How can state forestry agencies contribute to wood supply chain operation?
FRA and the National Association of State Foresters (NASF) organized a Forum at FRA’s September Board meeting to enable some give-and-take on how well state forestry agencies are able to connect with the challenges mills and loggers face in wood supply management.
How well are agency and industry goals aligned? How well are state forestry departments positioned to offer unique services to the business of wood supply while responsibly fulfilling their own mandates? And above all, what are the opportunities for future cooperation?
These questions are important both to FRA members and to the agencies, which recognize the relationship between effective resource use and their other mandates. The states our three panelists spoke for—Vermont, Maryland, and South Carolina—each has a different forest resource, its own state mandate, and its own relationship with forest industry. But the common threads in their remarks encouraged us to think that FRA and NASF could find means to solve the resource management challenges of the future together—chiefly by building communication channels.
Following the Forum, the two of us hammered out a set of preliminary steps that might set forth a framework in which to build this relationship, and the FRA Board reviewed and endorsed them two days later. We’ve presented them in a box of their own, within this article.
Jay Farrell, NASF Executive Director
Richard Lewis, FRA President
“Our Forest Products Industry: Maryland Forests’ Best Hope”
Steve Koehn, State Forester, Maryland Forest ServiceLast year when I was NASF President, I asked Jay Farrell, our Executive Director, to contact Richard Lewis to explore ways to improve working relationships between State Foresters and FRA members. We thought attending each other’s annual meeting would be as an excellent way to make professional introductions and begin what should become an ongoing dialog to promote the health and vitality of the forest products industry, without which forest restoration and conservation would be largely impossible. It is gratifying to see the fruits of that initial discussion borne out. I’d like to share with you some “little known facts” about the forest products industry in Maryland and how the Maryland Forest Service works with the forestry community to advance our shared mission.
When most people think of Maryland, they invariably think about blue crabs, oysters and rockfish (striped bass). Not surprisingly, Maryland’s $950 million seafood industry is important to the state’s economy and is the essence of the culture of its people. But it surprises an awful lot of people that our forest product industry adds $4.7 billion our economy, employs over 14,000, and is the state’s fifth largest industry overall—the largest in western Maryland and second only to poultry production on the Eastern Shore. We have one large fine papers mill in western Maryland, two chip mills, a half dozen hardwood and softwood sawmills each, and several hundred firewood operators.
The Maryland Forest Service continues to stand with the forest products industry to promote the wise use and sustainable management of our 2.4 million acres of forests. Maryland is about 40% forested, making forest the largest single land use in the state. With 157,000 forest landowners, Maryland is 76% privately owned, with the bulk of the remaining forest managed by several agencies within the Department of Natural Resources. The average tract size in our state is 17 acres, and 80% of forest landowners own less than 10 acres, making forest management challenging since there are so few benefits of “economies of scale.”
The following are just some examples of how the Maryland Forest Service provides assistance and support for forest landowners and the forest products industry:
• Provides a dedicated forest products utilization and marketing specialist to assist existing enterprises and promote new and emerging markets (e.g. secondary manufacturing and renewable energy);
• Has secured dual third-party certification under both the Sustainable Forestry Initiative and the Forest Stewardship Council on the entire State Forest system (211,000 acres);
• Currently working with NGOs to develop “on ramps” for dual third-party certification for private non-industrial forest landowners;
• Maintains a well-trained and highly skilled professional field staff of licensed foresters and forest rangers who provide technical assistance such as management planning (e.g. forest stewardship plans), logger training (BMPs and biomass harvesting guidelines), seedlings for conservation plantings (e.g. afforestation & reforestation), and fire control services to ensure the health and vitality of our tree and forest resources;
• Provides financial assistance such as property tax abatement, cost-sharing on out-of-pocket expenses, state income tax relief, and conservation easements to defray the costs of holding working forests, thus encouraging the retention of open space as forest.
These public sector services, along with private sector enterprises, provide powerful incentives for family forest owners to hold and manage their forestlands sustainably over the long term. Given Maryland’s stated desire to pursue a “No Net Loss of Forest” policy, it is only through private/public sector partnerships and collaborative approaches that such an ambitious undertaking becomes achievable. Remember: “no markets, no management” and “no cash flow, no conservation.” Our best hope to keep forests as forests is a healthy and vibrant forest products industry.
On the national level, as the Chair of NASF’s Forest Resource Management Committee, I believe FRA members can help support the work of State Foresters by promoting strong Forestry and Conservation Titles in the upcoming Farm Bill, opposing the 9th Circuit Court ruling on forest roads and NPDES permits, and advocating for the State and Private Forestry portion of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget.
I truly appreciate the opportunity to share these thoughts and to work with FRA members to advance a strong agenda for the restoration and conservation of our nation’s forests.
“Vermont: Supporting a Working Landscape”
Steve Sinclair, Director of Forests, Vermont Department of ForestryVermont has a long heritage of supporting a working landscape, be it agricultural or forested. Vermont’s roughly five million acres of forestland are 80% privately owned and managed by almost 85,000 landowners. The forests products industry is second only to electronics in manufacturing, employing 4,000 people. There are around seventy sawmills producing 200 million board feet annually. Fuels for Schools truly started in Vermont, and now over one third of Vermont schoolchildren are educated in facilities heated with wood chips.
The Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation has a long history of working with the forests products industry. Vermont has one of the longest running programs for recording sawmill production in the country—68 years of voluntary reporting by primary manufacturers, covering volumes, species, and county of origin.
Industry is well represented on a number of boards and initiatives, including our Forest Stewardship and Forest Legacy Committees, Marketing Council, and Logger Education and Advancement Program. Industry also provides technical support on field inspections for BMP compliance. An innovative program to construct and then lend out portable skidder bridges through sawmills has been very popular. (See Technical Release 11-R-17 in this issue!)
Vermont holds a Governor’s Summit for the Forest Products Industry every four years. The most recent one, in 2008, covered issues and concerns such as weight restrictions on the Interstate system, the high costs associated with Workers’ Compensation, health insurance, energy, retention and recruitment of workers, and the rate of harvests on public land.
The Department’s Forest Action Plan recognizes the important role of the forests products sector, both primary and secondary, in supporting our working forest landscape. In the sustainability of our forests, ecological, social, and economic considerations are interdependent. A healthy forest relies on a healthy forest products sector.
“South Carolina: Considering Forestry as a Strategic Natural Resource”
Gene Kodama, State Forester, South Carolina Forestry CommissionI really enjoyed attending the FRA national meeting in Vermont in September and seeing so many of my forest industry friends. As I said during the meeting, I am enjoying my South Carolina State Forester role, but still continue to consider myself to be a member of our country’s “forestry community” first, no matter what my current job may be. We must all work together for the good of our industry.
The South produces more wood than any single country in the world, and South Carolina does its share. “Produces” is the operative word in this statement, in that the South does not necessarily “contain the most wood,” but it does “produce” the most, because of active forest management that provides wood products and economic return while caring for environmental and societal needs. Private landowners own 88% of South Carolina’s forests, and two-thirds of the state is forested. Much of the South has similar statistics. A recent National Alliance of Forest Owners report determined that this active private land management provides huge economic dividends. The nation’s private land provides over $300/acre/year to state GDP, while public land produces around $50/acre/year.
In South Carolina, forest industry is the number one manufacturing industry segment with respect to job numbers and wages paid. The industry is also among the top 10 manufacturing employers in 42 states. So our forestry community has a wonderful story to tell.
The SC Forestry Commission’s mission can be summarized as the “protection and development of the state’s forest resource.” Other state forestry organizations have similar mission statements. The state’s forestry mission of “protection and development” means “supply and demand” in business terminology. Unfortunately, many state organizations are known for wildfire protection only. However, if resource development or demand (for forest products) is not addressed, the economic equation is unbalanced and unsustainable. As Steve Koehn, the Maryland State Forester, and I concluded, “No markets. No money. No management.” For sure, both supply and demand must be healthy for forest industry and the wood supply chain to be successful.
State forestry organizations have been suffering from budget reductions, many to the point of not being able to accomplish their protection and development mission and therefore their proper role within the wood fiber supply chain. Our entire forestry community needs to help improve this funding situation by ensuring that our decision makers know that forestry is a strategic natural resource of equal importance to energy and food sources.
A big resource development opportunity currently exists within an initiative by the National Association of State Foresters Forest Markets Committee. I am the chair of that Committee, which has created a working vision of “Recovering the United States’ historic 25% share of world industrial roundwood production and increasing its share of global wood value production.” The U.S. produced 25% of the world’s roundwood production from 1960 to 2000, but this share dropped to about 20% over the past ten years. In parallel, forest industry job numbers dropped by 35% from 2005 to 2009, and the value of wood product shipments dropped by 42%.
These trends are extremely disturbing, and we must work together to reverse them. To do so, the Forest Markets Committee is proposing that the entire forestry community join together and identify the causes of this decline and correct as many causes as possible. During the NASF annual meeting in September, the organization will confirm its position on this proposal, and with this confirmation, the Committee will begin contacting potential partners that will work together to reach the vision.
I look forward to working with NASF and FRA for the good of our entire forestry community and the wood supply chain.
JOINT FRA-NASF COOPERATION
Following the Forest Industry / State Foresters Forum at the FRA 2011 Fall Board Meeting, the FRA Board approved the following Forum recommendations:
• FRA members are encouraged to review their respective State Forest Action Plans at forestactionplans.org and to communicate support and/or recommendations to respective State Forester’s offices.
• FRA staff and members will engage with the NASF Markets Committee as it moves forward with its work.
• FRA encourages its members to support State Forest Agency budgets at the State and Federal levels.
• FRA and NASF will offer reciprocal complimentary mailing list privileges to FRA and NASF members. FRA members can sign up for the NASF Friday Newsletter at the stateforesters.org home page.
• FRA members applaud State Forestry Agency assistance to logger training and certification programs and to encourage State Forestry Agencies to recognize loggers as fiber supply chain partners.
Jay Farrell, NASF Executive Director
Richard Lewis, FRA President