Eastern WA Cost share programs from DNR & USDA NRCS

Federal cost-share funds from the Washington Department of Natural Resources, USDA Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) may be available to help you pay for projects to improve the health of your forest.

Forest Stewardship Coached Planning Course, Fall City, coming Fall 2009

Some preliminary dates have been set for this course with more details to come.  This is a great multi-week course covering several forest and wildlife management topics that will culminate with you writing your own Stewardship Plan.  WSU Extension and Washington DNR present these programs statewide with the help of several other partners.  Detailed information about the Forest Stewardship Program is available at: http://ext.wsu.edu/forestry/stewardship.htm.  While you’re there, spend some time exploring the new WSU Forestry Extension site.

 

Small Forest Landowner Newsletter May 09

 

 

Driveway or truck road construction

A neighbor just built a new driveway about 100 feet to a spot where he plans to park a 25' camper trailer. The new road has very little grade and crosses two seasonal streams.

 

If you build a dirt road in central Washington, you'll quickly find that the combination of rainwater and clay can stop any vehicle.

 

It's best not to put off installing culverts. Get it done before mid September if you can. Once it starts raining, the heavy equipment work itself is almost as damaging as having your road wash out. Your first few springs you'll have a lot of silt. Get at least 12" culvert so you can get a shovel or hoe into it to clean it out. Near Wenatchee: United Pipe, 509-662-7128, or Tumwater Drilling, 509-548-5361.

 

Crushed rock is a very good idea. A 4" base course of "1 1/4 inch minus" rock will give you a good, solid road surface year-round. My neighbor might want to put a load of smaller "5/8 inch minus" under the camper trailer and in the area immediately around it, where he won't drive but will want to walk and have a patio area. A load gets you about 10 feet of one-lane roadway. Bergrund Construction in Peshastin has a small dump truck that can maneuver in tight spaces. He spreads the rock evenly, so you don't need to do any smoothing or grading. Dan Dietrich, 509-669-7908.

 

This driveway was simple in design, but difficult to plan and to construct due to the many constraints -- side slope, varied geology, overstocked trees, property lines and rights of way. If you want to know more about road design, the WA DNR or UW Extension/Forestry have handbooks that are cheap or free.

"Got Wildlife?" WSU Extension workshop

Free WSU workshop helps you learn how to attract furred and
feathered friends to your woodland property.

The presence of wildlife can be one of the highlights of owning forested property. But many factors can make your property less desirable to forest fauna. Learn what you can do to increase the diversity of your forest backyard.

Washington State University Snohomish County Extension is offering a free ‘Healthy Forests for Fish and Wildlife’ workshop for small woodland owners. The workshop will be held on Thursday June 4, 2009 from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m., at the Loyal Heights Community Club in the Bryant area just north of Arlington: 4305 269th Pl NE Arlington, WA 98223.

This class will teach forest landowners practical steps to attract more wildlife and biodiversity to their property. Participants will learn about different types of habitat, how to enhance streamside areas for salmon, grant and cost-share programs available to help landowners improve habitat on their property, and where to find assistance with forestry and wildlife issues, including free on-site consultations from a forester or wildlife biologist.

The workshop will feature speakers from Washington State University, WA Department of Natural Resources, WA Department of Fish and Wildlife, Snohomish Conservation District, and the Sno-Stilly Fisheries Enhancement Task Force.

There is no cost to attend this workshop, but space is limited and pre-registration will assure your spot. Register online at http://snohomish.wsu.edu/forestry/wildlifeworkshop.htm or by contacting Kevin Zobrist, WSU Area Extension Educator:

 

Kevin Zobrist – (425) 357-6017 (Work)                                                               

kzobrist@wsu.edu – (425) 299-6403 (Mobile)

 

Tractor Damage Slows Slash-Burning

Pushing a burn pile around with the Kubota front loader earlier this month, I got a long pine stick between two parts and saw hydraulic oil start spewing.

 

It bent a hydraulic rod, broke a cylinder cap and ruined a set of seals. Must be more careful with debris. Having the tractor out of commission now isn't good. The burn ban starts in 3 weeks, and we have a lot of fire-hazard debris to get rid of while the forest is still wet.

 

The seals were the least expensive part to replace, under $50. They're special rubber O-rings that you fit into their respective places. The steel cap was more like $150.

 

Two tractor mechanics advised against reinstalling a bent hydraulic rod because it would just damage the cylinder. A new rod would have been $400. Swiftwater Tractor directed me to a place that straightens them. The bend wasn't bad, and there was no polishing required on the mirror-like surface. Cost: $30 instead of $400. The place is Western Metals in Ellensburg. Valley Tractor called around for me to try to find someplace similar in Wenatchee, with no luck.

 

Shipping the rod to the shop, and driving out of my way to pick it up, was nothing compared to the hassle of fitting 2 of those little seals into the new cap. I tried several times, then boiled the seals to soften them (but it didn't), then finally found a way to fold it like a taco, then double it back over itself, then jam it into the cap with a rubberized pliers handle.

 

Back in business -- and not a drop.

 

April Showers, May Flowers

Photo: Arrowleaf Balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) in bloom, mid May.

This is the time of year that keeps us coming back to this place. The wildflowers are in their full glory, with every open meadow and hillside covered with gold blossoms.

The weather is beautiful, most of the time, but schizophrenic. Out of the past three weekends we've had blue skies and warm weather, moderate temps with overcast, and chilly with showers, in that order.

We managed to burn some slash piles while the duff is still quite wet. It's mostly boring, hot work, but it's so nice to be rid of large heaps of dry wood debris! I also managed to bend a hydraulic rod on the tractor, pushing a burn pile around. It's turning out to be quite an expensive mistake, and takes the loader out of commission for a few weeks.

I sharpened the chain on my larger saw, fueled up the two Stihls, and felled 12-14 trees in 2 weekends. One fell against its favor to land on the deck, right where I aimed it, so I haven't completely lost my touch.

Forest Stewardship: Timber Values

Advanced forest stewardship course, day 4: Timber Values

Tonight's class focused on values -- the value of timber, calculating the value of a future harvest, and looking at the big picture beyond cash flows.

 

Will Miller of Miller Shingle talked for over an hour about timber prices, types and mills. His charts were depressing -- timber prices are at dismal lows, and mill closures are disheartening. I learned some new terminology, so now I know the difference between J sort and K sort, between hook and sweep, and between a knot and a spike knot. I know how to pronounce Buse and Oeser without sounding like the tenderfoot I am. (Buse sounds like busey and Oeser rhymes with closure.)

 

Will handed out a spreadsheet of timber prices for the current month, organized by species and log size or type. All of his information was for west side timber, so he had no information about Ponderosas, nor for mills east of the Cascades.

 

Take-away: Don't harvest now, prices are too low, but the outlook for price recovery is gloomy.

 

The rest of the evening was on forest finance. The course's lead instructor (MBA in forest economics) talked us through various financial calculations. We started with the simple ones, like present value and future value. We worked through net present value (NPV), perpetual periodic series, and converting nominal figures to inflation-adjusted numbers. All of this led up to learning the Soil Expectation Value (also known as the Land Expectation Value).

 

SEV is NPV expressed as a perpetual periodic series. I never learned this one in business school. It takes into account the cost of the land, any existing timber at time of purchase, and all of the aspects included in a NPV calculation. SEV is specific to one situation and land use, i.e., forestry.

 

Take-aways:

Calculations like these are useful tools for comparing timber management options. Should I buy an available piece of forest land? Should I harvest it now or wait for the market to improve? How does that change if the existing timber is in decline? What species should I choose after harvest? What if excise tax rates change?

 

Calculations are not as useful for the non-market factors in timber management. What are my goals for land ownership? What value do we (or another organization) place on wildlife habitat? Aesthetics? Fire safety? When calculating the monetary output of a chunk of mud and mbf, It's important to keep the big picture in mind. If it were only mud and mbf, we wouldn't own ours; timber farming is a terrible business to be in now, strictly economically speaking.

 

Garbage in, garbage out. Assumptions are the key to any of these calculations. Some assumptions boil down to guesswork. The better the guess, the better the accuracy of the outcome. Many calcs are good only for comparisons; in that case, be sure you're comparing apples to apples. For example, try to use real numbers and real interest rates (not nominal, and certainly not a mix).

 

Note: Tonight's class follows two weeks (class days 2 and 3) of training on the Landscape Management System (LMS) software. LMS performs a wide variety of complex calculations and 3D visualizations on timber stands, and could be very useful to a part-time timber grower. The software is technically a kludge, one that crashed my PC twice and had to be removed each time. It can be downloaded from the WSU Extension. The class also took a field trip to practice taking inventory with sample plots.