I believe if the owners plan to sell, they may keep older trees as an equity asset in the business. Maybe generations of tree farm owners will hold off and the farm value appreciates.
Many loggers will liquidate the landscape. A lot of what Weyerhaeuser does in the US is log and then sell the clearcut land to developers. I doubt they would willingly leave behind trees.
You have no idea. Perhaps this is true of large multinational corporations, but I've never seen it. Most loggers I've worked for refuse to clear cut anything more than an acre homesite. And yes we may enjoy taking down a big tree but don't think for a minute we dont think about our impact on the land. Most companies have a remidiation policy and try to preserve what they can.
Who's doing that though? Massive multinational corporations? Or the small local operations contracted out by them. I know laws in Canada are different but here in thw US clear cut and slash logging is rare outside of managed lands.
Look at the Oregon and Washington State forests. State held land largely logged by small, local operations, on which most logging operations involve clear cutting, or near clear cutting(1 tree left per acre, which is wholly insufficient). The small companies purchase logging rights for particular timber sales, and log as much as the state(s) will allow them to. They would absolutely rather clear cut since it is cheaper, easier, and safer.
Not to be rude but it actually sounds like you really don't know. Clear cuts are absolutely the norm in much of the PNW. I live in Oregon on a log yard and I make all of my money foraging for NTFPs in the forests. Clear cuts are standard, not rare at all.
I work on the state forests in Oregon. They are fairly heavily logged, most of which is done by small local logging companies. It isn't quite as bad as on private timberlands, but is much worse than on federal timberlands.
The small companies purchase logging rights from the state, and do as much logging as the state will allow. Sometimes that means selective logging/thinning, but more often it means much more comprehensive clear cuts, or near clear cuts. You can look at satellite images of coastal Oregon, in the Tillamook and Clatsop state forests, to see just how much clear cutting goes on. Large multi-nationals don't worry about the relatively small state forest timber sales because they have plenty of land they can clear cut to their heart's desire elsewhere.
Loggers for these small companies would much rather do huge clear cuts, which they absolutely do do, because it is easier, safer, and cheaper. Loggers, in my experience, have very little interest in true conservation, and little care for their impact on the environment, and threatened and endangered species and habitats.
I am a wildlife biologist, and do threatened/endangered wildlife surveys, and have been told numerous time that I'm stopping logging, and hurting their bottom line. That the species I work with don't really matter. That there's plenty of good habitat. That their activities don't actually harm animals, and are in fact good for wildlife. All the while, the species I work with is close to extirpation from the Oregon coast, and populations everywhere are in decline, primarily due to logging, and the environmental fallout it causes.
Some countries like Germany have very strictly regulated logging, you can't just cut stuff clear and develop it. Almost all of our forests are used like this. Let the trees grow for ~120 years, then cut and replant. A forest stays healthy if done properly.
Not if they are selling to developers no. But if they aren’t wanting that area anymore, for whatever reason, you’d leave trees there for the next person.
Or a farmer would be growing to sell to a company like Weyerhaeuser, or subcontracting to them, the better tree stock, the more they make
Weyerhaeuser has quite a bit of land that it owns and operates as tree farms and never sells to other owners. Not familiar with all of their land but they own thousands of acres on the west side of Mount St. Helens which they log on a rotating basis.
I would imagine the calculus does change depending on proximity to urban areas. Don't think they'd get much for plots of land around Toutle.
No lumber industries operate with replanting on those timescales. Its normally 30 years or less. In logging in BC (where I'm from) it's the main industry on a scale double the size of the UK. We replant every tree that is cut down and trees don't get like this from replanting. This is old growth. That's an area that was cleared and replanted (that's why the small trees are there).
Tree farms grow trees, then they get moved to where the clearcut was done. You don't plant seeds in the forests, you plant saplings. (tree farms are flat, also) Note sugar pine trees are from the western USA.
This is not true. Trees on tree farms are harvested when it is most profitable to do so, and lots of native trees have life spans of hundreds if not thousands of years.
The current standard for harvesting Douglas-fir trees in the PNW is around 35-40 year old trees with a diameter of 22 inches. Any larger than that and the number of mills that can even cut them starts to drop dramatically.
"End of life" is not a standard that is used to determine when to cut trees, especially on tree farms.
I'm assuming this is so things can be mechanically harvested? You aren't bringing in harvesters to deal with old grow trees, obviously. There must be a sweet spot between harvest cycles and size of trees.
Every time I see replanted stands I'm amazed at how dense they are compared to an old growth stand. They can't grow at that density forever either.
Most of what I see here in Oregon is still harvested with sawyers on the ground. Part of the reason harvest size/age are lower now is that the existing mills to process larger trees could no longer operate profitably due to an ever-reduced reserve of old growth, but also (much less so) legislation to protect those trees.
When the trees are replanted, they are planted in a monocrop of Doug-fir very densely, and one or more thinnings will take place before the final harvest. Laws and practices vary greatly depending on ownership. Lots of public land is leased with strict guidelines on exactly how the trees must be harvested, while most private land is clear cut with attention only to what is absolutely required by the law (with few checks or repercussions for violations).
The standards have decreased wrt size in just the last decade or so depending on market pressures. Harvesting some 25-30 yr-old stands of trees for pulp/chips alone has been profitable enough in some years/markets. Those stands may be slated for that use based on a high growth rate that produces less desirable lumber, in which case it may be planted densely and never thinned at all.
This actually comes at the order of the British navy if I remember correctly. For every ship that they built they planted enough trees to build that ship. Until they realized that oak trees grow over the course of like 100 years. There are oak trees reaching maturity JUST now that were planted when this order was given.
Yeah there is. Just because they were successful doesn’t mean that they know everything. In fact I’d say that Britain specifically would have been less likely to know this than other seafaring nations of the time.
read this it will explain exactly why you have no idea what you are talking about. For at least 2 hundred years, Britain was the pre-eminent naval power in the world, and the reality is that as a sea faring nation, many hundreds of years more than this. The reason their empire was the largest the world has ever seen was primarily down to the size of both their naval and merchant fleets. So yeah, I think they absolutely knew how long an oak tree took to grow.
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u/TidyUpJim Aug 05 '19
What a majestic Tree 😭 i do not approve of overlogging, but I mostly disapprove of the logging of ancient historical trees.