese honeysuckle has to be controlled; otherwise it will climb and bend the trees.  If we set it back this year and maybe next, the trees will be big enough to mostly shade it out.  We have more or less defeated the tree-of-heaven infestation.  There still are a few of them cropping up and we can zap them with Chopper too. BTW - the picture along side is a tree-of-heaven in Old Salem.  This is the biggest I have seen. They are not bad looking trees and are fine - in their place, which isn't in the woods.

I was hoping to burn out the honeysuckle, but the guys at the tree farm committee told me it would be a bad idea.  My trees are still a little too small.  A prescribed fire could work, but any bad luck might kill half my trees.  It isn’t worth the risk.  I got enough chopper for the whole farm for just over $200, so along with my in-house labor force, waging chemical warfare against the invasive species will be the way to go.  My research shows that Chopper Gen2 is much better than the first generation, both in its effectiveness and it benign environmental impacts.  It also gives the kids some stake in the place.  Espen and Alex still brag about their hard work in fighting against the tree-of-heaven and setting down the streambed rip-rap.

Invasive species are one of the most threatening environmental problems we face. They have a greater impact than the projected consequences of global warming, but it is not as cool to “rock against” honeysuckle or phragmites.  Most gardeners are complicit in the invasion.  I planted some wisteria on the mailbox shelter across the street from my house.  It looks good and grows well.  Many of the invaders are indeed better than the natives, but they can get out of hand.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Biltmore estate had lots of big and beautiful trees, including some hemlocks.  Hemlocks are common much farther north.  They hang on in the southern Appalachians as a relic of when the climate was much cooler thousands of years ago.  Or maybe we should say they hung on and that they were common farther north.

The hemlocks on Biltmore don’t look good.  It is not bad management or climate change that did this. This destruction is probably the work of the hemlock wooly adelgid, an invasive pest from Asia that arrived in 1924 and has now spread from Maine to the Carolinas. This is an ecosystem altering monster, although the insect itself  is almost too small to notice. It threatens the existence of hemlocks in eastern North America.  The hemlock is a beautiful tree that grows well in shade. It occupies this special shady niche and w/o the hemlock many of the woods will be a lot more open and hotter. The destruction of the hemlock is a slow motion disaster.

When I first visited Old Rag mountain in the Shenandoah, the start of the trail was shaded by giant hemlocks. That was twenty-five years ago.  Today they are gone.  All that is left are dead and decaying skeletons.  Some of the guide books still describe the cool shade and the deep green solitude of the place, but if you won’t find it no matter how hard you look.  Hemlocks make a particular sound when the wind blows through.

We lost the chestnuts before I was born.  Now the hemlocks are going.   We did manage to bring back the American elm, however, so maybe there is still hope. A lot of good work is being done in biotech and plant breeding.

Posted by Broadnax at 04:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is my article for the next issue of "Virginia's Forests", the publication of the Virginia Forestry Association.  It draws on a blog post from a few months ago, so it might be familiar, but there are changes.  I am going past the farms on Sunday, so I may have some pictures to add.

Growing the Best Trees

I have been a like a proud parent with my forest land, taking pictures of my growing trees and the changing face of the land I own.  One of the tracts was clear-cut in 2003 and the next year replanted with genetically superior loblolly pine,  so the trees are now six years old.   I know that as a relatively new forest owner, I am just experiencing things that many readers have seen long before, but I still think it interesting to mention.

Posted by Broadnax at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are back home in Virginia and we have evidently missed spring, at least late spring. It is now summer.  The leaves are all out. Today was hot & humid, mostly humid, at least compared to the cool weather we had when I was last here a couple of weeks ago. It will get more or less cooler again. May is a pleasant month; we usually don’t get that oppressive heat until late June. 

I went to see Alex just before I left for California. We went to the arboretum in Harrisonburg, but I never wrote a post or posted the pictures.  It was a pleasant spring day. I am posting the pictures today, but they are a couple weeks out of date.

The Shenandoah is one of most pleasant places on earth in the springtime. The picture on top I-81 that passes through the valley. It is a busy truck route, that carries much of the goods along the East Coast. The trucks make it a hectic drive sometimes. They are bigger than the cars and they know it. The middle pictures are flowering trees in the arboretum.

Above is the pond on the arboretum. Below is a pocket park in Arlington. It is near the place where we first lived when I joined the FS. It is just one block of green, enough to give kids a place to play and provide a nice space for the neighbors.

Below is the lawn in the park. It is a "real" lawn with clover and some weeds. I like this better than the chemical lawns so common around malls and new developments. The Chesapeake Bay is polluted with run off. They blame farms and farms do contribute, but at least they also produce something.  But it is just wrong when we use chemicals and fertilizers to create perfect lawns. This one is better all around.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We left the Joshua Tree National Park and keep on going on a little road toward the Salton Sea. (Above is Interstate 10 in the distance.)  The area is below sea level and w/o irrigation it is a hot and desolate place.  With irrigation, it is a hot and productive place.  This is the Imperial Valley, one of the most bountiful agricultural areas in the world, where a lot of our lettuce, grapes, berries and broccoli come from.

The Salton Sea is a fascinating accident related to the irrigation. In 1904 the irrigation dikes broke and almost all the water from the flow of Colorado River poured into the below-sea-level desert depression for almost three years. The escaping water had created a vast fresh-water lake.  It is so big that you cannot see across it.  Had they not fixed the dike, the Colorado River probably might have simply changed course and eventually found its way to the Gulf of California by alternate means. (This, BTW, happened periodically with the Mississippi.   If not for human intervention, the Mississippi probably now be following the route of the Atchafalaya River, bypassing New Orleans.) Geologists say that the Salton Sea has been formed and dried up many times in the past w/o the intervention of man.  You can see the Salton Sea chronology at this link. 

At first it was great.  People put in fish and the bred fast in the warm and empty waters.  But the water in the Salton Sea didn’t stay fresh for long.  The salts and minerals from the lake bottom soon dissolved in the water and with no outlet to the ocean, it was in the same situation as the Dead Sea.  It is getting saltier and saltier.   Many of the fish are dying out.  The only ones still thriving are tilapia, which can survive almost anywhere if the water is warm enough and are now being used for cat food. 

The dying of the Salton Sea is a problem from several points of view. Migratory birds have become very fond of using the Salton Sea as a stopover.  If it becomes a dead sea, it cannot serve that purpose.  The State of California is trying to “save” the place, but it is hard to see what they could do, short of breaching the dikes again and sucking in the Colorado River.  It “benefits” from some irrigation discharge, but this is not water of the highest purity. The Salton Sea is essentially a big puddle, with no reliable sources of replenishment or discharge.  It is a very temporary lake and in a moment of geological time it will return to its former condition.

We almost got to Mexico on the last leg of the day’s journey. We caught I-8 in El Centro, California.  Not too far along the road, we were stopped at an immigration checkpoint. I didn’t know they had such things except at the border.

The road to San Diego is very interesting.  The first set of mountains look like a pile of stones.  If you didn’t know better and they weren’t so massive, you would think that humans dumped and piled these rocks.  It just doesn’t look natural. As I wrote earlier, the wind really blows out here.  They have signs on the roads warning about the high winds.  The winds sandblast the rocks, and everything else, and knock off the rough edges.

As we got farther west, the mountains became green and beautiful.  In other seasons the grass is probably brown, or golden as the Chamber of Commerce might describe it, but the green was really nice. Below is another picture of Chrissy.  Sorry to post so many, but she looks good and really liked the car.

We ended up at the Courtyard Marriott at Liberty Station.This used to be a Naval Training base and now it has been redeveloped into hotels, shops and restaurants.It is very pleasant if a bit too neat, see below. Chrissy has already left for Washington.My flight is a little latter so I am writing this at the airport.It has been an interesting visit to California.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The only place Joshua trees grow is in parts of the Mojave Desert, on elevations from 2000-6000 feet, and their highest concentration is where they are protected in the Joshua Tree National Park. This is high desert and cooler than the Sonora Deserts lower down and farther south. You pass through the transition zone between these two biomes as you drive south across the park. From the north you cross a vast expanse of Joshua tree savanna.  

Joshua trees are a type of yucca. They don’t grow like ordinary trees, with rings marking each year’s growth, so it is hard to tell how old individuals are. They don’t get very tall. They look sort of like crazy people waving at you. This seems to confirm one of the stories about how they got their names. The story goes that early Mormon settlers thought the trees looked like Joshua welcoming them to the Promised Land.  They were also sometimes called desert oranges.  This story says that land sellers wanted to entice settlers to this barren land, so they not only implied that these were productive fruit trees, but even went around and tied some oranges to the trees near the roads. It evidently didn’t fool anybody.

The landscape is beautiful in that harsh sort of way, a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here. We were seeing it at its best time. Spring rains have made it greener than usual.  The day was very windy, which I understand is fairly common. That is why they have all those windmills nearby.  It also explains the sculptured roundness of the rock outcroppings: natural sandblasting smooths off the rough edges.  

The Joshua trees dominate the open spaces, but in among the rock outcroppings you find pinion pine, California juniper and scrub oak. These communities are under some stress, however. The climate was wetter until the 1930s. The same hot and dry conditions that provoked the dust bowl affected the local climate. I couldn’t find out details about this, but evidently the previous relatively more verdant environment did not return. There are hot/dry and cool/moist cycles in climatic patterns and this could not have been anything new to the plant and animal communities. 

The difference may have been human development. Cattle grazing took out some of the natural cover and made it less resistant to the changes.  But the bigger problem seems to be invasive species, such as cheatgrass. These things deliver a double punch.   During wetter periods, they fill in below and among the pines and oak. In drier times, they die back, but don’t quickly decompose. This makes wildfires hotter and more destructive, which kills some of the trees that would have otherwise survived. When the area regenerates, these non-native grasses form a thick layer of turf that makes it harder for the pine and oak seedlings to get a roothold. This is not a very generous environment and there are not that many second chances.  

IMO, the native environment is better than what we will get if we let the invasive take over, but it will be sustainable only with a little human intervention and probably chemical warfare. BasF makes a good herbicide that can take out cheat-grass and its ilk, while leaving the oaks and pines intact.  This should probably be done periodically. I don’t know if it is. I would get more involved if I lived nearby.  This is certainly an environment worth saving. Doing nothing is not a good option.

Above - Joshua Tree NP is a favorite for rock climbers. Below is a lake made by ranchers for cattle by building a dam at a runoff point.

Below is the dam holding back the water. The little lake has become a major wildlife attraction, as one of the only steady water sources in this arid place.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been very windy today and I can understand why they built all the windmills as we drove through the forests of them to get from the coast to Palm Springs. 

Wind power was the topic of NPR’s Science Friday a few weeks ago, this time from Oklahoma. If you read between the lines, you understand why alternative power is still alternative. When one of the producers of wind turbines was asked why he wasn’t selling more in windy Oklahoma, he honestly responded that electricity rates were too low. His turbines couldn’t compete with the stuff from the grid. There’s more.

I generally favor a diverse portfolio of energy. I am especially fond of biomass fuel, specifically wood chips. But I recognize that even with this simple and well-known fuel there are problems. The biggest challenge to almost all fuels is that they are not where you need them to be. I have acres of wood literally rotting away, but gathering it up and transporting it cost more than it is worth.

What annoys me about some of the alternative fuel advocates is their unjustifiably smug attitude that they have found some big thing and that the only reason it is not widely used is because everybody else is stupid or “big companies” are too greedy to allow it. Besides overlooking obvious drawbacks in the fuels themselves, they are almost always overlooking costs and troubles of transport and distribution. They sort of assume these are free or should be covered by someone else.

So let’s talk about wind power. Wind is free; capturing it is not and neither is getting it from where the wind is blowing to where the energy it produces will be used. A caller to the NPR program talked about getting off the grid with wind power. The guy who sells the turbines admitted that you really need the grid. Wind is unreliable and if you wanted to be off the grid, you would have to invest around $100,000 for all the back-up systems you would need to keep the lights on. The grid costs money to build and maintain. If you account only for the cost of the turbines, you are missing the biggest investments. It is like the kid who thinks he pays the whole cost of a car by filling up the gas tank on weekends.

Most people will not have their own wind turbines. That means that the turbines will be some distance from the consumers. The wind blows mostly on the plains and in the ocean, far away from cities and factories. So we need transmission lines. But we need more than the kinds of transmission lines we have already. Big power plants need transmission lines, but they are at least coming from the same place. Wind turbines are by necessity spread out. You need transmission lines from the wind farms to the cities, but you also need lines between and among the turbines.

Transmission lines are not free and they are not 100% ecologically benign. Each time you build transmission lines, you also cut through the environment, across streams and migration routes, to build roads to service the line and you build pylons every 100 yards. That’s a lot of rock, steel and concrete when you add it up over many of miles, not to mention lots of gas burned by crews building, checking and maintaining it all. So when anybody tells you that a wind farm takes up only a couple acres, recall the many miles of transmission lines. I personally have eight acres under power lines. I can't grow trees there and while I think it is good to have it as edge community (it can be managed as excellent quail habitat) too many of these kinds things will fragment environments.

The fact is that we use carbon based fuels because they are cheaper, easier to move and more convenient to use than alternatives. When alternatives get to be cheaper, easier and more convenient, they stop being alternatives and just get to be mainstream. That is what it means to be a viable alternative. As long as earnest advocates have to try to convince skeptics about its virtues, it is not viable. Energy consumer really aren't that dumb. When something really is cheaper and easier it won't take earnest advocates; they try very hard to get more of it.

Wind, solar and other alternatives are indeed getting cheaper. When their time comes, there will be no stopping them.  (I assume that the wind turbines we passed make some money.)  Until that time artificially pumping them up won't really make it happen. And we have to remember that no form of energy is trouble free. There are always trade-offs.

Posted by Broadnax at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have a few odds and ends that are not enough for a whole post, but I don’t want to lose.

Crows are among the most intelligent birds.  It is something you notice when you just walk around.  They have a sentry in the tallest trees and they caw differentially as you walk under.  If you are carrying a shotgun, they all fly off.  If you are unarmed, they just ignore you.

The job of eating food scraps around people eating lunch outside is usually the job of pigeons but at San Simeon the task belongs to crows.  The crows are scarier and not only because they are shiny black and raven-like.   Unlike pigeon, which are just stupidly annoying, you can see the calculating intelligent in the crows’ black eyes. The pigeons also are little fat-boys; crows look lean and mean.  You don’t want to mess with the crows, especially if you are driving a convertible.  You know that they will forget you never more and maybe come back to retaliate. BTW, Alfred Hitchcock filmed "The Birds" up the coast.

Speaking of bird-brained intelligence, turkeys are really dumb. They used to be thought “elusive” but that was only because there were not many of them.   A couple of them wandered across the road on our farm.  They just stood there in front of the truck. I had to get out and toss stones in their general direction. I am pretty sure that I could have caught them with my bare hands. 

The turkey population has exploded over the past couple of decades and our scientific understanding of them has changed.  We used to think that turkeys needed large ranges and significant protection to survive.  Today we have learned that any decent sized clump of trees will do, whether it is next to a farm field or a suburban street.   We should probably encourage more hunting of these big birds, along with the now ubiquitous Canada geese.   Some people could probably save a lot on food bills.

Pea’s porridge hot

We stopped off at a Danish bakery and pea soup restaurant. The Andersen restaurant claimed to be selling pea soup since 1924. Pea soup was one of my father’s staple menu items (along with bean soup, polish sausage and green tomatoes) and I like pea soup. 

I don’t often make it because you have to make big pots of it at a time. The canned varieties just aren’t right, even Progresso, which usually produces good soups. Chrissy and I both got pea soup in a sourdough bread bowl. The bread mixed with the soup made it into pea’s porridge. It was good and worth the stop.

We stopped in Carpinteria to get gas. We didn’t, because the gas station (yes we passed only one) charged a $.45 “convenience fee” for using a credit card.  I can't believe there is still a place that doesn’t have a pay at the pump, much less charging a “convenience fee.”  It was an Arco Station, which I thought was a major company.  

But it was worth the diversion. As we stopped looking for another gas station and decided to turn back to the highway, we noticed a very large pine tree. I got out to take a look and noticed the plaque that claimed that this was the largest Torrey pine in the world.

The Torrey pine is locally endangered in the wild of its own natural range, where few of the species get as big as the one we saw and most are slow-growing and picturesquely twisted. But it is grows fast, tall and straight when used in plantations in Australia and New Zealand. It just doesn’t like it at home.

I bet that if we looked hard enough, we would find that the largest Torrey pine in the world is in Australia or New Zealand - if not now, soon. I read that the tallest California redwoods will soon be the ones planted in New Zealand during the 19th Century. I saw some really beautiful sequoia trees at the Ambassador's house in Geneva and a whole beautiful forest of redwoods growing on the hills near Sintra in Portugal. In fact, Sintra has a castle a lot like a smaller version of San Simeon.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Spanish established a road, El Camino Real or the royal road, from San Diego to San Francisco to connect and supply their missions and forts.  Today I-5 and U.S. 101 follow the route and we drove along both today on our way from San Diego to the Hearst Castle in San Simeon.

The route is marked with bells suspended from question mark shaped pipes.  These are good promotion and the reason we noticed that we were on the route. 

I originally rented a Chevy Cobalt and I used it to drive up to the botanical garden mentioned in the last post, but it was such a crappy car that I took it back to Alamo before I picked up Chrissy.   Chrissy always said that she wanted to drive a convertible, so I splurged and surprised her with one.  It was fun to drive in the convertible on the coastal highway and we look forward to more fun when we drive inland to Joshua Tree National Park. 

Below is Chrissy with the car.

The coastal highway goes through some beautiful county.   The part I like the best is the oak savanna.  I think they call them oak woodlands out here.  The ones along the coast tend to feature California live oak.  They are similar to oak openings in the Midwest, but the California hills are more majestic, especially when set against the Pacific surf.  The park-like widely spaced oak forests make a truly pleasant environment.  They are maintained by frequent low-intensity fires and are endangered when fires are too carefully prevented by humans.

Above is an example of the oak savanna/oak woodland biome.  Below is the road ahead north of San Luis Obispo.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Relationships long established should not be changed for light or transient causes.  Everything exists in a complex web of interrelationships and changing any part may bring unexpected systemic changes and unwelcome changes.  But everything is always in the process of becoming something else.  Change is constant and avoiding it is not an option.  The best we can do is work toward sustainable, predictable change.

I thought about change and continuity, as I walked through the Quail Botanical Gardens north of San Diego.   The Southern California environment most people know, love and want to preserve is largely man-made, as I wrote in an earlier post.   The local environment has a lot in common with some places in South Africa, the Mediterranean and Australia, so plants from those places tend to do well in Southern California. Below, however, is a familiar tree from Brazil. I never knew what it was called. It is a floss silk tree (weird name).

There is some emphasis on trying to reestablish native or nature ecosystems.  IMO, sustainable is important; natural or native really are not. The problem with natural is that the concept is too slippery and unrealistic.  As for native, it all depends. Native plants and animals might be well adapted to the local environment and fit in the overall environment, but sometimes non-native plants and animals can be as good, or better. I am glad that banana, oranges, apples, wheat, potatoes, horses, honeybees etc have spread beyond their narrow native regions ... and improved in the process. 

Posted by Broadnax at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was a little early to go down to the farms. The trees haven’t quite started to grow yet and the clover is still small and not flowering. I will be back in a few weeks. But I wanted to check on flood damage now. Above are the trees near the clover field at the top of the hill. The truck gives perspective. The land was clear cut in 2003, so you can see how much the trees have grown since then. The biosolids helped them grow faster last year. Below is another truck comparison. There is an interesting detail. Look at the two trees behind the truck. The round top one is a "volunteer" i.e. natural regeneration. It was probably a little tree when the place was cut. The one next to it is a planted genetically "super tree." Because of their location at the crossroad, I have been paying attention to this place. The round top tree was twice as big as the ones around it when I first noticed. Today, you can see that the one next to it is a little bigger and I expect that after this growing season it will be significantly bigger. I will take another picture.

I saw clear evidence of heavy rain and lots of runoff, but no real damage. The places near the streams overflowed, but that doesn’t hurt the trees. The water is running UNDER one of the water pipes. I figure it will undercut the road, but I don't think there is much to do about it. I will put in a load of rocks and turn it into a ford when/if it collapses. I think it will be better for the water to run over instead of under. 

One of the little streams changed course last year. It went back to its older course. When I dig down, I find sand and gravel all over, indicating that the stream has changed course a lot. It creates wetlands until the mud piles up into natural levies, and then it moves again. You can see from the picture above that there have been times when the ground was dry for a long time.  The dead trees were alive when I got the place in 2005, when the stream shifted and evidently drown the roots in wetland. I suppose that now the stream has shifted again, it will be dryer, although the whole place is spongy.

I also think that runoff will decrease over time as the trees on the slopes get bigger and their roots absorb more of the water before it hits the streams. 

I want to get the trees on the Freeman tract thinned this year or next, before I get to Brazil.   Above you can see from the comparison with the truck that the trees are big enough and thick enough. They will be fourteen years old this year, which is a little early for thinning but within the range.  Below is the power line right-of-way. They replaced the wooden pylons with steel and kind of tore up the grass. I have eight acres under those things. I am looking into establishing quail habitat, since I cannot plant trees (or allow them to grow) that would interfere with the wires.  On the plus side, it provides a long area of forest edge and wildlife plot and the utility company maintains the road. 

Posted by Broadnax at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I drove with Frank Sherwood to the Virginia tree farm of the year and got a chance to talk to him as we walked around on the ground. Frank has been doing forestry in Virginia for thirty-five years and I got some good information on drive down from Winchester. 

This area of Virginia features a lot of mixed hardwoods and white pines. I was very familiar with white pines form Wisconsin, but I really had a lot to learn about them. For example, white pine wood is light and not as hard or strong as loblolly.  It is good for fence rails (it doesn’t twist) and it is used in log cabins, but it is not as much use as structural timber.  Frank lamented that there is not much of a market for white pine saw timber in the immediate area, besides in those two limited uses. A lot of the local white pine had not grown straight and un-branched.   The newer plantations are doing better.

White pines have not been developed genetically as well as loblolly and it is less likely to be planted, since natural regeneration works very well.   A white pine rotation is around fifty years (15-18 years longer than loblolly) with two possible thinning. 

Pulp prices have remained steady over the years, Frank told me.   Some people are a little concerned about biofuels, which would compete with pulp and drive the prices up (good for landowners), but there currently is not a biofuels market in the Winchester region.  You can make ethanol from cellulous, but it is not worth it with today’s technologies.   That means that effective biofuels for wood is to burn it directly and for that you need local facilities that burn it.   The alternative is to make wood pellets, but that industry is also not present locally.

Landowners have a couple options for timber selling.  The one you get the most money for is saw timber.  Saw timber will yield $150-400 per 1000 board feet.  Pulp is the cheapest, maybe biofuels in the near future.  Pulp yields $5-7 a ton for pine and $2-3 for hardwood.  In between is scragwood.  These are small diameter but straight trees that can be sawed into rough boards used in crates and pallets.

Frank feeds the mill in Luke, Maryland.  He says that the mill’s catchment area is getting bigger because it is harder to find wood in local areas.  Development and forest fragmentation are the causes.  You can do forestry on small tracts, but at some point it gets to be economically unviable.  You probably need around forty acres to do decent management. Development has been taking forestry out of business. Although the recent economic downturn has stopped much of it, development will resume when the good times roll again. Too bad.

Frank doesn’t know of anybody using biosolids or animal manure on forest lands in this part of the Shenandoah valley or around.  There are several chicken operations (we drove past a Perdue operation) that produce a fair amount of chickenshit, but Frank didn’t know what they did with it.  Chickenshit is a powerful fertilizer, high in potassium, but as I understand it, chickenshit has to be left to decompose a little otherwise it can burn out the crops.  IMO forest lands would be a good place to dispose of some of these farm wastes.  There is a lot of forest and they could absorb and use the nitrogen and phosphate w/o letting it slip into the Chesapeake Bay. Of course, the problem is transportation. Manure is bulky, heavy and stinky.

The problem is concentration.  These large animal operations concentrate the crap. That changes it from a valuable fertilizer into a potential pollution problem. The difference between a life-giving medicine and a deadly poison is often the dosage.

Anyway, those are some of the things I learned from Frank.  The biggest benefit of writing the tree farm of the year article is getting to talk to people like him while actually setting foot on the forests.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Noble Laesch, the father of the current owner Judith Gontis, bought this acreage in the late 1960s and it has been a certified tree farm for the last twenty-eight years. Laesch and Gontis did not live on the land and so for the last twenty-eight years it has been forester Frank Sherwood’s business and pleasure to look after these 927 acres of hilly mixed forest just inside the Rockingham County line.

It is a tree farm with great diversity in terms of species composition, topography, soils and microclimates. The ridges are still dominated by mixed hardwoods, although gradually white pines are taking over, both through natural processes and forestry practices. We looked at a logging operations and examined some of the recently cut stumps during a recent visit. The partially shade tolerant white pines had seeded in naturally under an older stand of mixed hardwood, mostly scarlet oak, but were suppressed until released by the forestry operation. 

 We counted 130 rings on a scarlet oak stump. For the first sixty years of life, the tree grew slowly and crookedly. It is clear that there were too many trees here competing for sun, nutrients and water. We have no record of how the neighboring trees were thinned, but the tree started to grow much faster at around sixty until it slowed in older age. Unfortunately, although very big, this scarlet oak, like most of the others in the stand, had begun to rot in the middle. It was past time to remove them and give the white pines their time in the sun. Within a few years this will be an almost pure stand of white pine.

Farther down the hill was a recently thinned plantation, a total of 126 acres of twenty-year-old white pine and a clear cut left to regenerate naturally in white pine. The trees were vigorous but widely spaced. The blueberries had come in very thickly and perhaps they just outran the pine seedlings.   The plantation was clearly better for timber production, but the naturally regenerated area had cost nothing to plant and the widely spaced trees were providing excellent openings for wildlife.   As with any management plan, it depends on what the landowner wants and it was interesting to see the side-by-side comparison of different choices.

The tulip-poplars that grow so profusely on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge do well here too, but only in coves or bowls that have deeper soil than the rocky and sometimes sandy slopes.   In these places you find towering tulip poplars that can be harvested at regular intervals and regenerated naturally.

The rest of the tree farm is mixed hardwoods, especially white and red oak, plus some maples, as well as white pine.  This is white pine country. Although loblolly can be grown here too, the white pines do it naturally. With Frank Sherwood’s advice, Mrs. Gontis, as her father before her, manages for pulp and saw timber mostly through selective cuttings.  

Like all well-managed tree farms, this one provides a home for wildlife, a place for recreation and protection for water resources. The farm is drained by Runion Creek, whose waters find their way into the Shenandoah and the Potomac and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay. Although there is some development in the region, it looks like this tree farm and its 927 acres will continue to provide these kinds of ecological services for years to come. 

Posted by Broadnax at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The stump is from a scarlet oak that started life sometime around 1870 up the hills just over the northern boundary of Rockingham County, where I was visiting this year's tree farm of the year. I didn’t count all the rings, but it is close. I sharpened a little on the picture so you can see the pattern. It tells a little about Virginia history.

You can see that it grew hardly at all for the first sixty years. This is probably because it was severely overcrowded. This area was almost completely cut over in the decades before the Civil War. Some of the wood was used for building, mining supports & staves, but mostly for charcoal for little foundries and lime kilns in the region. The trees grew back after the industries moved along and they came back thick and for about sixty years, roughly from 1870-1930 there wasn’t enough sun or water to go around. (In those days there weren’t as many deer and other varmints around. These days, they would browse down some of the trees.) Our tree was also leaning a little. You can see that it grew as a reaction more on one side.

But something happened around 1930. Somebody probably cut down some of the trees.  Or it could have been a fire or insect infestation, but that seems less likely, since whatever it was didn’t harm our tree here. In fact, it started to grow a lot faster, until it slowed again down because of its age.

Scarlet oaks are part of the red oak family, but they are among the worst members. They wood is not as good northern or southern red oaks and scarlet oaks tend to rot in the heart or have other irregularities. The logger said that the logs in the pile shown in the picture were probably not up to saw timber standards because of this.

All members of the red oaks family have open pores, which is why they cannot be used for barrels and generally do not do well when exposed to water. Even as seasoned firewood, they can hiss when burned, since they absorb water easily and a little rain will soak in. The oak whiskey barrels used for Bourbon whiskey are always white oak. White oak also makes better firewood. 

There were mostly scarlet oaks on this ridge, mixed with white pines. White pines are partially shade tolerant when they are young, so they will come in under the oaks. The loggers cut out the scarlet oaks and the forest will come back as mostly pine. The scarlet oaks were almost done anyway. Many were already rotting in the centers and they were well past prime as timber trees.

This part of Virginia is white pine country, at least on the hillsides. In the coves, where the soil is deeper, the yellow-poplars do very well. The picture above shows some of them. They grow very fast. This stand has been harvested twice since the late 1970s and it is ready for a third cut, as you can see.

Yellow-poplar is good for furniture inside drawers and cabinets with veneer of oak or other high quality wood on the outside. Yellow-poplar doesn't shrink or swell very much, so it is good for that purpose. 

I will write more about this subject tomorrow. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes there is nothing you can do, but everybody expects you to do something. That is the time for the rain dance. Put on a good show, create a lot of sound & fury to keep people occupied so that they will keep you around long enough for things to improve, so you get credit. Politicians are master rain dancers, butt all of us have done a few. Sometimes you just have to be seen to be doing something.

I have been reading a book about real rain dances, called Floods, Famines and Emperors:  El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations.  The author talks about the various times when climate change caused civilizations to thrive and crash.   One chapter talks about the Pueblo of the Southwest.  (I think that is where the term “rain dance” comes from, BTW.)  Their population expanded during relatively wet times and then their populations starved and dispersed during when the same Medieval warm period that brought prosperity to Western Europe brought droughts to Southwestern North America that lasted decades or centuries.  Changes always bring winners and losers.

The author Brian Fagan says that a lot of early civilizations were based in part on the implication that priests and rulers could control the weather. Their activities to do this ranged from the merely wasteful to the downright gruesome.  A lot of complicated rituals and ceremonies were designed to do things like make the Nile flow or bring on the season rains.  The ancient Maya seem to have based their belief system on the need to capture, humiliate, torture and kill people from neighboring areas in order to sacrifice them and appease bloodthirsty gods who otherwise would bring drought and destruction.  They left some nice pyramids, but living through in those times must have been like being a minor character in a endless horror movie.   Unfortunately, these kinds of superstitions were the rule and not the exception in pre-scientific societies.

At our safe distance, we sometimes think of these superstitions in the benign fairy-tale sense of an enchanted forest full of fairies, elves etc. But think of how horrible it would be if you really believed it. The pre-scientific world must have been a frightening place. Everything you did could offend some spirit or nymph, so you needed to turn to shaman, witch or priest to protect you from capricious nature, which they (and you) attributed to benign or malevolent intelligence that had to be mollified.  

Some ritual had to be performed, but nobody was ever was sure if they worked.  Of course, they didn’t work but sometimes they might look like they did. If I do ceremonies to make it rain, and it eventually rains, I take credit.  A smart shaman probably had an intuitive sense of probability, so he did his rituals at times when things were moving in the right direction. You can see how the shaman might have added some value by his experience, on balance, however not. 

I suppose superstition is a step toward science. Alchemy led to some real discoveries about chemistry and physics. Astrology gave us some of the tools later needed by astronomers. 

Superstitions are an attempt to put some planning and order into an unpredictable world.   The problem is mostly based on mistaking correlation for causality, poor record keeping and the evidently natural human propensity to see patterns that don’t exist. Superstitions are a kind of distortion of reason, but they can be ostensibly reasonable.    

Of course, we still do rain dances too. The world is still an unpredictable place.

Anyway, I recommend Floods, Famines and Emperors. A lot of his ideas seemed very familiar, but I didn’t put it together until I started writing this that I had read one of his earlier books called The Long Summer.  It is still sitting on my bookshelf. These books help put the climate change debate in its historical perspective. We have been here before and maybe some perspective on how earlier climate changes affected earlier people may help us in the future.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NOAA is establishing a National Climate Service, analogous to the National Weather Service. This is a good step for the very practical reason that it will facilitate planning and adapting to changes in climate. But it also carries with it the legendary pitfalls of prognostication.

You can listen to the NPR story about it at this link.

Weather predictions have become a lot more reliable in the last ten years. You can make reasonable plans based on hours of the day. For example, I was able to make drive across my state ahead of a blizzard because the weather service was able to accurately predict sun in the morning before the blizzard hit in the afternoon. Climate prediction is still not up to the scientific level of weather prediction, but it is getting better. We should soon be able to make reasonable predictions on the regional and sub-regional level.

This brings the obvious blessing that we can take advantage of changes and/or minimize losses. For example, as I have said on many occasions, it is positively insane to rebuild the below-sea-level parts of New Orleans. We should not extend subsidized flood or storm insurance to any new construction on low-lying coastal plains and we should encourage people to move to higher ground, even if that means building higher premiums into insurance policies and mortgages of those who won't.

BTW - we DO NOT have to mandate this, if we just refrain from getting governments to subsidize or require insurance or mortgages be available at "reasonable" rates. The market will sort out which places are too risky. If someone is willing to insure your house on a mud-slope, it is his business and yours. People can build if they want, but we should not become accomplices to stupidity. We might also plan to retire some crops or cropland and get read to move into others. Advanced plant breeding and biotechnology will be a great help here.

Climate change will create winners and losers. Having a reasonable idea of the shape of the changes will make it possible to reap more of the benefits and suffer fewer of the penalties. But think of the troubles along the way.

Somebody today owns valuable land near major ports or in the middle of today’s most productive agricultural land. On the other hand, somebody today owns near worthless land. These might change places. Think of the ports around Hudson Bay. How many of us can even name one? If you look at a globe instead of a flat map, you can see that Hudson Bay is more convenient to many parts of Europe or Asia than is Los Angeles or New Orleans. The problem until now has been ice. The place was locked up most of the year. If this changes, so does the shipping calculation.

Are the current owners of prime real estate and infrastructure going to welcome all the newcomers? Are they going to welcome a study that shows investors and government decision makers a future that makes their wealth creation machines redundant?

Woe to the GS-13 bureaucrat who issues the report proving that no more government aid should go to New Orleans’ 9th Ward. Imagine how much more this will be true of more crucial and expensive infrastructure owned by politically powerful people and interests.

I think the National Climate Service is an excellent and useful idea. It will help us adapt and prosper in the future. But I fear the daunting politics.

I remember talking to a guy from North Carolina during disastrous floods a few years ago. He told me that they had detailed maps that could accurately predict almost the exact shape of a flood, but they couldn’t use them because people objected when the places they wanted to build were shown to be in the middle of seasonal swamps. We have seen this kind of stupidity in New Orleans and continue to see it.

There is a whole genre of literature involved with someone getting a prediction of future events and being unable to do anything about it. Predictors are dismissed (e.g. Cassandra) or often the twist is that the very attempt to stop the predicted event is what brings on the tragedy (e.g. Oedipus Rex). Let’s hope that our prognostication works out better.   

Posted by Broadnax at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are off from work again today and the government will be closed again tomorrow. They say that we got more snow this year than any time in recorded history. This is less impressive when you recall that they have kept detailed weather records for only a little more than 100 years. Nevertheless, it is a lot of snow and it has been a cold season.

There is a real blizzard today and I can see why nobody should be driving. Espen tried to drive the truck to visit one of his nearby friends. He got stuck in our complex. Fortunately, Chrissy and I could walk over and dig/push him out. Yesterday, however, wasn’t bad until around 5pm. In fact, the main roads were perfectly clear.  As I wrote in yesterday’s post, I drove down to the forestry conference in Keswick , near Charlottesville. It is a little more than a two hour drive.

I took a little different way than usual. I started down I66 to US29 as usual, but then I cut off on US15 through Culpepper and Orange. The drive takes you through a really beautiful countryside, full of horse farms and vineyards with the Blue Ridge Mountains as a backdrop.   James Madison’s estate is nearby and so is Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The soil is good and the climate is moderate. You can see what it looks like covered in snow. It is even prettier in springtime.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The debate about whether heredity or environment is more important in shaping human behavior has been a hot topic for many years. The “blank slate” idea dominated thinking when I was on college and I remember being embarrassed by the castigation I got from one of my anthropology professors for suggesting that human events were influenced by genetics.  We have reached a more nuanced understanding, but books like “The Blank Slate”, by Stephen Pinker still cause controversy.   And suggesting innate differences among people can still get you in serious trouble in some places.  

The tree and genetic determinism

So let me talk about genetic determinism in trees. Presumably none of them will be insulted or feel that I have diminished their self esteem. Getting the best genetic stock and managing it for optimal results (nature & nurture) was a topic at the Forest Landowners’ conference on forest productivity that I attended.  They were going to hold it at the Virginia Department of Forestry in Charlottesville, but the snow knocked out the electricity, so they moved it to the Rivanna Volunteer Fire Department (above), where they have a big meeting room (below).

Both genetics and environment are important and they build on and affect each other.  The anger of my anthropology professor just showed that he was not qualified to teach the subject.  Unfortunately he was reflecting the mainstream scientific consensus of those times.

Genetic improvement changed forestry

Genetic improvements have greatly changed forestry in the last fifty years. This is especially true for loblolly pines, the most commonly planted timber tree in the South, which are unusually adaptable. The “original” loblolly is a fast growing but often crooked and ugly tree. Genetic improvement can be very simple. You just choose the trees with the best characteristics and try to plant more of them.  We are now in the third generation of loblolly and the differences are remarkable.  

The new trees take thirty years to get as the original trees get to be in eighty.  They are also a lot straighter, more resistant to disease and have a better branching structure. You can achieve these goals in different ways. The easiest is the simple one I mentioned above.  Just gather the seeds from the best trees; grow them and repeat.   In this system the trees pollinate themselves, so there is randomness in this process.  A next step is to control pollination to ensure that the best fertilize the best. This is more labor intensive, since you have to put little bags on the trees to be sure that only the right pollen gets to the right flowers.  

Below are Virginia pines squashed by the snow.  Virginia pines are weedy trees and not much use. They don't live long and break easily.  I saw lots of broken Virginia pines along the road. 

Bring on the clones

The latest step is cloning. Let's explain a little about cloning in plants, lest we think about a “Caprica” scenario. Most gardeners have cloned plants.  You can clone a willow or a cottonwood just by shoving a stick into wet ground.  If you see a bunch of cottonwoods along a river, there is a good chance that they are all the same tree – genetically – as trees sprouted from roots or from sticks that lodged in the mud. I once inadvertently cloned a cottonwood when I used a freshly-cut cottonwood branch as a marking stick.  A couple days later it sprouted into a little tree. Pines are harder, but they can be done. The clones are all genetically identical, so they can be a good test for the nature v nurture question.

Good genetics can move the whole curve higher, but variation remains and good genetic are the most profitable deployed as other conditions improve.    Many of the costs associated with establishing and managing the stand of trees remain the same no matter what you plant.  If you are planning to expend a lot of energy and time on management and planning, you are well advised to spend a little more for genetically superior trees.  All trees will do better with better management, but the better trees will do better than the others. 

Improving conditions make good genes more important

In other words, the more you improve conditions and remove obstacles, the more import genetics becomes to the results and the greater the gap between the superior and the inferior trees.  It makes sense when you think in terms of potential.  It doesn’t make much difference if one tree has the genetic potential to grow  80 feet tall in twenty years while another can only grow 40, if limiting conditions prevent any of  the trees from growing more than 30 feet tall.

Limiting factors

So what are some of the limiting factors? The most obvious are climate, rainfall, soil and elevation.   These make a difference when choosing a site, but after that they are beyond our control.  But there are many limiting factors that we can control, including spacing among the trees, thinning schedules, rotation timing, competition control & fertilization.

Spacing

Trees will grow faster and stronger if there is more space between them.  It is like thinning flowers in a garden. Everything else being equal, a similar amount of wood will grow on a given piece of ground no matter how thick or thin the trees are planted, but the health and quality will be very different.   If planted too thick, you will have lots of small, maybe worthless trees.   The optimal number of trees per acre is still debated among foresters.  

Some of it depends on your goal.  If you want to produce lots of pulp, you might want to plant thick.  If you are trying to grow saw timber, you need to plant thinner.  Another consideration is that if the trees are close enough together, they will sooner shade out competition and also shade out lower branches so that the trees will essentially prune themselves, leaving wood with fewer knots.

Thinning

Thinning schedules are a type of spacing issue, but with additional considerations. Thinning does not have to be a random selection.  You can take out the inferior trees when you thin, so thinning both produces more space, more sun, water etc, but also leaves the better trees.

Controlling competition

Competition control is crucial. If you don’t control hardwoods, they will out-compete pines in most situations. Some hardwoods, such as gum and tulip trees just grow faster, but hardwoods also often have the advantage of an established root system, since they sprout from stumps or roots even after many years of being shaded out. Hardwoods can be controlled with physical methods, such as cutting, but the best way to control hardwoods these days is chemical.  

BasF makes a couple of products called “Chopper” and “Arsenal”. They kill most hardwoods but leave the pines. Unfortunately, they don’t work very well with herbaceous plants or with blackberries, which easily over top the little trees, but they still do a good job with the hardwood competition, which is the key.   

It is smart to spray with Chopper when you are establishing a pine stand. After that, you can go in with backpack sprayers.  The boys and I killed off a couple acres of invasive Ailanthus using hack and squirt (where you smack the stem with a machete and then squirt in some arsenal) and I still have to go after individuals constantly. The good thing for the landowner is that the prices of these chemical has plummeted, as they have gone off patent. IMO it is still good to buy the name brand because they support the product better and the name brand product is also fairly cheap.

Fertilization 

Fertilization is still not much used in forestry but it can increase yields. Most forests in Virginia grow on bad soil, either naturally poor or depleted by bad farming practices of times past. (The key crops of Southern Virgina, cotton and tobacco, are hard on soils.)  If the soil is good, the land is usually devoted to row crops, which pay more than trees.  (An exception is recently converted tobacco land. When the government stopped supporting tobacco crops, many tobacco farmers left the business and the land has been planted in trees. These trees are only a few years old, but they seem to be growing well.) 

Deficient Virginia soils

Virginia forest soils are almost always deficient in phosphorus and nitrogen and trees grow a lot faster when they are provided with them. You have to give both, since just providing one or the other doesn’t do much good.  You can fertilize when the stand is established and or fertilize after 6-10 years. Until that time, there is usually enough P & N for the little trees.

I fertilized my CP property with biosolids in September 2008.  It seems to have given them a good jump. 

Anyway, those are some of the things I learned at the meeting. I have drifted a little from the nature versus nurture.  I think both are important.  We cannot choose between them, since it is nearly impossible  to know where the effects of one stop and the other start and they actually change each other by being in contact. As the trees show, equalizing or improving opportunity and conditions will make genetics more  - not less - important and will make inequality more - not less - acute.  The trees don’t care; people might.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dulles Airport got 32 inches of snow, a record amount. Reagan-National only got 17 inches.  This is the 4th largest amount.  But it ain’t over. It is good to have Espen at home for the snow. He is a strong boy and actually shoveled us out w/o us even having to ask.

We didn’t have to go to work today. The government was closed. It will be closed again tomorrow.  They already announced it. I am betting that the government will be closed on Wednesday too.  We are supposed to get another foot of snow on Tuesday/Wednesday night. That will paralyze our Nation’s capital again. Below you can get an idea of the snowfall with the picture of our cross the street neighbor making a path.

We had around three feet of snow on the back deck. I was a little afraid that another foot of wet snow would cause a collapse, so I pushed most of it off. On the radio, they warned people not to overdo the snow cleanup and specifically not to push the snow off their own roofs. You should get a licensed contactor, they said. They featured some poor old woman who hired a kid to push the snow off her flat roof.  She seemed to have good sense and didn’t really take it seriously.  I suppose it is possible that somebody will fall off, but I think that risk is well worth it compared with the wimpy idea that you would have to get an officially sanctioned person to do that. Maybe we should bubble wrap ourselves before we go out. I don’t think they were talking about decks, but I felt offended anyway. I didn’t like the earnest way they seemed to care about my welfare.

Espen was stranded at home. They canceled classes at GMU today and tomorrow. We had planned to pick up Alex on Friday, but were snowed out. His classes were also canceled so he is hunkered down in the dorm, but he says he can get to the chow hall, which is open, so all is well.

I don’t recall if they ever shut down University of Wisconsin because of snow, although sometimes nobody was in class. I remember trudging to class through some very high snowdrifts. But the difference was distance.  We walked to school and those that drove didn’t have to drive that far.   Now they have to worry about a very wide metro area. Like all old guys, I think we were tougher back then.   I also remember walking across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis when it was 25 below – real temperature not that wind-chill dodge. It was several minutes before I could get my frozen glasses off my frozen eyebrows.

It is not nearly as cold here as it gets in Minnesota or Wisconsin but the snow piled all around is starting to make me feel at home. And it looks like it’s not going to let up for at least another week or two.  We are getting a real winter here.  Below is one of our meadows sleeping under the snow last week.  It is piled higher now. 

On the plus side there should be a lot of good soil moisture for my trees and clover and the cold weather will freeze out most of the southern pine beetles. Of course, none of my trees were infested before anyway. But I will really enjoy looking at the burst of green this spring in the wildlife pastures. The hard winter will produce a vibrant spring.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been cold again this year but this year we are also getting more snow. They got a lot of snow in southern Virginia & North Carolina, so I wanted to go down and look at the snow on the farm.  Well, it wasn’t a lot of snow by Wisconsin standards and it will melt in a few days, but there was more than usual and it created a different look for the place. You really wouldn't guess that you were looking at southern Virginia.

I saw a couple cars in the ditch on the way down and I didn’t dare take the back roads, as I usually do.  Instead I went down I95 all the way down to Emporia and then went over on 58. I also didn’t dare drive down the dirt roads on the farm.  You can see that 623 was good in the spot above, but look near the bottom and you can see why I didn't want to drive up the farm road.  It is harder to walk through the snow but it is nice to feel it underfoot. There were a few animal track, but it was otherwise undisturbed. It is nice to have land.

It was a long trip to see it and it took longer because of the adverse weather conditions. I finished almost the entire audio-book Infotopia, which I found very interesting and useful (I hope) in my job.   This was one of the three audio downloads on Audible.com that Mariza gave me for Christmas.   It was a good gift.  Audio books make long drives bearable and even beneficial. I lose my NPR a few miles outside Washington.  I don’t like music radio or those silly talk shows that purport to give advice that will solve problems that I don’t have. Audio books do the job.

Another good audio program is “the Teaching Company”.   Alex likes them too because they are around forty-five minutes long, which fits his workout schedule.

Anyway, take a look at the nice pictures. 

Complete set of photos are at this link.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is my article for the next issue of "Virginia Forests".  It is based on an earlier blog post, so if you have a feeling of deja vu, that is why.

Everybody has his/her own idea about what is natural, and often thinks everybody else’s ideas are wrong.  What is a natural forest, for example?  Is it made up only of native species?  Does it feature only local species?   Is a tree farm natural? The distinction most often made is that “natural” is what the situation would be like absent human activity.  Of course, nobody has ever seen that.  The “natural” Virginia of 1607 was the result of thousands of years of human activity.  Natural is not an attainable or even a useful goal when talking about forestry.

I think the goal should be sustainable, not “natural.”  Natural is a slippery, arbitrary and often arrogantly used term.   It assumes also that an environment that results from random chance and the interactions of non-human animals and plants is somehow qualitatively different than one with human influences and implies that human interventions are always damaging. This is just not true.   Besides all that, some environments that are natural are not sustainable and some environments that are sustainable are not natural.  Many of the most productive, beautiful and sublime environments are the results of long term human interference and management.   They are not “natural” if that term implies human-free.   But they beautiful and productive and they are sustainable.  

That is why I also quibble with words like “recovery” or “damage” used too freely when talking about human interactions with the environment. They can sometimes be appropriate.  Humans do serious damage to the environment and recovery may be necessary, but they too often go too far.   Some radical misanthropes who call themselves environmentalist actually believe that somehow the earth would be better off without humans.  Of course, this is a very short-sighted and ironically very human-based point of view. 

We would not want most human-influenced, human created, environments to revert to a pre-human state, even if that was possible and even if we could determine what non-human even looks like, since there has not been such an environment in most of the world since the end of the last ice age or before.  The wonderful “natural” environments of pre-Columbian America were by no means natural.   They were created by Native American activities, especially the use of fire, for example.  Humans have changed the environment ever since there have been humans.  Other animals have done so too.  Change is written into the book of life and all life creates change.  Everything is always in the process of becoming something else. Natural environments come back quicker than we often think and The truth is that it takes a lot of human effort to prevent nature from obliterating the most of the works of humans. 

Sustainable is clearly the better concept.  It provides a wide variety of choices and varieties of human influence. We will always have human influence as long as we are here.  So let’s go with sustainable, which is achievable and good, rather than some hypothetical “natural” state.

A well-managed tree farm clearly meets the standards of sustainability and through the “ecological services” it provides, such as cleaning water, providing wildlife habitat and just making the world a prettier place, it helps make the rest of Virginia a sustainable environment.  The constant learning and experience sharing provided by organizations such as ATFS, university extensions, departments of forestry and others helps us all adapt to changes in the environment.  This is a sustainable ecological system and we can all be proud to be participants.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I talked about my flight over the farms with Brian in my last post.    The aerial perspective was fun.  I could see the interrelations of the wildlife plots for the first time.  Below are some pictures with comments.

Above is a panorama of the feed plots and a picture of almost the whole CP farm (the wing covers only a small corner.)  You can see how they are connected and how form openings in the woods.  They are mostly covered in clover, which appears a lighter green this time of year.  The picture below shows the sun reflecting off the streams.  It has been a wet year, so they are wider than usual.  I was a little surprised how much water is spread over the wetland area near the center of the photo.  BTW, the gray trees are the broad-leaf forest, currently bare of leaves, around the streams and boundaries, so you can see things clearer this time of the year than when everything is green.

Below is the Freeman tract.  You can see the boundaries with the deciduous bare branches.   It is roughly rectangular.  You can see the Vulcan quarry off to the NW.  It is much closer to our property than I thought.  You have to drive a long way around to get to the farm gate. As I wrote in yesterday's post, that quarry may eventually become a deep lake, which would be a nice addition.   The utility lines that run through the property were recently upgraded, and the dirt was a bit torn up by the machines.   I have a total of eight acres under those lines, so it is not inconsequential.  I would like to plant this over in warm season native grasses and encourage some quail habitat.  The long narrow aspect provides a lot of edge environment.

The Freeman trees will be fourteen years old this year.  It is an exceptionally good stand and I think they will be ready for thinning, maybe even this year.  I have spent a lot less time on this tract.  The CP farm was my first one, so I spent a lot of time there just getting to know forestry, it is also more interesting because it has a greater variety of environments, including the wetlands and hills.  You cannot really tell from the pictures, but CP is a lot hillier than Freeman.  But Freeman is more valuable for growing trees, acre for acre.  Less interesting is often more valuable.

Above is a panorama showing the local lay of the land.  My forest is only part of the bigger picture.  The whole area looks like this.  You can see how important forestry is to southern Virginia. Flying over made that clear. It is not just covered in forest, but also lots of clearly managed forests.  BTW, the distortion you see in the picture is just the reflections from the window glass.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Obama Administration is exceeding our expectations at Copenhagen. Todd Stern, our chief negotiator has adroitly thrown cold water on developing county blackmail while our delegation makes the joyous noise with environmentalist. It has been an excellent balance of realism and hype that might actually lead to a workable agreement instead of the usual crap that comes out of these big convocations. So far, so good, let’s keep it up.

Calling their bluffs

Stern has called the climate community’s bluff, as we hoped he would. No more can plaintive voiced people get away with just saying how bad we are, how terrible things might get and – with a tears in their eyes – say that it would all be just great if only the U.S. would do the right thing. Stern pointed out that 97% of the new emissions will come from developing nations. Unless they step up, nothing will work. A little tough love was what they needed and what they are getting. One of our most potent tools is the resort to higher authority. This is something you learn in negotiations 101, but most people hate to use it. It does our egos a lot of good if we can say that we are the final decision makers, but it is a very bad negotiating position. It allows you to get rolled and/or carried away by the tide of events. This is what evidently happened at Kyoto. Otherwise it is hard to explain how our negotiators agreed to such a monumentally stupid agreement.

The negotiator proposes; the Senate disposes

America holds a strong hand this time

Addressing climate change is a big job and it will cost trillions of dollars. We agree on the goal, but there are ways to do it that are more and less effective; more or less costly and more or less costly particularly to the U.S. That is what these negotiations are about. And this is something that those most loudly braying about the need to “save the planet” are often trying to obscure.

You have to be willing to walk away

Finally, the most powerful tool of negotiators is the ability to walk away from a bad deal. Developed countries like the U.S. accounted for most of the historical emissions, but they emit less than half of the GHG today and this percentage will drop now and forever. If current trends continue, China alone will emit more CO2 in the next thirty years than the U.S. did since 1776. China's emissions alone more than swamps any “historical damage” done by us.

Nevertheless, many big and future developing polluters have a big incentive to play the victims. We already hear the silly rhetoric and attempts to guilt us into doing something stupid. (The Sudanese, you recall the guys who brought us the genocide in Darfur, had the guts to ask us to remember the children. Well, we do.) We should not let the idea that we MUST make a deal stand in the way of making a good deal. If many in the developing world have their way, we will send a lot of money with few or no strings attached to countries that historically have not managed their finances well. They will talk a lot about reducing CO2, but not do very much about it. In fact, the big buck infusion will enable them to pollute even more. This deal is worse than no deal and everybody has to understand that we will walk away than accept it.

Economist Special Report on the Carbon Economy

Nature Conservancy

WSJ on Climate Debate

Posted by Broadnax at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is Virginia.   We usually don’t get snow this early in the year, but this has been a cool and wet year and maybe winter will come early.  The pictures are taken from our back and front doors.   The snow is falling on some trees that still have not finished shedding their leaves.

Confirmation Bias?

Forbes Magazine has a good article about forestry as an investment called Buying Woodlands for Fun and Profit.  I cannot believe how lucky I was to get into forestry and I keep on getting confirmation of that. I admit that I went into it backwards.  I have always loved trees and wanted to have something to do with forestry. Since we are not rich enough to own such a thing as a luxury, I had to figure out a way to make it an investment, and I think I succeeded.

I sometimes worry that I am victim of confirmation bias, i.e. I notice the information that confirms what I already believe and just overlook or ignore contrary arguments.  I suppose the downsides are the large initial investments & long term commitment.   It also helps to know something about trees.  I got good deals on both my forest parcels. It is not only luck.  I looked at dozens of properties and I could envision what the land would look like in a few years.   This is now the fifth year we have owned the first piece of land.  It is developing about as I anticipated, only a little better.  

Everybody has to save for retirement, especially these days.  Forestry is a good option.  

Given the ways the deficit is shooting faster than it has since World War II, I don’t think anybody can count on Social Security and other investments will be devalued by the inflation that will have to come in the wake of our enormous spending binge, not to mention paying for health care and the raids on the trust funds.  Forestry is a tangible asset. It will rise with inflation. But it is much more than an ordinary investment. 

It is just a joy to walk across MY land and I believe that I am doing something that has lasting value. I just don’t get that same feeling from mutual funds in an IRA.

The joy of forest ownership

Owning a forest has changed my thinking on forestry and changed my life. I understand a lot more about the moral imperative to make forestry work.  It is much more work and better for the world to grow and sustainably harvest trees than it is to set up a “sanctuary” or “preserve.” I feel a little like I am swimming against the tide of environmental perceptions.  And when I think back to how I used to think, I understand the misconception. I just have to make it my business to explain how it really is.

Read the article if you are interested in forestry or owning a forest.  If not, you probably have not gotten this far down the post anyway.   It is not something everybody wants or can do, but it is easier than most people think. You just have to really want to do it. It requires a commitment and you have to recognize the terms. You won’t get your money back quickly and your fortunes are controlled by the rhythms of nature. You have to think of it as a long-term retirement asset, not a quick turnaround investment. It literally grows slowly over time.  But it is a great thing if you can wait for it.

I understand that the chances are small that I will live long enough to make the final harvest, but that is okay.  We all plant trees for the next generation as the last generation did for us.  Life is one long chain letter.

Posted by Broadnax at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went down to the farm to check for flood damage.  The farm got more than five inches of rain in a couple days, which is about double the usual monthly average for November.  Larry Walker told me that the road flooded and the Meherrin River was seven feet above flood stage. 

The water was lower by the time I got there, although the creeks are clearly higher than usual.  The forest near the river was still flooded but this is not uncommon even in more “normal” wet weather. There was no serious damage, however. It doesn’t hurt the trees if the water doesn’t stand too long and the sediment deposits are good soil builders.  That is why forestry is so good for watershed protection.  Judging from the sediment deposits, the water spread at least 100 yards from Genito Creek and up the road.  My guess is that it must have been at least eight feet higher than usual.  I have never seen it do that. 

It was lucky that I went down. I got a last look at the fall colors (see above) & I fixed my bald cypress.  The flooding had undercut it. I am very fond of that tree and it is the only one I have on the farm.  I built up the base with rocks and put in some dirt.   That should hold it.  Maybe it will be better rooted by the next time we get such a big flood.

I also had the chance to meet with Larry Walker’s boss to talk about thinning schedules.  He is going to take a look at the Freeman place to see if it makes sense to thin the 86 acres of 1996 pine this year.  It is an exceptionally good stand of trees.  I think that early thinning might be a good idea, even if the pulp prices are low.  Some of the inside trees are already dying back.  You have to balance the benefits with the risks.   Ice storms become a danger the years after thinning, but that will be a problem no matter when you do it.

Above & below is the CP forest from 623 today and three years ago.  The trees did well this year. Notice the cedar tree more or less in the middle. It stands out in the field in the top picture,  You have to look hard in the bottom one, as the pines are now almost as big or bigger. In fact, you can hardly see the pines at all in the top picture.  Of course, seasons are different.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We spent our last day in Arizona at the Bryce Thompson arboretum, where you can see trees and plants native to the desert southwest, the Sonora and Chihuahua regions, as well as those from deserts in South America, Africa and Australia.

Desert landscapes are strange for someone who grew up in Eastern North America, although the Sonora vegetation is vicariously familiar because of all the cowboy movies.   Almost everything has thick skin and thorns and takes a long time to grow. 

The exception is the gum tree or eucalyptus. It is a type of miracle tree from Australia.  It can grow very fast in dry harsh conditions.  This wonderful capacity for growth and adaption has made eucalyptus an invasive species.  It can often out-compete the native desert flora, but it provides little for wildlife to eat.  

Kuala bears eat the leaves, but most other animal avoid them. I suppose this is because they smell like Halls Mentholypus cough drops and probably taste like them too.  It is an acquired taste.  Like everything else, its value can be judged only in context.  Eucalyptus are great trees to provide shade, cover and erosion control.  They get big. The one pictured below was planted in 1926.  And they are attractive individually and in clumps.

Date palms were familiar from Iraq. Dates are a very productive desert tree.  I have written about them before. I cannot tell them apart, but I understand that there are dozens of varieties.

An arboretum is not only a pretty place. It is also a place to learn about natural communities. They say the desert speaks, but I like to have someone put up a few signs to interpret it for me.  The biggest surprise was an Australian she-oak.  It is not related to our oaks (quercus).  I had absolutely no idea what it was.  Below are Maleah, Diane & Christiana in the date palm grove.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lighten up while you still can

We finally got down to Winslow, Az.  Winslow is world famous among fans of the 1970s pop group “The Eagles,” since one of their hits “Take it Easy” features a hitchhiking vignette when the singer is “…standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.”   We didn’t actually see the corner, although I looked for it and evidently drove past it on the way to Highway 87.

Burning Brush

The geography changed as we climbed from the semi-arid grasslands through juniper and back up to beautiful ponderosa pine forests. I regret that it was getting a little late and we were losing the light so I couldn’t tarry longer.  This is part of the Coconino National Forest and the Forest Service was busy burning the brush.  We saw a lot of smoke and even some flames.  You can see the smoke in the distance in the picture above. I am encouraged to see the proactive use of fire to restore the landscapes.  The park-like ponderosa forest, with its interspersed meadows, is one of nature’s most beautiful communities.  Below is a well-managed ponderosa forest.  The ones with the red bark are at least 100 years old.  Younger ones have black bark.

Cool Air and Cooler Sunsets

Although Arizona was experiencing a heat wave, and temperatures in Phoenix were reaching into the nineties, the air in the piney woods was cool.   The thermometer in the car registered 59.  You might think you were driving through upper Michigan.  As I wrote above, we were losing the light and I didn’t want to drive the narrow, curvy roads in the dark, so we cut sideways to catch I-17.  We saw one of the most beautiful sunsets I have seen with red clouds turning purple before going dark.  I think the smoke from the prescribed fires contributed to the color.  I didn’t even bother trying to get a picture.  Beautiful sunset pictures are cliché.   Part of the beauty of a sunset lies in its ethereal & ephemeral elements.  Taking a picture is like trying to grab a handful of air.  

The picture above is taken near a gas station in Happy Jack, AZ.  Interesting name for a town.  We didn't see the actual town. 

We lost altitude as we approached I-17 and the temperature rose to 81 degrees, in spite of the coming of evening.   It was 86 by the time we got to Phoenix.  Back in the desert.  It is interesting that you can get such changes in such a short time and distance.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Above is the hotel were we stayed. The El Tovar lodge has that rustic elegance characteristic of the early 20th Century.  It was built in 1905, financed by the Santa Fe railroad as a sort of rail destination. President Theodore Roosevelt took the first steps to preserve the canyon about that time and the lodges here reflect that muscular personality of Roosevelt and America of that era. The Canyon was declared a national monument in 1908 and a national park in 1919.

The dark log walls are studded with actual heads of moose, deer, mountain goats and even bison.  I always wanted a moose head for my wall, but I have never had enough walls to handle something as big as a moose head.   You need a really big room with really high walls.  Actually, you probably need something a lot like the room in a big lodge. Moose are not native to Arizona, BTW, so the head came from somewhere else.

Below is Bright Angel Lodge. 

Posted by Broadnax at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chrissy and I went down as far as Indian Gardens.  This is an oasis on the Bright Angel trail and it is the logical terminus of a day hike for a person in average condition.  It took us around three hours to get down but only around two and a half hours to get back up.  It doesn’t make intuitive sense.  I think it is because of all the rocks.  I walk gingerly among them going downhill.  We also had to get to the side of the path to let hikers pass who were coming up or mule trains coming down. There was less oncoming traffic on the return trip and no mule trains came past. 

Of course I am not counting the leisurely lunch-break we spent at Indian Gardens.  The cottonwoods and willow make very pleasant surroundings.  Both are fast-growing adaptive trees but are often unloved because of their weak wood, short lives and susceptibility to wind damage.   Of course, it depends on where they are.  As long as they are not near houses or roads, they do just fine.  Except that they grow in generations, i.e. a lot of them come up the same time and whole clumps grow, live and die together.  This is not a problem except during generational change, when the whole clump of cottonwoods begins to die back about the same time.

PS

The morning later I my complaining muscles reminded me that I am no longer in the top condition I used to imagine.   The pattern of pain was interesting, more characteristic of overdoing cross country skiing than overdoing ordinary hiking.  I suppose it is because of the poles. 

My legs hurt a lot less than I would have guessed, but my arms, chest and lats are screaming. 

I used to cross country ski a lot when we lived in Norway.  I am sure I used the poles the way the Norwegians taught me, which is to push off in back of your body instead of leaning forward on the sticks. I recognize the feelings.   The good news is the pain confirms that the poles worked.  I pulled myself out of the canyon w/o overstraining my legs or knees.  

As they say (for different reasons) in "Animal Farm", "Four legs good; too legs bad."

PSPS

The link to my earlier trip down the canyon is at this link.  That time we did it in 117 degree heat and went all the way to the river and back.  That was stupid.  The bottoms of my shoes melted off on the hot rocks. Really. 

This time we had perfect weather. Cool at the top and only warm near Indian Gardens. AND we didn't go all the way down.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

They have been planting trees at the University of Arizona for a long time, so it is not pleasant place but also a place where you can see a great variety of plants from around the world.  The climate in Tucson is almost tropical, but the soils and moisture levels are very different, so it makes for some interesting combinations. 

I came here to talk to some University of Arizona professors at the agriculture and soils department.  They were courteous and hospitable.  I can always find good people willing to tell me about the place they live and what they do and I enjoy getting the local angle wherever I go. Their ideas are reflected in the post on Mt Lemon.  They told me about the environment there and suggested that I make the trip up the hill, so I thank them for that piece of local intelligence too. 

My hosts were proud of their town and happy to live in Tucson.  It is not hard to see why.  Tucson has a lot to like.  But the recent rapid growth has presented challenges to the local ecosystems.  The extension services at the University of Arizona and the county extension are actively involved in their communities, helping local authorities, landowners and developers do the right thing to maintain a sustainable environment. 

As with all cities in arid environments, water is a problem.   Tucson depended on ground water and is one of the largest cities in the world to do that.   The ground water renews itself (it is not like the Ogallala aquifer) but not at the rates now required.  They now have a water plan that uses a water allotment from the Colorado River. Importing water creates its own challenges.

Minerals and salts can poison soils.  This is what happened in large parts of Mesopotamia and it is an ancient lesson that we have to be careful when irrigating dry fields. The water itself brings with it minerals and salts and water sitting on irrigated fields can bring salts and minerals to the surface. In either case or in combination, the result is the same. The general idea is that you need enough fresh water dilution to wash out the salts and minerals.  Rainwater is pure except for the small amount it might pick up from things like dust or smoke, but once on the ground it begins to pick up minerals and salts.  When water evaporates, it leaves the minerals and salts it brought along.  Most arid irrigated regions have a positive salt balance, i.e. more come in than goes out.  Over time this buildup is a problem.

There is a lot you can do to conserve water, but conservation is not w/o its own problems.  There really is no such thing as a decision w/o some negative consequences.  All life involves trade-offs. Conservation means you use less, but using less concentrates the minerals and salts in smaller volumes of water, which may be worse for the soils.  That is one reason there is a limit to the amount of gray water (semi-treated) that you can apply to irrigation. The water is reused and recycled … and the salts and minerals are concentrated.   If you live in a place where it rains a lot, you don’t think about these problems very much, but you have to if you live in a arid place like Arizona, with rapidly expanding populations.

On the plus side, the growth of urban populations might REDUCE water demand.  That is because no matter how much water an urban population reasonably uses, it is often less than irrigated agriculture had used with the methods employed in the past.   Ranchers can convert their irrigated agriculture to dry land production and sell the water saved to the growing urban regions.   Production declines, but it might be more profitable.  Municipalities also buy up land, along with the water rights.  This has the double benefit of providing water and open lands for parks and nature reserves.

We learn from experience how to maintain a sustainable environment.  As I often say, yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems, but that does not mean we made stupid mistakes in those solutions of the past.  As conditions change, often BECAUSE of our solutions, our responses must also change.  That simple knowledge should make us less critical of the “mistakes” of our ancestors and less arrogant in our out decision. There is no end to this game, just one move after another. The good player just get to keep playing. Some people think this is depressing (These are often the same ones who were upset when they discovered the principle of entropy.) I find this exhilarating.  It is almost the very definition of being alive.

Tucson is a pleasant place and a lot of people want to live here.  With good management and some foresight, they can accommodate more while keeping it a place people want to come.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went up to Mt Lemon yesterday and have some pictures, but I cannot currently post them since I am lacking a connection.  But I have a picture and some general thoughts from the day before.

Above is another view from Carl and Elise's yard, this time during the daylight.  It is amazingly green, although you see that the ground itself is bare.  There were all sorts of birds flying around.  Especially common were desert quail.  They walk around most of the time and only fly when flushed out.  Their calls were very nice to hear. 

I was comparing this desert land to Iraq. I think the land in Iraq is just misused for millennia. The challenge of the desert is that it is unforgiving.  You can get away with a lot more in a wetter place, where grass and trees will quickly grow back after a disturbance. In the desert your mistakes are written on the land for many years or centuries.  I bet that much of Iraq could be as rich in natural diversity as Arizona, but there are too many goats and the country has been too abused for many centuries.  Plants in the desert grow slowly and they depend on the other plants in the natural community.  The brush you cut down or let your goats eat might have taken decades to get that big.  And once taken out, it is hard for it to come back. 

The picture above is me talking with some Iraqis who want to restore their land.  I think it can be done and so do they.  We are standing in the middle of one of their projects.  It is a good start. It just takes work and long-term - multi-generational commitment. 

We have learned many good lessons in land management.  If we just follow our own best management practices and strive to continue to learn, we won't suffer the fate of the ancient lands of the Middle East.  And maybe if we all learn the right lessons, we can help them return to a better place.  That is a truly worthy enterprise.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

All the bee hives I have ever seen were rounded or in protected places like hollow trees.  Then I saw this up in a tree in Montgomery.  It looks like the bees didn’t bother to put up any defenses or walls, maybe because it never gets very cold. I noticed that many of the houses in the Deep South are also open to the elements.

BTW - I would not have seen this bee hive except for a stranger telling me about it.  I found the people of Alabama extraordinarily friendly and open.  People at shops and restaurants talked with me and were very happy to tell me about their town.  

Posted by Broadnax at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t know if it is true, but several people told me that air bases are required to have golf courses, the idea being that all that flat, grassy space is available in emergencies for landing or at least the storage of aircraft.  It sounds a little glib, but who knows?  Home owners in some arid regions sometimes get a discount on their fire-insurance policies if they have swimming pools that can serve as reservoirs.   We got a discount on our insurance from USAA in New Hampshire because our house was within a convenient hose length from a pond.  I thought that was just a specious reason until the condominium clubhouse caught on fire and the fire department did indeed tap the pond water.   Their attempt to save the structure was futile but they did prevent the fire from spreading to the neighboring woods and homes.

On the left is pond in New Hampshire.

A surprising number of people hate golf courses.  They are evidently offended by them and work themselves into a frenzy saying things like the land and resources devoted to golf courses could be used to feed poor people. I suppose if we were close to subsistence, this would be true and if we plowed up all the golf courses we could feed a few more people.  Of course, there are lots of other places food is wasted that would come first.  We have all sorts of fruit trees we don't harvest and all kinds of unused land.  I think the real problem is that luddites associate golf course with affluence.   I don’t golf, never have.  But golf courses are usually attractive.  They provide nice vistas and often good places to run -around the peripheries; golfers get annoyed if you get to close to them.

Maxwell Air-Base features another luxury item – horses.  Even the luddites rarely object to horses because they are graceful and beautiful.  I would not want to own one, since I don’t know how to care for them, but I am glad to have them around.  Mariza is very fond of horses.  If she (and we) lived nearer to the tree farms, we could buy one for her.

Grazing animals are good management; of course a couple horses are not enough. It is good to have different types of animals, such as sheep or cows or goats to rotate in the pastures. Animal species have different digestive systems. The sheep help slow the spread of horse parasites and vice versa and tend to favor different mixes of greens. Healthy pastures are diverse because of the different habits of species and the different characteristics of their manure. 

They have lots of nice trees on base and Alabama is a big timber state. Slash, Loblolly & longleaf pine together are called "southern pine"  and they sustainably supply around 58% of American timber needs.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are starting to notice the remarkable, game changing development in energy. Scientists have discovered a new way to get natural gas out of shale. They call it hydraulic-fracturing. And there is a lot of potential. This new technique has increased American gas reserves by something like 39% in the last couple of years.   Experts estimate that we have as much usable gas in the U.S. as the Saudis have oil and if only half of our coal powered plants converted to cleaner burning natural gas we could easily reach our greenhouse gas reduction goals. 

Gas is cleaner than oil and much cleaner than coal, both in terms of actual pollution and in terms of greenhouse gases such as CO2.  Another important consideration is that WE have our own vast new supplies of gas.  Most exportable oil is under corrupt, unfriendly or unstable countries.  It is better not to send American money to some of these guys.  Our gas, on the other hand, is in peaceful, pleasant American places like Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and West Virginia.  Many of these rural areas could use the jobs that domestic natural gas could bring.

I traveled though much of the area where the gas is when I drove from Syracuse to Virginia.  It is the same area where we did a lot of coal mining.  This is no coincidence.  The same forces that turned Paleozoic plants into coal also made gas.  The gas is trapped in shale formations and you can easily see how the roads were cut through the shale formations. 

But I noticed something else about the geography of natural gas. It is also the geography of the Chesapeake Bay watershed and much of the water that isn’t running off into the Chesapeake flows into the Great Lakes. We worry about these bodies of water. While listening to local radio driving near Wilkes-Barre, PA I heard reports of firms extracting gas were asking permission to discharge water into the local streams. The HYDRO part of hydraulic-fracturing has to go somewhere.  I don’t know the details of the process, nor do I know about the quality of the water discharge, but I do know that any discharge in large enough amounts is going to create disruptions in the local ecosystem, in this case the Chesapeake Bay watershed.  Some people are already raising concerns.  The process may turn out to be benign.  It could even be beneficial if the water is clean, but we will have to think of this as a balancing among priorities. 

Yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems and it follows that today’s solutions will be tomorrow’s problems.   Abundant American natural gas will help free us from nasty foreign oil suppliers and help us reach climate change goals, no doubt at the cost of something in the future.  This is not necessarily a failure of wisdom or judgment.   It is an ordinary consequence of making choices, setting priorities and doing these things in the context of imperfect information.   All these things are part of the definition of decision making.

Future critics with access to much more information as well as the experience of the past can easily attack earlier choices, but the comparison is usually unfair, as it is always unfair to compare hypothetical solutions with a real ones.  

For now the smart move looks like going for the gas. 

Posted by Broadnax at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Erie Canal was a wonder for its time.  It could move stuff many miles at very low cost.  Water was much more reliable than roads of those times.  But it moved only as fast as a mule could walk.  The golden age of canals was cut short by the advent or railroads. There were a few dead ends, such as plank roads.  They were roads made of boards (planks) that elevated the traveler above the mud.  They were very good for swampy areas.   One of the first plank roads in the U.S. was build right here in North Syracuse.   Lots of them were built and they were all the rage.  But they cost a lot to construct and wore our faster than their proponent projected.  If you included maintenance they were a really bad, if picturesque,  idea.  Their memory survives in place names.

Those days were not really that different from ours.  That was also a time of great changes in technology, relationships and in their case geography.  Let's make a comparison using technological milestones.  The first Apple personal computer came out in 1976 - thirty-three years ago.  The Erie Canal was completed in 1825.  Thirty-three years later half the U.S. had gone from wilderness to settlement.  Railroads had spread.  The telegraph had been invented and lines were being strung across the county, so messaged that had taken days or weeks now arrived in secondss.  A dozen new states had entered the Union but the Union itself was looking shaky.  A lifetime in the second quarter of the 19th Century was at least as eventful as ours. BTW, the canal had to pass over rivers with a kind of water bridge or aqueduct.  Below is what they look like.

Great fortunes were made and lost betting on which technologies would come out on top.  Like today, the best didn’t always win out.  Sometimes you just had to jump on the one that had the most users.   

I went down to part of the old Erie Canal that was left near Syracuse.  Through town most of it is now filled in and forms the middle of Erie Boulevard, BTW.  There is a park along much of what is left of the old canal and it is very calm and pleasant.  The tow path is paved with gravel and it would make a beautiful running trail.  I didn't have time to try it out myself. I can imagine it was not so nice when it was in use.  Picture the mud, mule crap, sewage and garbage.   This is how it often is.  We get nostalgic for the old facilities and they get better looking with time.  Think of all those Civil War battlefields or medieval castles.  They were once factories of war.  Now they are just pretty and interesting.

A closer look at the area around the canal shows that not everything is as it was.  Humans have totally remade the landscape and that goes way beyond digging the ditch that became the canal.  look at my pictures above and below.  The plants you see in the foreground above are phragmites, an invasive species of reed.  There are acres of them in the wetlands nearby.  Had you come to this place a generation ago you would have found native American cattails.  The phragmites are ecosystem changing species. Look across the pond on the picture below and you see Norway spruce.  They too are immigrants.  We tend not to call them invasive because they are not as prolific and they are pretty. Not in the pictures but in back of me were Norway maples, which look a lot like sugar maples and are replacing them in some places.  A 19th Century naturalist familiar with the fauna along the canal would be very surprised by the unfamiliar plants.  I couldn't get a good picture that showed the ruts on the hills a little farther away.  Chrissy's father explained that to me a long time ago.  The cows walk around the hills in habitual ways. Over the years, they create ridges and indicate that the hill was long part of a cow pasture. Of course, the cows and even the grass is not native.  Some people consider fescue invasive. Even the earthworms living in the soil were imported from Europe.

We had a weather anomaly.  In Pennsylvania and much of western New York it snowed. Parts of PA got SIC inches.  This is the earliest significant snow on record.   A woman who drove up from nearby Ithaca said there were inches of snow there.  But Syracuse was like a donut hole.  It was rain or snow all around.  Here it was cold, but clear, so I got a good impression of the town.  It seems a nice place and Syracuse University is very charming. 

We had a good symposium at SU, BTW.  I will write about my impressions tomorrow. 

Posted by Broadnax at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bobwhite quail used to be common in Virginia.  Their population began to crash about forty years ago because of changes in their habitat.   Some of this was obvious.  Farmers became more efficient and in the process eliminated lots of the bugs and weeds that quail need.  Suburbs expanded and suburban dwellers are probably even less tolerant of bugs and weeds.  Both suburban lawn owners and rural landowners also got new and better techniques to achieve their goals, which usually involved creating a "neater" landscape.  The thick green lawns, beautiful but ecologically barren, are widely possible only because of chemicals and techniques developed in the last generation.   

Wildlife habitat in general and quail habitat in particular is ragged and messy from the human perspective.  Above is an early succession field, a lot of goldenrod and ragweed. A lot of people would feel the urge to mow.  Even the gardens of “wild” flowers many of us plant are NOT really natural.   Ideal Virginia quail habitat consists of the weeds and debris that comes the year after a clear cut.  It is the disturbance itself that is the key to success. Many of us demand that this kind of thing be “cleaned up” or avoided in the first place.

My friend Mike Jones led the wildlife habitat field day to discuss ways landowners could create places for quail and other desirable animals.   This is Mike just above. He is a landowner who recently retired from the NRCS and smartest person I know when it comes to the practical creation and protection of wildlife habitat.  Mike has tried out all of what he talks about on his own land and seen the results over a lifetime. The State of Virginia is wise to take advantage of his expertise and his credibility when explaining programs to landowners. 

These field days are a sweet deal.  It cost me only $10, which probably didn’t cover much more than the lunch.  The lunch line is pictured above.  But field days are really a kind of advertising and education.  Landowners make decisions about what happens on their land and it is in the best interests of everybody in the state if they make good ones.  I didn’t really comprehend how important this was until I bought the farms.   I have spent thousands of dollars and many hours of time making improvements to protect wildlife and water resources.   I am eager to do that, since I consider improving my land a long-term investment, but I need advice about what to do.   But there is no right way to do anything.  We need to learn from scientists and experts, but they also need to learn from our experience and we have to learn from each other.  These field days are part of the extension outreach done by the State of Virginia and our universities such as Virginia Tech and a great way to share practical knowledge.  

You can make improve the environment and make profit from your land at the same time, but everything is a trade off.  Wildlife tends to thrive in a less dense forest with more space between the trees and some of that ragged and messy weed patches I mentioned above.  Of course, different animals favor different environments too.  All life is trade-off. You can see the open woods at the top of this post and you can easily see how this does not maximize timber production, but most people like it better on their land and they may be able to make back some of the money with hunting leases. I lease both my farms to local hunt clubs.  They provide a local presence and take care of boundaries.  

Hunting is a virtuous circle.  What is good for wildlife habitat is usually good for the environment, so hunters have an incentive to protect the environment.   Above is a wildlife corridor Larry Walker, a member of one of one of our hunt clubs, made for me on our land.  It will provide diverse edge community AND it allows me to get down to the creek w/o bushwacking.  He cut it through a couple of weeks ago and planted the cover that you can see coming up.  The hunters on my land have been there for a long time, in some cases for generations. They make the effort to understand the land in a way that almost nobody else does.  They have to understand and provide for the needs of deer, turkey or quail.   Hunters pays for a lot of wildlife conservation.  They also control numbers.  The deer population has exploded in the last twenty years.  In places w/o enough hunting, they are destroying the forests and preventing regeneration.  Of course, we don’t have that problem with quail.

Above is part of Genito Creek that crosses our property.  Larry's path makes it much easier for me to get down there and it is a nice place to visit. The creek meanders around, moving sand around the bed.  The water undercuts banks and brings down the trees periodically.  The creek used to be the boundary of the property, but around 1960 the whole thing moved around 100 yards in, so now both sides are on my land ... for now.

I mentioned some of the reasons for quail decline.   A habitat is only as strong as its weakest link.  When they are chicks, quail need lots of bugs to eat, so they need the mix of plants that bugs like.  This included weeds like goldenrod and especially ragweed, grass not so much.   When they get older they need seeds to eat.  They also need places to breed under cover, which is why they like blueberry thickets and they need brush and trees to hide from predators.  In other words, they need a great diversity of habitat type, with a lot of it in the early stages of natural succession.  By definition, the early stages of natural succession pass quickly, so we need a fair constant cycle of disturbance and recovery.

The State of Virginia wants to bring quail numbers back up.   They have devoted $9 million over the next five years and will hire five regional biologists to study the problem and provide advice to landowners.  They have some cost share programs for landowners targeted to five Virginia counties in order to focus efforts rather than spread them out and lose benefits too thin to do any good.  Brunswick is not among the counties.  Besides, they are aimed at crop land conversions, so I cannot get my forest lands in on any of them.

But my farms do have a lot of good edge habitat, even if they are not part of the program.  The wildlife plots we established last year are doing well and the pre-commercial thinning has done a good job of establishing biological diversity.  I visited the CP farm after the wildlife field day.  As I walked down the road just before sundown, I spooked a covey of quail.  At least a half-dozen exploded out of their cover as I slowly walked by.  I took a picture of the spot and posted it above.  I can be plenty ragged and messy w/o cost share from the state, thank you. You can see that it has the goldenrod and ragweed.  It has the cover trees and the bramble blueberry and the combination of edge communities.  The edge is plenty weedy and ragged. Not bad. I should hold a field day on my farm(s).

Posted by Broadnax at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the draft of an article I wrote for the next issue of “Virginia Forests.”  It is substantially based on a post I did a couple months ago, so regular readers might get a feeling of déjà vu. IMO, this one is somewhat improved and the editors will improve it even more.

Wood in the Ecological Value Chain

A chain is only as good as its weakest link, as the old saying goes, and you have to look at the whole chain from start to finish.  This is true in any business and it is even more crucial when talking about something’s impact on the environmental affairs.  Some products may look very green when you look at the finished product, but are not so environmentally friendly when you consider where they are coming from or where they are going, in other words when you look at the whole environmental value chain. 

Tree farmers can take satisfaction from knowing that wood is the most environmentally friendly building or structural product available when you look at the ecological value chain from start to finish.  

Start at the beginning.   Growing trees is an environmental friendly thing to do.   A growing forest removes pollution from the air, sequesters CO2, keeps water clean, provides wildlife habitat and makes the world more beautiful.  Think of the forest as the factory where wood is made.  Is there any more beautiful factory than the one on our timber lands?  The raw materials to make plastic, concrete or metal must be pulled from the earth and processed in noisy, dirty and energy intensive factories.  Wood is good.  

It is true that harvesting of trees requires the use of fuels, which will emit CO2 and may result in particulate pollution released into the air, and even the most well-managed forest harvests will impact local water quality to some extent.   These are serious issues, but they can be minimized and serious Virginia loggers are very careful to tread lightly in the woods.   Beyond that, these activities occur only once in many decades on any particular piece of ground and are much more than compensated by the many years of beneficial growth in between harvests. If you look over a thirty-five or forty year pine rotation, it is clear that the net environmental benefits of producing wood are overwhelming.

If you compare forestry to almost any other land use, forestry wins out as the most sustainable and environmentally friendly activity. No other ecosystem better protects and enhances soil and water.  Water that flows through a forest usually comes out cleaner than it went in.   Compared to the land use for other products, the difference is so extreme that we might actually miss it.   Twenty years after operations are completed, a mine, quarry or oil well is still only a hole in the ground unless costly reconstruction has been done.

Twenty years after a harvest a forest is … again a forest with young trees growing robustly.  

This renewal is what always impresses me when I interview the Virginia Tree Farmers of the Year. These guys have usually been in the business for many years and they have pictures from many years past.  I am astonished to see the old pictures and hearing about the changes.   I recall standing in a mature pine forest in Greenville County and talking to Mike Jones (2007 Tree Farmer of the Year) about his land.   He showed me an old photo of his grandfather standing in the “same” grove of trees where we stood as we talked.   But these were not the same trees.    This land had been harvested TWICE since the old man stood proudly among his pines.   His grandson could stand among his pines and future generations would still have the chance to stand among their pines.   That is what renewable means.

 

 

Wood is completely renewable and renewable is even better than recyclable.

Let’s complete the ecological value chain.  We have seen that wood is ecologically good in its production, sustainable in its harvest and completely renewable, but what happens after you are done with a piece of wood?  We like to think our houses will last forever, but they won’t.  Wood may be with us for centuries but when its usefulness to us is done it is easily disposed of or cycled back into the natural world.   It can be burned as fuel.  It releases CO2 at that time, but this is the same CO2 recently absorbed.    That is why burning wood is recognized as carbon neutral.  If thrown away, wood decays.  It doesn’t take long before yesterday’s wood is fertilizer for tomorrow’s growing trees.  This again is in striking contrast to other materials. Steel can be recycled at a high energy cost.   If thrown away,