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