Great video. I especially respect how he points out that timber improvement is a multi-year, multi-pass project. He says that he'll make an improvement pass, wait 10 years, make another, etc. until his stands reach his desired quality point. That's an incredibly good comment by a young man. He's spot-on, too. I don't know where his property is, but it looks like the midwestern forest that I work on as well. If you divide a stand into poor/average/good/excellent criteria, the best you'll usually do is to move it up one class by a heavy TSI pass followed by a 7-10 year wait. So if you start off with a "poor" stand, make your TSI pass, wait 10 years and you'll likely go up to "average". Then do it again. The process works and the results are worth it. I've cut and dropped undesirable trees, girdled, and basal-sprayed with herbicide. They all work to some extent and all have pluses/minuses. In my case I got burned by heavy girdling. I completed a large acreage of girdling, the trees died, and then we had a big windstorm and the girdled trees came down in groups, that action taking down many, many crop trees. So, now I cut and drop weed trees and don't treat the stumps. Good luck to this guy and good luck to fellow tree farmers!
Great work...I run prescriptions that follow this technique on over 10000 acres in Lufkin Texas. Win win win like you said. Love the management advantage team. Cheers from Johnny @ #TnTForestrySolutions
Be curious to go through the cut and see what kind of kill you got on the stumps after waiting so long to apply the herbicide. The herbicide should be applied within a couple hours before the wood starts to seal up.
If you double girdle from mid-July to leaf drop you will not need to use chemicals. Sugar maple is a valuable species. Soft maple less so. You could just spay the triclopyr on the lower 18 inches of the tree at any time of the year. That will kill the tree as well. triclopyr is not legal in my state. At the beginning of the video, you show a girdled tree with a small branch growing below the girdle. You can't have even a small limb below the girdle.
very informative...gonna try some girdling and triclophyr on the sweet gums. I like the idea of leaving the big trees standing and dropping one limb at a time.
Outstanding video. It's great to see a youtube forestry video with a silvics-knowledgeable forester. @WestPaPyro, it's 'probably' because those trees were unable to pay their way out of the woods. Trucking eats up a lot of the profit, so depending on the species and quality, local markets, and current pricing of wood&trucking... stuff may be felled without care to value. Plus, depending on what you're managing for, it might be a good idea. Often, foresters will girdle trees for wildlife habitat (woodpeckers, predatory birds, etc.). This tends to be a standard practice of commercial clearcuts, as well (not girdling, but leaving talk&dead stems--'snags').
No way is walking around a woodland with a backpack sprayer profitable. Get yourself a clearing saw, take most of the trees you cut out for firewood and leave some for wildlife. When the forest regenerates you can control which species you want to keep and do a pre-commercial thinning with your clearing saw. Then you can start doing commercial thinnings with a profit in the future instead of "improving" the stand by creating so much dead standing wood that the whole forest will look like pick-up-sticks in a decade. Spraying forests with herbicide...the mind boggles.
The standing dead provides homes for animals and insects. As they fall they are a long term slow release fertilizer and compost maker for forest. Chipping and removing everything is a short blast but is long term deficient. Not every choice must be governed by profit. Following nature's cycles is a solid bet.
@@finallyfriday. Yes, dead wood is very ecologically important and more should be saved in intensively managed forests. But herbicide is a poor way to create it, and to manage forests in general.
