I'm Kyle Cunningham, associate professor of forestry with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
My role with the university is to assist forest land owners across Arkansas and
the region in helping you achieve your management objectives for your property.
And we try to do that through our research and outreach efforts.
At this stop, I'm going to talk about a concept you may have heard of called white oak sustainability.
And where that term has come from is across the central hardwood region and the upper regions,
portions of the upper coastal plain across the southeast, there has been an increase in the harvest and demand for quality white oak saw timber.
And if you look across the central hardwood region and the upper coastal plain region, many of those stands contain older,
high quality white oak trees in them that can produce products such as high quality veneer or even in more demand
today, products that are used for barrel making and cooperage mills for bourbon production.
And in certain areas, there's a high capacity of the mills to accept that type of material, to make barrels and higher value products.
And in those regions, we're seeing a decline in the overall quality and value of some of these hardwoods stands across the region.
The reason for this is it takes a long time for a white oak tree to get to be to the quality of veneer
tree or of the quality to be used for something like stave material for barrels.
And so as you go into these stands, what you find is you may have a few trees in the stand,
like this white oak right here, that are of high grade, high value, good, vigorous tree.
Those are the types of trees that these mills are going to desire to have to produce those high value products, those high end products.
But as you can see, not every tree in here is going to meet that criteria.
And one of the issues we run into is when a buyer or a harvester comes in and offers a high value of,
say, 80, 90, 100 dollars a ton for stumpage value on these high quality white oak logs.
That's great for the land owner, for you as a forest landowner.
But if they're not interested in managing and harvesting the remainder of the forest, you wind up with what's called a high graded stand.
And what that means is we came in and did more of a selection based harvest where we
were harvesting the higher quality material and leaving the lower quality material.
And that's an issue. You've probably heard the term high grading before.
And you know while you might think that has a good sound to it, in terms of forest management
it doesn't. And so one of our objectives here today is to inform you on the methods that are available so that you can capture the value of this tree,
that two or three times the normal price you would get for oak saw timber,
but at the same time, managing that stand for sustainability and ensuring that in the future you're
going to have a stand that maintains health and vigor and value through time.
And so what we refer to the term that we've we've coined for this is white oak
sustainability or white oak sustainable management. And it's really not any new science,
it's just applying known methods and known technologies for managing these stands in a sustainable fashion.
We talked about the problems with coming into one of these stands and just picking at the stand, if you will,
and doing selection based harvesting where we're selecting the really high quality white oak logs,
but not really paying attention to the rest of the stand, and the ramifications of making that decision and the long term impacts of that
having a negative impact on the stand in both species quality, tree health, tree value and the overall health and value of your forest over time.
It's not sustainable. And so that's where the concept of white oak sustainability has come from.
And so you might ask, well, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to turn down all of this
value that's being offered to me for these stems? You know, how do I go about capturing that?
And so that's what we want to focus on for the rest of the talk is how do I apply established harvesting methods to
these stands that allow us to manage them in a sustainable way and capture the value of stand the same time.
Well, let's start with thinning and let's even back up a little bit further and start with the stand evaluation.
You really need to have an understanding for what it is that you're working with, the conditions of your current stand,
before you make a decision to say okay I can thin this stand or no, I need to regenerate the stand.
And so that's something that you may need to do with your consulting forester is to have them help you conduct an evaluation on your stand.
If you have the background knowledge, perhaps you can do the evaluation yourself. We have methods for doing that.
But some of the things you're going to be looking at is the age of the stand,
the number of trees per acre that you're working with in the stand, the species composition and the value of those stems.
These stands are what we call even aged, or in some cases, two aged like this stand.
This is a two age stand we're in.
And what even age stands are, these are stands that the majority of the trees in the overstory are of relatively within the same age group.
So they may be within 20 years of each other from the time they establish from seed or sprout.
Most of the stands across the southeast and in the central hardwood region are what we refer to as even age stands.
And so that's where the problem comes in if we just pick at these stands, that's not how they developed.
And so if we just take out one quality sawlog tree here and there, we're releasing stems that number one probably are not oak species.
They may be elm or dogwood or maple or something that from a timber standpoint,
you really aren't going to want to focus our management on those species. They're more shade tolerant and they develop under these canopies.
And so that's where we come in and say, well, let's apply some known systems into conducting these harvest.
This stand in particular here on the research station has a basal area of about one hundred and ten.
And that's pretty high for an upland hardwood stand. This is really more of a two age stand.
I talked about the even age stand where everything's the same age class.
Well, this stand is a two age stand where we have a set of trees that are really old,
and then we have another crop of trees that came up underneath that stand to make this a two age stand.
So some of the stems may be over 100 years old in here and some maybe 60, 70, maybe 80 years old, but it's still just two age classes.
We're not dealing with uneven age management.
And that's where you get into trouble if you start picking at these stands like they're uneven age when they're really not.
So we looked at this stand and decided we could thin this stand.
And typically what you want in your thinnings, if you say I'm going to thin a stand, if we think about these being even age systems,
these rotation lengths and these upland hardwoods are going to range anywhere from 60 to 80, maybe 90 years, maybe even 100 years
if you want to hold onto the stands that long.
And so when we talk about thinning one of these stands, typically you're talking about a stand that's probably between 40 and 60 years old on average.
And that's the stand that I can take some of the inferior material out.
I can improve my species composition and put the growth on the more valuable trees over another
20 or 30 year period until I get to the point where I'm looking at it at a regeneration cut.
We'll talk about regeneration cut options in a moment. Well, let's just focus on the thinning for now.
You know, we did a stand evaluation and we determined that this stand could be thinned.
And so we marked the stand. And you can see the trees marked in orange, such as the the large white oak behind me marked in orange.
And that's that's one of the things I want to point out.
Just because we're doing a thinning doesn't mean we don't get to capture the value of these large white oak stems.
We're just not removing all of them in one operation. We're spreading it out over time,
and we're also incorporating that with removing some of the inferior material.
One of the reasons we're able to take out like the tree behind me, for example, is that's one of those older trees.
I talked about this being a two age stand right here. Well, that stem right
there is easily over 100 years old. And it has some some ill form and effects as you move up the bowl of the tree.
And that, you know, that tree's pretty much done all it's going to do because of its age.
And so that's a stem I can remove and I can capture the value out of that stem.
And I'm focusing my growth more on the stems, like the first tree we started out with in this presentation.
So what would be some other stems that we would remove in the thinning harvest?
This is a white oak. It's of a smaller diameter. It's crown is
not really as large as I would like to have a crown on one of these trees.
And it also doesn't really have the form to get to the point where it's going to be one of
those high value stems that might produce a veneer log or a stave log at some point in time.
You know, a log like this is more than likely going to go into a tie log or maybe some flooring or something like that.
Still a valuable product. We still get our value out of the stem.
But this is not the type of stem, even though it's a desirable species,
it's not the type stem we want to manage for in time and expect this tree to improve in value.
So what are some other stems that we might take out in a thinning?
Well, one of the best things we can do during a thinning operation is take out our undesirable species.
And so we have a hickory right here. Hickory can be a problem in these stands
if we get too many of them, because a lot of times when they're pulpwood size like this, if you have too many,
the pulp mills really don't want a lot of hickory and that can really devalue your stand and make it unattractive to a harvester,
if you will. And so, you know, we're looking at removing small diameter, undesirable species in our thinning.
We're looking at removing ill-formed trees that are desirable species but aren't trees
we want to focus on. And then if we have some of those older trees that do have the saw timber quality,
but they've kind of reached their maturity, we can also remove those trees in a thinning.
And so the overall goal of the thinning is to capture value,
but also spread it out over time so that when we reach the point where it's time to regenerate this stand, we still have something to work with.
We haven't degraded and devalued the stand to the point that we're trying to do
some type of rehabilitation instead of a regeneration harvest down the road.
And so that's an overview of how we would go about thinning one of these.
And now I want to take it to the next step. Let's say that one of these stands has that quality white oak material in it, but it's all older.
Say it's all in that 80-plus age range, and we want to regenerate that stand.
And that's where we want to head with our next talk.