BRATTLEBORO — Windham County Forester Bill Guenther loves seeing log trucks rumbling down Main Street.
For the 60-year-old Guenther, who has been with the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation for nearly three decades, seeing those trucks piled high with hardwoods serves to remind area residents that the county's forestry economy is still alive and well.
“Forestry is not looked at the same way as farming,” he said. “Everybody loves dairy farmers, but if you walk into a room and say, 'I'm a logger,' you get a much different reaction. That's why my job is as much about people management as it is about tree management.”
Telling the story about forestry and its importance to the Windham County economy is something Guenther does enthusiastically and without much prompting. But now he has a new way for getting the story out.
The Conway School of Landscape Design, working with the Windham Regional Commission, recently prepared a report, “Woodlands of the Windham Region: Our Working Landscape,” (http://bit.ly/16rVPAp) that offers an overview of what kind of shape our county's woodlands, and its forestry industry, are in right now.
Gunther said that a 2011 report on Windham County's forests done by Doug Morin, a University of Vermont graduate student, provided much of the factual material for The Conway School's document.
“He gave us good, hard numbers,” Guenther said. “It was interesting and helpful, but a little dry. We wanted to take Doug's data, update it, and bring it to life in a story format. I had them get in touch with as many people as possible and get their stories.”
Evolution of the forest
There are fewer and fewer sawmills in Vermont, and many furniture makers have left the state. Hardwood lumber that once would have become high-value wood products is now being exported overseas as raw material.
Meanwhile, the value of the land that trees sit on keeps rising. Between 1990 and 2007, the average value of land rose 351 percent – significantly higher than the national average.
We must also throw into this mix of uncertainly new invasive insect species and a warming climate that scientists say threaten to make hardwood trees such as maples all but extinct in Vermont by the end of the century.
Despite these pressures, there remain about 500,000 acres of hardwood forest in Windham County. Roughly 86 percent of the county is forested, and these woodlands are still productive, yielding about 20 million cubic feet of new growth each year.
It wasn't always like this. Guenther said that the woods we see today in Vermont are the third generation of forests risen since white settlers came to the state in the 1700s.
Vermont was nearly deforested in the early 1800s as forests were clear-cut for sheep pastures. At the peak of the sheep boom in 1840, there were 1.7 million sheep in Vermont.
But the sheep boom ended, and as more fertile, less rocky land became available in the Midwest, farmers fled Vermont, leaving behind a denuded landscape.
The second generation of Vermont woods came after the Civil War, when fast-growing white pine took over abandoned farms. These trees, too, were clear-cut, and sent off to Massachusetts paper mills. Between 1895 and 1925, an estimated 15 billion board feet of white pine lumber was logged in New England.
The third generation of woodlands began with the Flood of 1927, which devastated the state – devastation aggravated by clear-cutting along streams and rivers. It prompted the federal government to create the Green Mountain National Forest and spurred interest in managing forests in a way that would prevent a repeat of the 1927 disaster.
The white pine was gradually replaced by the hardwood species it had crowded out - sugar and red maple, American beech, red oak, yellow birch, Eastern hemlock, and ash - and more sustainable forestry practices came into vogue.
“There's virtually no old-growth forest in this state,” Guenther said. “We mostly have second- and third-generation forests here. But, as we see from history, forests are very, very resilient.”
So resilient, Guenther said, that Vermont is now the third most forested state in the country, and Windham and Bennington counties are tied for second behind Essex County in the Northeast Kingdom for the title of most-forested county in Vermont.
And, with its 1.4 billion cubic feet of standing live trees, Windham County has the greatest volume of hardwoods and softwoods of any county in Vermont.
Creating, preserving forests
How do you create a good forest? Patience is the key. Guenther says that proper management of woodlands comes down to doing things “in the right place, at the right time, at the right scale.”
If you use the analogy of a backyard garden, he said, one year in a vegetable garden equals 100 years in a woodlot.
“Except that a forest ecosystem is far more complex than a garden,” he added.
Decisions about thinning damaged or diseased trees today will take decades to bear fruit.
Decisions about short-term profit have to be balanced against long-term health and potentially greater profits by helping high-value trees thrive.
And, Guenther said, unlike in many states, more than 80 percent of Vermont's woodlands are non-industrial private forests (NIPF). Nearly all the remainder is owned by municipal, state, or federal entities. Only 1 percent is owned by corporations.
Guenther said Vermont has made a big commitment toward preserving woodlands through its Use Value Appraisal system, otherwise known as “current use,” which allows farms and woodlands to be assessed at their agricultural or forest value rather than at the market price for developed lands.
Under the state's rules, a landowner needs at least 25 acres in the program, and must have a forest management plan approved by the Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation.
And forest management, Guenther said, means cutting trees.
“Forestry is an extractive process, and it's not always pretty,” he said.
But not cutting trees isn't an option. The penalties that come with not following a management plan is 20 percent of the town's fair market appraisal of the land.
“We don't want to tell people what to do with their land,” Guenther said. “But our primary goal is maintaining the health of the forest and, since we have no economic interest, providing advice to help people achieve their dreams for what they want to do with their woodlots.”
Whether it's providing habitat for songbirds and wildlife, providing a source of income from selling high-value timber, or providing a source of fuel for the family's wood stove, Guenther said there are management plans to help achieve those goals.
“That's the people-management part of my job,” he said. “Trees are the easy part; people management is the hard part.”
Commercial uses
Windham County has the distinction of being home to the state's two largest sawmills.
The No. 1 mill is Cersosimo Industries' operation in Vernon and Brattleboro. Each year, it processes 25 million board-feet of hardwood such as red oak, maple, and birch, and 15 million board-feet of eastern white pine. It also manages about 12,000 acres of woodlands, and buys wood from lots across New England.
Not far behind is the Allard Lumber Co. on Old Ferry Road in Brattleboro. It specializes in hardwoods such as red oak and maple, and offers logging services to landowners.
Guenther said that the county's forests do more than just keep two big mills humming: He estimates a multiplier effect of anywhere from $9 to $14 for every dollar generated by timber purchases. Appraisers, loggers, truckers, millers, kiln driers, and furniture makers are just some of the jobs supported by forestry, he said.
“We have a rich history here,” said Guenther. “We've seen a lot of changes, and we've seen a lot of threats, but we still have a wood product economy in Vermont.”
Taken as a whole, the forest products industry in Vermont is second only to electronics in total manufacturing revenue, and constitutes a $1 billion industry in Vermont.
Sawmills today squeeze every penny of profit out of the wood they process, and what doesn't get turned into boards becomes garden mulch, wood chips, or pellets for stoves.
Along with the mill waste, using lower grades of wood not suitable for finished products to generate electricity may be a boost for the local forest economy.
Vermont's Comprehensive Energy Plan sets an ambitious goal of obtaining 90 percent of the state's energy from renewable sources by 2050.
While it appears that there is plenty of wood to support increased use of biomass energy in Southern Vermont, many believe that haphazard logging could reverse all the progress of the past century in reforesting the region.
The Conway School study found that determining the amount of wood available for sustainable harvesting is the first step in determining the appropriate scale for biomass facilities.
Small-scale wood-fired power plants, such as the school heating systems at Leland & Gray in Townshend and Brattleboro Union High School, would provide another outlet for low-grade wood.
Proposals for industrial scale biomass plants in North Springfield, and nearby Greenfield, Mass., have been met with intense opposition.
Guenther said the state has taken no formal stance, pro or con, on biomass. Speaking for himself, he believes that biomass plants make sense only if they are small, near a reliable source of wood, and can be used to generate electricity as well as heat.
It will take time to figure out the right course, he said.
But time, and learning from mistakes, is pretty much the story of forestry in Vermont.
“You truly never learn it all,” Guenther said.