Carignan Forestry Consultants

Another important turning point in forestland ownership is the decision to establish a new stand of trees. With reforestation, the most common and most costly mistake made by landowners is underestimating the financial impact of their decisions.

The true cost of plantation establishment includes not only the seedlings, labor and materials, but also the land beneath the trees. The decision to plant trees is a decision to commit a capital asset - land - to a particular use for a long time. Making mistakes and cutting corners here can mean the difference between earning 5 or 10 percent on the total investment. Furthermore, the IRR that a plantation will produce is largely fixed at the time of establishment, and later attempts to correct early mistakes usually prove fruitless.

Many mistakes in reforestation are due to an informal management plan or no plan at all. But as long as the trees live, the owner assumes the plantation is OK. When timber prices were high relative to land prices, establishment mistakes could be tolerated because the landowner still earned a decent return on the total investment. Today, however, the situation is much different. Timber prices have leveled off while land values have escalated. And, as land values continue to increase relative to timber prices, forestland must be managed more intensively if it is to earn an acceptable rate of return.

The most powerful tools available to reforestation managers today are growth-and-yield models and the ongoing research on which those models are based. By quantifying the costs and benefits associated with various site preparation and planting techniques, and correlating them with site-specific soil data, it is possible to determine which combination of methods yields the highest return for a given tract of land.

Once a management plan has been prepared, reforestation usually begins with site preparation. Most sites are prepared with either heavy equipment or herbicides, or a combination of the two. Large amounts of vegetation require intensive site preparation. When vegetation is sparse, little or no site preparation may be required. (Do not, however, make the mistake of assuming a field or pasture requires no preparation!) Moderate vegetative cover can be dealt with any number of ways.

The number of seedlings to plant per acre can range from 363 to 726, depending on the soil type and other limitations imposed by the landowner's objectives or government cost-share programs. The best seedlings currently available are second generation genetically improved loblolly pine. Big timber companies that have their own tree improvement programs are already using third generation trees on their own lands, but these will not be widely available to the public until around 2002 to 2004.

In addition to the genetic improvements obtained through selective breeding, seedlings can also be morphologically improved by growing fewer seedlings per square foot in the nursery beds. Low seedling density in the nursery bed (a maximum of 15 to 20 trees per square foot) yields larger, more robust seedlings with greater root mass. However, since bed space at any nursery is limited, these trees cost more and must be special-ordered early in the year.