Agricultural & Conservation Development

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Need water? Agriculture Development means building or constructing business management infrastructure, things like livestock and dairy water systems, road drafting systems, irrigation, water storage, area fencing and complete grazing systems, road stream crossings (bridges, culverts or fords) or complete road systems.

Conservation developments can include tree plantings, but often refer to some sort of construction to conserve and protect public trust values that go beyond immediate business returns. For example conservation development may include creating and protecting habitat or protecting streambanks, but on infrequent occasions can include reshaping or relocating a stream.

Agland’s construction side focuses primarily on closely held business, families and local community NGO clients. We build for the long term, with material and techniques that will last 50 years and beyond. Our leadership has innovated and put in use established on-the ground practice techniques now standard procedure with resource and restoration branches of Cal Fire and CA Fish and Wildlife.

Conservation development needs agriculture and agriculture needs conservation development. For more information on this topic and for any agricultural or conservation development planning need you may have please contact us.

We have extensive generational construction development experience in both agriculture and construction development. Professionals qualifications and experience:
Over the past 20 years, Agland has completed and maintained 53 riparian and instream salmonid habitat enhancement projects, and sediment reduction and road storm proofing projects on Freshwater Creek, Mainstem Eel River & Howe, Oil, Sweet, & Price Creeks, Van Duzen River & and Wolverton Creek, North Fork Mattole River & Mainstem Mattole River’s East Mill Creek.

Agland’s General Engineering Contracting (CA License # 895241)brings the unique perspective of three decades of private sector experience with managing multiple forest and ranch properties in the Humboldt County, and four decades as a contract logging and road & bridge building.

Road & Bridge Construction

Nothing impacts the agricultural function and economic efficiency of a farm, ranch or forest like roads. Good roads provide logistical flexibility, management efficiency and rapid response. But what it takes to build a good road is mostly under appreciated. The full cost of maintaining a poorly placed or poorly built road is not well understood. At Agland we understand these differences. At Agland, we have innovated, put in practice and shared several structural practices that are being recognized by CA resource agencies and the forest industry as having new utility. Our practice is currently built on over 80 years of our own combined experience in addition to three generations of experience passed down from family predecessors.

Roads costs can be the most expensive overhead costs on ranch and forest aglands. When comparing an investment in a road that may last a century or more with minor maintenance, with lower initial cost construction and the expectation of reoccurring major reconstruction, the long-term investment is proven to be the clear financial and environmental choice.

The effective construction and maintenance of forest and ranch roads is an exercise in dealing with animals, geology, water and watershed hydrology. Effective road planning and construction requires a working knowledge of capitalized investment costs, maintenance costs, risks of catastrophic failure, environmental impacts from failures, and road surface drainage practice.

From steel structure or railroad car bridges to surface shaping and drainage structures, we can build or repair a road to outlast storm, flood and fire. In addition to construction contracting and contract management, Agland provides road and road point assessments and mapping, new construction pioneer layouts, and contract metric drafting. Our special focus and extensive practice means that we can build a better road for less long-term cost. Please contact us for more information on these services.

Stream & Riparian Restoration

Agland provides a full range of water related services from ½ day on-site evaluations to property-wide design plans and construction. Whether you need cost options, new layouts drafted for capital development, or help identifying the causes of existing problems, we tailor our services to meet your situation and budget. Products may include on or off-grid pumping alternatives, source development, simple flow engineering to eliminate dysfunction, and map layouts & maintenance diagrams of system components or entire systems.

Specific fees or project design bids are available upon request. Construction bids or construction services such as feasibility budgeting or drafting contract deliverable metrics are also available upon request.

Water Systems Design and Construction Considerations

The quality of ranch life in addition to marginal returns from livestock depend more on the dependable quality and availability of water than any other potential investment. A ranch can’t have enough water, but the quality of design and construction will determine whether ranching is a pleasure or crisis-nightmare. Bubbling water in a sanitary, well-built system is nirvana to our ears. Your water systems dependability and cost effectiveness is our aim.

The most important functionality aspects of livestock water systems designed to deliver water to troughs, include the ability to provide design flow at pressures well below the capacity of float valves, which are necessary in all charged pressure systems in order to keep diversions and-or pumping costs at a minimum. Also, the ability to withstand frost and earth movement (both earthquakes and mid-slope sloughing), the ability to continue to deliver the designed flows free of oxidation scale resistance, and the ability to withstand the elements, including mechanical damage from both wildlife and livestock, and, storage tank protection from oxidation (if steel), or support from rodent undermining (if plastic) are all important investment considerations. The quality of construction and longevity of materials are also key in determining feasibility in water system development.

Well-designed water source development, including springs, surface capture and wells, along with storage tanks or reservoirs are the foundation of any water system. Storage fundamentally provides the ability to capture flows over 24 hours to supply a demand window of from 8-12 hours (daily hrs. of trough visiting by livestock), or capture source water over a period of weeks to provide supply during a planned grazing period.

Unsanitary water installations threaten future margins and even solvency of ranching. The maintenance cost of poorly constructed water systems quickly becomes so extreme as to be untenable. Sloppy water developments are worse than any other poorly designed or constructed ranch infrastructure because of its essential and immediate need or the livestock. Consequently, systems pre-designed to supply adequate supply to the herd or site, elimination of excessive or inadequate pressures & flow rates to eliminate water hammer, airlocks and blowouts, and use of high quality materials like high density welded polyethylene pipe and 316 stainless steel fittings eliminate plaque & scale buildup and the shortening of effective life are all important considerations.

Getting Help with Fencing

Although agland provides a full range of livestock fencing related services from ½ day on-site evaluations to property-wide design plans and construction. Whether you need cost options, new layouts drafted for capital development, or help identifying the causes of existing predator depredation, we tailor our services to meet your situation and budget.

Products include fencing style design, complete property-wide or cell systems design, map layouts & maintenance diagrams of system components or entire systems, and of course fencing construction or construction management.

Specific fees or project design bids are available upon request. Construction bids or construction services such drafting contracting metrics, and feasibility budgeting of contract deliverable metrics are also available upon request.

Vegetation Rehabilitation & Forestry

 

Getting Help with Brush

Brush is a natural part of unmanaged and or ungrazed vegetative cycles. It’s also the result of either the loss or removal of grazing animals from grasslands, or hi-grade or speculative forestry. Its presence also represents a period of transitional terrestrial mono-diversity and carbon volatility. Soil degrades, the land burns, and if no graziers or grazers are present to begin turning it back into grasslands, or tree planters to turn it back into forest, it will be brush and fire all over again.

Its vegetative state serves humans little or no purpose. Agriculture including forestry, can’t pay for its removal. So, consequentially, regardless of a site’s potential its human highest and best use is low density residential land use. Ranchettes. Five to 160 acre house lots. So California burns again and again and there is nothing to stop it.

Managed grazing and large-tract forestry are the only modern agricultural practices that currently have the potential to produce commercial food and fiber with a net surplus of energy. They are also the only land use that can solve California’s wildfire problem. Is State mismanagement of private forest and public land causing fire death and destruction? You bet!

If we can find a way to pay for it, brush land rehabilitation provides long term social and economic benefits in soil or forest carbon sequestration, net energy agriculture, soil water retention, wildlife and biota diversity, and last but not least, these acres become resilient and sustainable contributors to local economies.

Carbon cap and trade regulatory policies will provide the means for paying for it, and conversion of brush land to forests or integration into grazing systems are peerless in the degree of carbon project public benefit.

Agland provides a full range of vegetation related services from ½ day on-site evaluations to property-wide rehabilitation project planning, brush clearing, erosion control and revegetation. More importantly, we provide grazing and forestry system designs to have in place immediately post brush conversion, that will establish productive and self-maintaining land use that will permanently enrich the vegetative and soil states of a site or a property.

Please contact us to learn more about these topics or to schedule a free initial consultation.

Forestry and Ranching Requires Planning Excellence

A good plan is used, or at least thought about daily, even when managing a forest, obviously a long term proposition. Not so obvious is what a plan can do for you, the landowner .

Government agencies drive a very high percentage of all resource planning undertaken today. Cost share and grant incentive programs and regulations require their own plans. All are shortsighted, lacking material experience and catastrophically destructive. The California Board of Forestry driven Forest Practices Act, for example, and its rider components driven by State Fish and Wildlife and Water Quality bureaucracies are the singular cause of forest conversion in California outside the urban interface, and, the most significant cause of catastrophic wildfire including the urban interface.

We are all conditioned to think about planning in this way; i.e. planning satisfies some government agency’s meaningless red tape requirement.

At Agland, we advocate for internal, resource-business strategies that lead rather than follow or react. We facilitate planning that will accomplish landowner goals and provide real future benefits.. The success of our planning products speak for themselves. Our experience is generational, and in a time when a very large percentage of family businesses don’t survive beyond two generations, our planning clients continue to thrive to five and even six generations.

Agland uses a proven curriculum, developed and formed over decades from the successes and failures of real family businesses. It’s very simple in concept, but requires hard work to accomplish. It can’t be done alone.

Agland provides logging management in some circumstances, but the operational aspects of forest management come late in the plan. If you are interested in considering real-effective planning, check ETCwebpagelinkETC, and we welcome your reaching out to us by phone or email any time.

Logging and Forest Stand Improvement

Logging is an exercise in regulation, labor and equipment management. These have been the same three challenges for half a century, but their regulatory and cultural complexity has grown exponentially.

A forest manager should be focusing a cumulative month a year on strategic and operational planning, and spending the rest of the time training and managing people. Today forest managers spend an enormous amount if time putting out regulatory fires and assembling and providing meaningless data. Regulatory surveys and reporting requirements have diminished the dry work season to less than five months. While regulatory and reporting overheads continue year round.

Unlike a few generations ago, most young people are not taught a work ethic or required to be accountable for what they spend or how they use their time. Consequently those young people who can work and want to, are so extraordinary that they have unlimited opportunities, and although most would want the camaraderie and Mana of being a logger, the danger, pay and short season prey on a landowner’s ability to keep an experienced crew together very long. Highline yarding required on steeper terrain requires such a large crew that its type of service availability is extremely limited and very expensive.

Because of these complexities logging is changing. In all circumstances financial returns are diminished. In fact in all but a very few forest site-types, forestry as a business is no longer feasible. Small parcel forestry has become the normal expectation. The large corporates are all looking at real estate as their primary business. Forestry is a secondary consideration for a majority of forest owners, coming in third behind residence and recreation, which means forestry is subsidized by a job in town . Cal fires’ incentive programs are heavily weighted to provide advantages to small parcel landowners, with the idea that their programs may help to reduce wildfire. All the while State forest policy is driving conversion. California burns and burns. And California will continue to burn.

Dire? Yes indeed, but there are smart strategies that will overcome these challenges. On the surface, the most obvious long term strategy includes longer rotations to have denser volume to harvest, thus spreading the overhead cost over more revenue units. The challenge becomes how to pay for (capitalize) those longer rotations. Partaking of government incentive programs has become an interim resource -land revenue generator, but long term success will require planning that creates flexibility and opportunity preparedness. These are easier said than done, but we have done it and can do it again for you.

Please contact us to learn more about these topics or to schedule a free initial consultation.