4. Does marking or having the contractor remove the "junk" species and stems hurt my financial return?

We want to address this question in 2 sections: First, absolutely not! If you are having a contractor harvest your property on a pay-as-you-cut or percentage basis, that argument is presented by the contractor to you, because they don't want to cut it. It brings no value to them to cut it and it is extra work. But you the landowner are asking the question. By not cutting those species and stems you are hurting your property's health and investment value by leaving those trees growing within your timber land. Those species will regenerate and many of them regenerate and grow best when they are released; exactly what a timber harvest does. Why waste the growing time, the growing space, the rich minerals and moisture on a specie or stem that will bring you no financial return and no wildlife value? Remove that stem today and let a specie or stem that has financial wealth take its place. So, if you are working with a contractor that refuses to cut them or will cut them for a "fee" today, yes it will hurt your wallet some today. If you leave them in your stand; tomorrow it will hurt your wallet even more because you have a non financial investment in your growing residual stand. You are actually spending money by wasting precious growing time and space on a stem that won't pay you anything in return... unless you are in the firewood business! Plus, aesthetically those trees left in a stand will hurt the aesthetic beauty of that stand tremendously. Many logging contractors receive pulpwood free for their taking. That is a normal practice and there is very little value to the landowner, plus it does have a higher handling cost to the contractor. Removing pulpwood from the site has a non monetary value to the landowner, but a high non monetary return to the landowner and the health of the property.

The second part to that question is if you are selling your timber as a marked timber bid sale. We mark around 2000 acres a year in contract marking for many of our corporate landowners. We also sell around 5 marked timber sales a year ourselves on private lands. In EVERY sale we mark, whether it is on a contract basis or timber sale through us, our methods are: Mark all of the bad and only half of the good. I want to repeat that: Mark all of the bad and only half of the good. That means we mark with no diameter objectives, no species objectives, nothing other than the objective of removing as much of the bad as possible and leaving a very healthy average 60 Basal Area (60 trees per acre) residual stand. When we mark a sale, we mark everything including pulpwood to be removed... and the results are tremendous! Every sale we have marked like this, we have had not one, NOT ONE... Not have a Successful Bid. And in fact we have had financial results of the sales be very high! We see absolutely no financial difference in the selling values of these sales. We still are seeing the high average stumpage rates that bid sales bring. We are hearing very little discomfort out of the bidding and buying population. We are seeing very, very aesthetically pleasing harvesting operations. We are seeing extremely high residual stand health and future stand growth and value. So, we want to say that ABSOLUTELY NOT! You only hurt your financial return if you Don't Remove those stems and species from your stand today.

Back to FAQ