Timber sale generates a wide variety of wood products

I recently had a chance to visit a timber sale conducted by Jeremy Turner, forester for Meadowsend Timberlands, on some of their 5,000 acres in Windham County, Vermont.

The sale had been marked and was being administered by Jeremy and harvested by Twin State Forestry, who were using grapple skidders, hand felling and a feller buncher harvester. Both the landowner and logging crew expressed concern over minimizing residual stand damage and placed impressive attention on following Acceptable Management Practices (AMPs) for maintaining water quality. One example of their attention to detail was laying out almost a mile of corduroy skid road (placing logs perpendicular to travel in wet areas to drive on) for moving the logs on ground that would otherwise be less than ideal for the operation because of its wetness.

The crew had piled the harvested sawlogs into at least eight different sorts at the landing. The pallet wood was going to Killington Wood Products with some going to Rutland Plywood. Hardwood sawlogs were going to Plumb Lumber and small spruce sawlogs to St. Pomphrey in Quebec. Large spruce sawlogs were going to a clapboard mill in Granville, and pulp was sent to Finch Pruyn in Glens Falls. Slow growing spruce with close growth rings was shipped to a local instrument maker in Arlington, and the firewood was sold and processed by the logger’s firewood business. The crew increased their firewood production efficiency by moving their firewood processor onto the landing. After each day of logging they would process 5-10 cords of firewood to deliver on their way home at night.

This specific sale was marked in a variety of different ways. Some areas were chosen for crop tree release where the individual residual trees were flagged for retention. Other areas of thick spruce fir were cut in strips in an effort to give more sunlight and growing room to trees adjacent to the strips as well as to promote potential regeneration from seed falling down onto the exposed mineral soil in the strips. Jeremy marked a few areas to be cut as large groups or patches of 2 to 5 acres in which the areas were cleared in an effort to get existing seedlings to grow vigorously as well as having surrounding trees seed into the newly exposed areas.

Meadowsend Timberlands is the 3 rd largest landowner in VT. They are Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) green certified as well as a certified Tree Farm. “The mission of Meadowsend Timberlands is to own and maintain a significant inventory of productive forest land which, over time, will be capable of supplying a consistent and predictable amount of high quality and high value forest products without having a detrimental effect on the forest or wildlife populations.” Bob French, one of the founders of Meadowsend, has had a long connection to the forest with his family having been in the wood business for over 6 generations. They had a vision to get more control over growing high quality sawtimber so they began purchasing land in the early 1990s. For more information on Meadowsend go to http://www.mtlforests.com/.

Sam Schneski

Assistant County Forester

VT Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation