The most valuable trees from a habitat, or particularly a hunting standpoint, are often the most valuable trees.
From a market standpoint, white oak may comprise 50 to 60 percent of a stand in some cases.
And if the landowner says, don't touch my white oaks, there's not much we can do commercially.
And for that matter, there's not a lot of benefit we can offer to the understory if we're retaining 60 percent of the overstory.
Mm-hmm.
Welcome to Wild Turkey Science, a podcast made possible by Turkeys for Tomorrow.
I'm Dr. Marcus Lashley, Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Florida.
And I'm Dr. Will Goolsbee, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Management at Auburn University.
We're both lifelong hunters and devoted scientists who are passionate about hunting, managing, and researching wild turkeys.
In this podcast, we'll explore turkey research, speak to the experts in the field,
and address the difficult questions related to wild turkey ecology and management.
Our goal is to serve as your connection to wild turkey science.
Jordan, we don't get to see each other that much, but we saw each other in North Carolina here a couple weeks ago.
Right.
And that was right at the same time that we started getting a lot of folks asking us questions about, you know, how do we actually get this done?
You know, I hear you.
I know we need to cut some timber.
I know we need to, you know, to get sunlight on the ground.
We need to burn, you know, all these things. But folks have started asking us to do episodes more on, you know, some of the practical considerations, I guess.
Like, what, how do I actually get some money on my land?
What do I need to be on the lookout for?
And, you know, after hanging out with you in North Carolina, it just dawned on me, you know what, this is what Jordan does for a living.
So, that'd be great.
And, you know, that's why I reached out to ask you if you would be willing to do this.
So, we appreciate you coming.
Just a little bit of background for folks.
I've known Jordan, I don't even know how long, probably been 15 years or more, right, Jordan?
Yeah, I believe we first ran into each other back in 2012.
Okay.
Which was...
Not quite 15.
So, we're looking at about 13 years, going on 14 now.
Yeah, it's got to be about that long for me, too.
Yeah.
Yeah, same with you, Will, that's right.
Yeah, because you came to the Deer Study Group with us early on, didn't you?
That's right, yeah.
I remember those first interactions, being exposed to that amount of wildlife-focused research.
And at that time, you know, I was an undergrad student that was definitely field-focused and very passionate about habitat management.
But I don't think I had a very good grasp of the science.
And not all, like, we're talking about a mountain of science that backs up a lot of the management decisions that we implement.
Yeah.
And that was just so cool to me.
And I think, you know, I've taken the path of more implementation.
And you guys are kind of hybridizing this academia and implementation of habitat management.
And I love that.
I really respect you guys for what you're doing.
Yeah, well, you know, it takes all kinds, right?
Like, there's a lot going on.
And we're trying to play a role in that.
And I know that you are, too.
Yeah, and I would say don't sell yourself short, Jordan, because you contributed to that science during your master's as well.
Well, I was going to say, he actually did in his undergrad to start with.
He did a project, I was his mentor, I guess, so to speak.
So I was the graduate student he was working with on a project where you planted white pine seedlings kind of in the southern edge of the range.
And we were looking at, you know, different forest management strategies coupled with strategies to deter deer.
And what would be the most effective way to establish those seedlings.
And then Jordan went on to publish that from his undergraduate thesis.
That's awesome.
So he's been working on forest management-related topics since he was an undergraduate.
Because, Jordan, why don't you explain a little bit of what you did for your master's, too?
Yeah, sure.
So I really enjoyed that opportunity with Marcus to be exposed to that research and participate in it as an undergrad.
And then through publishing that and presenting it at various conferences, I had the opportunity to pursue a master's degree,
studying the influences of various hardwood silviculture practices and the combination of that with prescribed fire and different herbicide treatments
to increase nutritional carrying capacity for whitetail deer, but also the reintroduced elk herd in East Tennessee.
So I was able to continue that work in that combination of forest management and wildlife management
to investigate the interactions between those different practices
and on how they can either positively or negatively impact nutritional carrying capacity,
which is just a fancy way of saying how many animals can be supported by the food that is available on the landscape.
So, yeah, it's obvious to those of us that have been in it a long time that practices like timber harvesting
are essential to increasing the number of animals you can hold on your property
and obviously the health of the animals that are there influenced by the quality of the nutrition that's available.
And of course, other things like cover for nesting and brood rearing.
And it's just I cannot see myself, at least in the location I'm in here in Tennessee and working across the eastern U.S.,
not using forest management practices to meet habitat management goals.
And fortunately for me, I get to do that in a commercial way
where we use timber sales to make landowners money while we're improving habitat quality.
And that obviously meets multiple objectives for those families and landowners.
So I'm really vested in promoting forest management as a tool to keep it in the front of your tool bag when you're managing habitat.
Hey, Jordan, I know we've kind of followed you throughout your career and have kept up with what you're doing.
But can you just quickly describe what you're doing now, what your role is and how you work with clients, that sort of thing?
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm the director of field operations for a consulting group called Compass South Forestry.
We have multiple foresters across the southeastern U.S. and we operate primarily in the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas right now.
We're obviously evaluating every opportunity individually.
So when something pops up, say in Virginia or West Virginia, we have collaborated with other foresters that are a bit out of our geographic distribution right now to help landowners that reach out to us.
But, yeah, we are consulting with landowners. We have multiple wildlife biologists on staff, as well as certified foresters and registered foresters.
So we help people that are just wanting to sell timber to make money.
We help people that are just wanting to manage habitat quality and don't care about the money.
And most often we help people that are right in the middle, that have financial considerations for how they manage timber on their property, as well as habitat management considerations for meeting the wildlife goals they have.
Yeah, that's really good, Jordan. I'm glad you went into all your background, both academically and what you do professionally now, because that's all very directly relevant to the conversation that we wanted to have.
And specifically, you know, Marcus in Florida and me here in Alabama, we talk a lot about pine management and especially like plantation forestry and fitting turkeys and other wildlife objectives into that plantation style silviculture.
But a lot of our listeners, you know, have land in the Mid-South or even in the Midwest, and they've pretty much, you know, got hardwood timber resources.
And so we wanted to have you on specifically to speak to that and talk about some of the challenges there and maybe some of the unique aspects of that hardwood silviculture that would be directly relevant to our landowners.
I think it's going to be a really interesting topic to explore with y'all.
The biggest difference when we're talking about hardwood management versus pine management is the diversity of species you're dealing with and the diversity of markets that are tailored towards specific species.
So it's very much a dynamic process when working in hardwoods because no property is the same.
When you walk into a pine plantation that was planted 18 years ago, you know what to do.
It's time for a first thinning.
You walk into a 75 or 85-year-old hardwood stand, you don't know what you're going to get.
It all depends on where you're at on the landscape.
If you're up on top of the ridge or you're down in the river bottom or you're on the side of the hill, you're faced with a variety of scenarios.
And so you have to evaluate each one individually.
Yeah, and it seems like the other major complexity here is that a lot of times when we're cutting trees with a habitat objective, we want to keep the most valuable trees.
Yeah, I run into that frequently.
You may be keeping the most valuable trees from a wildlife habitat standpoint and also that sometimes or many times even aligns with which ones are most valuable commercially.
Exactly.
Yeah, the crown jewel of an example is white oak.
Right.
So in our world right now, the hottest market is the white oak market.
We've faced some setbacks on our stave industry lately, just in the past several months, but we don't expect that to continue in perpetuity.
We think things will level out over the course of the next year and a half or so and be able to continue using those markets at will.
Right now we're facing some quotas and some marketing challenges, but the veneer market for white oak is still very hot.
And the deer hunter market for white oak is very hot.
So we often have situations where we're entering properties that maybe are white oak-dominated tracts.
Here in Middle Tennessee and West Tennessee, in the Western Highland Rim region, we see that a lot.
White oak may comprise 50 to 60 percent of a stand in some cases.
And if the landowner says, don't touch my white oaks, there's not much we can do commercially.
And for that matter, there's not a lot of benefit we can offer to the understory if we're retaining 60 percent of the overstory.
So anyway, you're right.
The most valuable trees from a habitat or particularly a hunting standpoint are often the most valuable trees from a market standpoint.
But also there's other species that are very valuable right now.
Walnut, of course. Ash is a sleeper.
Most people don't realize that, but because of the loss of ash across the landscape,
we're seeing a much higher demand in areas where it remains not being affected by the emerald ash borer.
So that opens up some opportunities there.
And then the crosstie market is very stable.
So if you're dealing with hickory and sweetgum and red oaks and species like that, you can take advantage of those crosstie markets.
Hey Jordan, you're kind of doing it now, but I just wanted to formally ask you,
could you kind of tell us, I guess, maybe a few species for each of the kinds of markets and maybe how they relate to each other in value?
I think that would be extremely helpful for people.
It definitely would be for me to know, OK, which ones are actually going to that crosstie versus something else.
What are those primary markets and the groups of species that you might enter into those markets?
And then how do they relate to one another in value?
I can do that.
So if I start at the bottom, it's going to be hardwood, pulpwood, which is used for paper products.
And that is a market class that generally you're going to get a few bucks a ton.
Or in some parts of the region currently, you're either getting nothing or you can't even sell it.
So sometimes you have to use other methods such as herbicide, hack and squirt to handle your pulpwood.
But let's say in a market where everything is open on the bottom level, you have pulpwood.
And then in some local areas, you can sell some firewood, which would be very similar to pulpwood, just straight and the right species like oak and hickory that are often used for for smoking meat.
And then you take a step up from there.
You're looking at what Jordan with that pulpwood.
Does it matter which species there are?
Are there any that wouldn't fit into that?
Or is that generally generally it does not matter.
There are a few species.
Surprisingly, in our region, black walnut is not a species that the pulp mill likes to get much of.
But the run of the mill hardwood, whether it's maple, oak, ash, hickory, poplar.
You lump your hardwood pulpwood together, you lump your pine pulpwood together in the mills we work with.
And how is that market regionally throughout the southeast Jordan?
I mean, I shouldn't say just southeast, but mid-south and beyond.
Is it very confined to certain areas or is it strong throughout?
Historically, it's been fairly strong throughout.
Right now, things are tough.
And with hardwood pulpwood from Arkansas all the way back across Tennessee into the Carolinas.
If you're close to a mill that uses hardwood pulpwood, you can often tap into a logger that has a good quota with that mill.
And if you have a heavy pulpwood timber sale, you can work something out.
But if you have a timber sale that's primarily pulpwood and you're a long way from the mill,
and you have a low production logger that doesn't have the trucking capacity, you see where I'm going with that.
The price doesn't justify them moving it and paying much of anything for it.
So in that situation, Jordan, you talked earlier about you may have to go to a hack and squirt situation to implement forest stand improvement.
And we've talked about that on here before and how you might actually implement it and the benefits that you'd get.
Do you see most of your landowners implementing that themselves?
Are they getting NRCS money to implement it and having crews come in?
Or maybe something else that I didn't even think of?
Most of the time, folks are looking for a cost share option.
And so you don't have to do cost share, but it seems to be fairly readily available for forest stand improvement.
And that's through NRCS, just to be clear, right?
Yeah, through NRCS. And there are some state programs that are available, but that varies.
So in that case, you would hire a subcontractor crew to come in and take care of it for you.
Or you can do it yourself and be reimbursed.
If you're managing a property that has a fair amount of acreage, then it's just not going to be efficient for one or two guys to be out there with a hatchet and a spray bottle or a chainsaw girdling trees to cover, say, a 50 or 75 acre stand.
When you can bring in a crew that does it often and has a dozen or 15 guys and they can knock it out in a day.
So I encourage folks to subcontract.
Yeah, I have worked with several landowners that have hired a crew and seen what they did in one day.
I don't even understand how they're doing it, to be honest with you.
It's like, how did you do all that in one day?
Well, and I feel like they never used to have hack and squirt crews, and now that's more of a thing than it used to be.
And they're pretty widely available, it seems like.
Yeah, it seems, and maybe I'm completely off base, but I just kind of assumed that maybe that's because of the issues with the market and also pairing that with cost share opportunities.
I guess made it something that's in higher demand.
Yeah, and it's also a justified silvicultural practice, and it can be used for habitat management work as well.
So it's a versatile type of treatment, and combine that with the market challenges we have with pulpwood, you're right on.
Hey, Jordan, what could a landowner expect to pay for that?
If they were paying completely out of pocket, no cost share, what is the total rate per acre that those usually charge?
Well, it really depends on stem density.
So if you're in a stand that has 500 stems per acre versus one that has 100, the price will vary.
But in most mature hardwood stands where we're doing a mid-story removal or an intermediate hardwood stand where we're doing a crop tree release, we see those prices range in anywhere from $150 to $250 an acre, typically.
Now, that's with contractors I work with frequently and have a good relationship with.
If you were to price it off the cuff and just call everybody around the region that did it, you'd probably get a very wide range of pricing options there, depending on their staff and capabilities.
The ones that I have worked with that have done this, they paid within that range for theirs as well.
That's what I've heard, and it sounds high initially, but when you think about even skidder-based spraying now is close to $100 an acre, over $100 an acre in some places.
And then you think about that in comparison to the labor that hack and squirt entails, and it doesn't seem that bad.
Yeah, for sure.
And if you're doing it in a way that is setting you up to then implement a commercial timber sale after the hack and squirt operation, then you're very likely to make more than that back to overcompensate for the money you put in on the front end.
Well, I'm so thankful too that there's been some of these government programs step in to subsidize landowners doing this because over the past 15 years or so, you just come across so many properties that don't have a commercially marketable, feasible way of getting the habitat improvements implemented that they need.
And you just hate to tell a landowner that, that it's like, oh, your situation is hopeless.
Like there's no economically feasible way for you to do this, but now there is.
Yeah.
And then from a wildlife management standpoint, I mean, you know, we're recommending like people have been listening to us know that we recommend getting sunlight on the ground and adding fire constantly.
Well, if you get into a situation where across the landscape, it's common for landowners to not be able to move wood, like that ends up being reflected in the poor population situation with the wildlife that you're interested in, like wild turkeys.
So, you know, I'm kind of viewing it. It is. Thank goodness is giving options to those landowners that don't have another option, but it also is giving us a landscape level way to actually improve habitat.
You know, whereas that would would just sit there otherwise.
And leaving it standing because it's not merchantable is often just you're handicapping yourself on what you can do moving forward, whether that's because you've done an intermediate harvest and you've retained some of your overstory trees that were salt timber trees.
And now you've got all this pulpwood that's left behind that's contributing to the shade. So you need more sunlight or because you've got trees that are inferior that are now exposed to the overstory resources and you're left with a stand that's undesirable.
So it's great if you can have it just be cut off, but sometimes you have to be creative. And I think right now would be a good time to define what we're talking about when we talk about hardwood pulpwood.
And when I'm looking at a tree in the woods, typically if a tree is under 13 or 14 inches DBH, a hardwood tree, more than likely the majority of that tree or all of that tree is going to be pulpwood.
Certainly if it's under 12 inches DBH, because the small end of a tie log should be around 12 inches. Now in some markets, we can push that on down to about 10 inches because they're making camps or other products.
And so they can take some smaller material, but it's important to walk through your woods and be able to recognize, do I have salt timber available to market or do I just have a pulpwood dominated stand that I need to use for stand improvement in?
Because it would almost be impossible in our region to do a strictly hardwood pulpwood harvest unless you're in a very unique situation where a logger has a good market for that.
But yeah, so in general, 14 inches DBH and bigger, you're looking at salt timber that you can then analyze from a species specific perspective to see how much volume and value you have.
If it's smaller than that on average, you're looking at a stand that likely is just in need of forest stand improvement as opposed to a commercial timber sale.
Jordan, given the diversity of these stands that we're dealing with, as opposed to like a pine monoculture, it seems like intuitively it would increase the importance of working with a forester if you're a landowner trying to conduct a timber sale in that situation.
Because you're not just looking at potentially a total volume that they're going to harvest of this single product class, you're looking at individual trees of different sizes and different values that correspond to the species, right?
Yes, that's right. So working with a forestry consultant that is familiar with your local markets, particularly hardwood markets in your region that can conduct an inventory prior to a timber harvest being implemented to give you an expectation on the value of standing timber you have is extremely important in my opinion.
Because when you conduct that inventory, not only is that going to help you determine the approximate value of the timber you have, it also sheds light on what options you have.
Because if you conduct your inventory and 90% of your value is white oak trees, then you know that you're going to have to cut some white oak trees to be able to do your harvest.
If you conduct your inventory and the bulk of your value is mixed wheatgum, hickory, and poplar and you have say 25% of oak volume, then you know you have option to just focus on the undesirable species and retain your desirable species and it makes it really easy.
So understanding what you have before you take that step to do a commercial timber sale is extremely important.
And then a forester can work with you to select the trees to harvest if you're not going to do a clear cut.
Or provide the retention of the trees that actually have potential in the future if you're looking for another harvest down the road or to retain certain species that are going to best meet your habitat management objectives.
Yeah, like your mass producers.
Exactly.
Earlier you were kind of, I guess, starting at the bottom and then building up in value.
So we went through pulpwood and I think we've covered that pretty well.
Where are we at now?
Yeah, I would lump a couple other groups in the pulpwood category.
You'll hear the term scrag and you'll hear the term firewood.
For the purposes of this episode, those are all pulpwood products, even though they're not being used for paper.
They're in that kind of category of low price and generally restrictive markets.
Yeah, maybe a couple bucks a ton.
Yeah, you might get a little boost on your pricing and it may help the logger be able to move more wood and diversify his outlets for the smaller diameter stuff.
But in general, for the purposes, even if I was talking to a landowner, let's just view all that as one category.
And you take a step up from there, we're looking at tie logs and tie logs get that term because they're primarily used to create railroad ties.
And fortunately, here in North America, hardwood railroad ties are much preferred to concrete or other forms of tie.
So the hardwood tie log market is good, is stable.
It's not expected to dramatically increase or dramatically decrease, but I would argue that it's the backbone of our hardwood markets, hardwood saw timber markets in this part of the world.
And that's the eastern U.S., not just Tennessee or Alabama or Florida, which y'all probably don't have many hardwood.
You may have some bottom line hardwood stuff down there markets, but you take a step up from tie logs and you're looking at what we call grade hardwood or grade logs.
So, Jordan, just so that I'm, for the tie logs, are there specific species that do really well or that are excluded from that?
So yellow poplar would be excluded because it's a soft, technically it's a soft wood, not a hardwood.
So it has to be a hardwood species.
In our region, we're typically looking at white oaks, red oaks, hickories, hard maple, which often ends up going into the grade category.
But that's where we're headed next.
But essentially anything other than soft maple, which would be red maple and yellow poplar and the hardwood mix we have, even like I said, sweet gum and black gum and species that we might look at as not really desirable timber trees.
They actually are if they have good growth form, because a sweet gum typically grows really straight.
It tapers well where it doesn't lose its diameter super fast.
It's not very lemmy and doesn't have a ton of knots that can compromise the integrity of the wood.
You can get a ton of tie logs out of a hundred foot tall sweet gum tree.
So just because you have sweet gum doesn't mean you don't have some timber value there.
But yes, in short, the true hardwood species are what's required for tie logs.
And how much in value, I know you're wanting to move to that next class, but how much value could somebody expect out of that class of wood?
So typically, you know, it's going to range between where you're located.
For mixed tie logs, you're probably looking at somewhere in the $30 a ton range to $35 a ton range.
For oak tie logs, when you're looking at $3 or $5 for pulpwood, it's a huge jump.
And then even compared to pine sales.
That's a good price for pine saw timber in some places right now.
You get into oak tie logs, which are your white oaks and red oaks, you can get $45 a ton, $50 a ton.
And those are the prices where typically what we'll do is we'll just evaluate the timber across the track and blend everything together into a blended tie log price.
So let's just be simple.
If we were getting $30 for mixed tie logs and $50 a ton for oak tie logs, we'll just say let's do $40 for everything.
That keeps the accounting easier.
It keeps the loggers from having to separate them on loads.
We can move faster and get the job done more smoothly.
But it's all about how the ratio works out in terms of if that's the right move for the landowner or not.
Yeah, and if you've cruised it ahead of time, you probably have a pretty good idea what that ratio is going to be.
Yes, that's exactly where I was headed earlier talking about how important it is to have a timber inventory.
And you don't have to have 100% tally, but you need to have an inventory to understand generally what volume you have and what the species composition is so that you can market the products correctly.
And in cases where the timber sale is not too complex, let's just use a clear cut, for example, you can then use that information to advertise and procure bids and do a lump sum sale on your timber.
For many of our clients that are wildlife focused, we use a pay as cut approach for a couple reasons.
Number one, it simplifies the process for the buyers, whether it's a mill or a logger.
To not be intimidated by trying to put a lump sum value on a sale that may be complex in how it's harvested.
But it also gives us freedom as biologists and foresters as we're overseeing the sale to make a slight adjustment mid run if we need to, to better meet the end goal or the objective.
So as we go up from the tie logs, what's our next product class?
We're looking at grade hardwood here.
So when I say grade, that means it's being sawn into lumber primarily or specialty products.
Really any species of hardwood can be looked at as grade as long as the quality and diameter is there.
So a perfect size tie log would be like a tree that's 16 or 18 inches DBH because you don't have a lot of side lumber that comes off when you are sawing your tie out of the center.
When you are bumping into trees that are 20 to 30 inches diameter, you need to market those differently because a tie is only going to be like that 8 by 10 center section of that log.
You've got so much lumber that is going to come off the sides of that material.
If you can market it to a mill that specializes in sawing dimensional hardwood lumber, certain species can be much more valuable than tie logs because of their additional diameter and grade.
Another thing that contributes to grade hardwood is the quality of the wood inside the tree.
So when a tree is cut, you may see some staining that we refer to as mineral.
You may see some rot or a hollow hole.
You have various defects that can show inside the tree that you may not necessarily see from the outside of the tree.
And so the tree not only has to meet those specs internally, they have to meet the size and dimensions externally as well.
And those are graded as individual logs when you sell them to a mill.
You're not selling them as a per ton rate.
Each log is graded individually and your white oak species, walnut, ash are going to be your top three right now.
And then you get into like poplar and red oak after that.
And then when you get big hickories and big sweetgums, there's not really a great grade market for that.
They're just big and so you can benefit by selling them board foot as opposed to per ton.
Because the dull scale that most mills use is skewed towards larger logs.
So the larger diameter your log is, the better that scale is going to treat you.
If it's a smaller log, you're better off selling it by the ton because of how it's skewed towards giving more board footage as a ratio to bigger logs.
So can you give us a range and value there as well?
I'm just trying to kind of see how much we're stepping up when we step up classes.
Yeah, so let's use white oak for example.
We're looking at white oak tie log, let's say $50 a ton stumpage.
You move up to a white oak grade log, typically going to see an average somewhere in the neighborhood of $750 a thousand to about a dollar a foot or $1,000 per thousand board feet.
So you divide that generally by about, let's say eight tons per thousand board feet.
So if you've got, let's say $800 per thousand, divide that by eight tons per thousand, that's $100 a ton.
So it's doubling again in value?
Yeah, and that's going to be a range.
That's for white oak.
You bring it on down to say red oak and ash and poplar.
Ash is going to be in the middle, probably $600 to $700 per thousand if it's really nice logs.
And then red oak and poplar are going to be more like that $500 to $600 per thousand.
And then you have to take the cutting haul out of that.
So it's not necessarily doubling, Marcus, but let's say you get $100 a ton and your logger, a reasonable cutting haul would be like $35 a ton for say a 60 mile haul or a 50 mile haul.
So you're looking at about $65, $70 a ton.
So you're probably increasing your value by maybe about 50% as opposed to 100%.
Would make sense.
And then you take a step up from there, you're looking at specific species and quality.
So the next market outlet would be stave logs.
These are white oak logs that can be used to create the siding and headers for whiskey barrels and wine barrels.
And that market historically has been really strong.
We're hitting some challenges right now, but like I said earlier, we expect to come out of that in about 12 to 18 months.
There was a lot of demand during COVID.
We produced more barrels than we needed.
Now we're having to back off and get this thing back in equilibrium, but there's still a demand there.
But anyway, you're looking at about probably close to double the value of a grade log compared to a stave log.
A stave log would be, you know, a stumpage rate on staves could be anywhere from $150 to $200 a ton in some cases.
And what is changing about the log that takes it from, like if you had a white oak, what would make a tree in that class versus the other ones?
Oh, a grade log is going to, it can have a few knots on each side.
It can have a little bit of an internal defect as long as it's a sound log.
Stave logs, you don't want any mineral whatsoever.
They have to be Quercus alba, white oak, not chestnut oak or post oak or swamp chestnut oak or swamp white oak.
It has to be true Quercus alba, white oak.
So that's the most restrictive.
And then following that would be no mineral whatsoever, or if there is only on one side, not both sides of the log,
then you're limited to the cleanliness of the log in terms of how many knots it can have.
It can only have so many knots and defects on the outside of the log.
So generally that log needs to be about 80% clean on the outside.
But see, if you're looking at a grade white oak log, if it's sound all the way through, those knots can be on the side of it.
And then following that, the diameter needs to generally be at least 12 inches or 11 inches on the little end for a butt log,
white oak, and it needs to probably, to market it correctly, probably be 14 inches on the little end for a second cut.
So there's some really specific specs to meet that category.
And then we take it a step further when we use the word veneer.
And this will apply a lot to your guys in the Midwest and landowners that are, say, in Kentucky or Tennessee, Missouri,
Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, you run into a lot of veneer quality, hardwood, particularly white oak and walnut.
And those trees, to get the highest price, need to be clear on the exterior on all four sides,
and they need to be completely clean on the interior with no mineral stain or bird peck or other defects.
And then you can get extremely good pricing on those logs, and there's a wide range.
But the highest value I've sold a white oak log for in Tennessee was $7 per board foot.
So that's $7,000 per 1,000 board feet.
And as I was talking about with the dull scale, it skews towards larger logs.
So when you convert back from a large log from a board foot basis to a per ton basis,
you have fewer tons per 1,000 board feet.
So instead of 8 tons per 1,000 board feet, we're looking probably about 7 tons per 1,000 board feet.
So that means that log sold for $1,000 per ton.
That's pretty good.
If you've got really high-quality walnut, you will exceed that.
And I've heard of a few white oak logs going for better than that,
but I personally generally veneer is going to be in the $3,000 to $4,000 per 1,000 board feet range.
So you're looking at $400 or $500 a ton.
That's delivered, but you don't have to pay your logger that much because they're cutting them on site,
and then generally the veneer buyer is going to come out and scale them there
and then send a truck to pick them up.
So you don't have the transportation costs and stuff associated with it.
So your landowner can easily get $300, $400 a ton on their veneer logs.
I mean, you're not selling them by the ton, but if you do the conversions.
That's what you end up with.
So when you've got a landowner that loves deer and turkey,
and they have a bunch of 25-inch white oak trees, and they don't want to cut any of them,
then you have to explain that to them and let them make that decision.
It's easy to become a timber beast when you start looking at the numbers like that,
and you see dollar signs when you walk through the woods instead of mass production
and evaluating sunlight penetration.
So I, as a hybrid forester and biologist, I have a little better grasp on those two different perspectives
than most, and most people are not going to have just tons and tons of veneer-quality white oak trees
on their property or walnut.
We did go through the realm of the different levels of marketing and merchandising from pulpwood to veneer,
so that should be a pretty good summary.
Yeah, Jordan, we've talked several times on here before about how there's been research,
and even out of Dr. Harper's lab, about the minority of, especially white oak trees,
producing the majority of acorns. Do y'all ever incorporate that into your marking for one of these sales,
and do y'all provide that service, or do you know of anybody that goes out and checks
to see which trees might be the better producers that should be left?
Yeah, I actually enjoyed doing that or incorporating that into marking,
particularly because I was involved in that research when I was at UT.
I thought so.
But what I found...
It's Nanny et al., I believe, isn't it?
Oh, man.
Is it really?
No, it's not.
I'm one of the co-authors on it.
It's not, but I have had some presentations.
You contributed a lot to that, Jordan.
There are some conference proceedings where it is Nanny et al.,
but the actual publication is not.
It's Brooke et al., yeah.
That's right.
But what I was getting at with incorporating it is what I found when I'm marking timber,
every year is different.
You have some years that it's a bumper crop.
You have some years where they're very little.
When I'm evaluating, let's use a veneer white oak tree, for example.
This landowner says, well, I don't want to get rid of my best acorn trees.
Well, let's see if it's one of your best acorn trees.
And you can look in the leaf litter, and you will find a ton of acorn caps,
or you will find very, very few from years past.
And so if one out of every five years is a bumper crop of acorns,
a lot of acorn caps, if you're not in a bottomland system
and you're not burning frequently, will persist underneath the leaf litter.
And so that's a technique I've been using.
Instead of trying to go out in the late summer and use binoculars
and figure out, just look on the ground
and see how many acorn caps you have around your trees.
That's a really good point.
If you look down, you kick the leaves back, and you see a dozen,
well, that's a pretty good tree in a pretty good year.
If you kick it back and you look for five minutes and you find three,
well, that tells you you're not losing a lot by taking that tree out.
And you could be gaining a lot in your bank account.
That makes sense.
Yeah, and so that was a really good overview of all the product classes
and how a landowner might sell the timber under those different product classes.
But what I would like to ask you about now, Jordan, while we got you here,
is what kind of sales do you oftentimes implement with these landowners
or these forest and improvement cuts or these clear cuts?
What are their objectives for the harvest, and how are you selling this timber?
Most of the timber sales that we do, I guess, would be classified
as hardwood thinnings or intermediate harvests.
These would be harvests where the landowner wants to retain a portion
of the overstory, whether it's to continue to provide mass production
or to retain some value for their children to harvest down the road.
I like to use even-aged silviculture methods when possible because that grows
the best quality hardwood trees.
Those two options are clear cuts or shelterwoods in our world.
Shelterwood is simply a heavy thinning of hardwoods where you retain
mass-producing trees of your desirable species, primarily oaks,
to contribute towards regeneration and to provide some intermediate
light conditions that are going to help young oak seedlings establish
and advance into advanced regeneration status.
But it also doubles for landowners that aren't necessarily looking
for advanced oak regeneration.
They're looking for increased nesting cover or brood ring cover
or forage availability.
Then you can manage it as a fire-maintained woodland
as opposed to a shelterwood.
In those cases, we call it a retention cut as opposed to a shelterwood
because shelterwood indicates regeneration.
A retention cut just means you're retaining specific trees to help you meet
whatever objective it is you're looking to meet.
Right.
So other than that, you could do – I have one right now that I've been working
on marking in the eastern portion of Middle Tennessee where we're taking
out a lot of understory pulpwood and then very selective on the overstory
trees because this is an intermediate age stand.
So we're going to attempt to do forest stand improvement through
commercial timber harvest just because we have the acreage there
and we have the West Rock Mill in Stevenson, Alabama that's been
on and off lately, but they've been running.
At times, they've been running wide open.
So we're trying to time the market to jump in and make the landowner
a little bit of money and accomplish their habitat management
objectives as well there.
I'd like to go back to what I said earlier.
There's really two approaches we offer.
That's the lump-sum timber sale approach, and that's a great clean,
cut-and-dry approach when you have marketable timber
and your prescription is relatively straightforward.
If you have marginal timber quality or your prescription is rather complex,
then that's when we want to use a pay-as-cut approach.
Or in some cases, we have investors that want us to individually oversee
the merchandising of the logs as opposed to selling them to someone else.
In those cases, we pay the logger a fixed cut-and-haul rate for each product,
which is to cut the tree down, drag it to the landing, put it on a truck,
haul it to the mill, and then we market where that wood goes
and how it's cut to try to maximize revenue for the landowner.
Those are the approaches we most commonly take.
Makes sense.
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