Published: May 21, 2008 11:53 am            

Trying to right a wrong in west central woodlands

Originally published in the May 16, 2008, print edition.

BATTLE LAKE — For 35 years Chuck Erickson farmed near Battle Lake and taught agriculture in the high schools at Henning and New York Mills in Otter Tail County. He knew his woods were there. He did get some fire wood out of them. But he focused his energies on the tillable land.

“At the time my income came from farming and full-time teaching,” Erickson said. “Over the years my efforts had mainly been on the crop land. We logged some trees off many years ago but most of it has just been used for firewood. Many trees have gone down and rotted. There’s a tremendous amount of waste out there. Most of the woodlands that I have are poorly maintained.”

In 1995 Chuck gave up his herd of registered Holsteins and retired from teaching. At about the same time he began taking a second look at his 200 acres of woodlands and non-tillable acreage. He began to recognize their value both to him, as an individual landowner, and as part of the overall mixed forest and prairie landscape in the county. The waste he saw in his forest began to bother him.

“Now, at my age, I’m going to try and correct some of the waste and neglect that has gone on in my woodlands,” Erickson said. “I hope to ... spend the rest of my life trying to straighten out the mess that I’ve got.”

Like a lot of woodlands in west central Minnesota, Erickson’s are of mixed species. They are, however, primarily made up of burr oak, basswood and popple (aspen). They also include some ash and birch along with willow in the low lands.

“This year we’re getting some land ready to plant about 25 acres of trees,” Erickson said. “The seedlings will be mixed hardwoods and some conifers. We want a diverse stand so that it won’t be vulnerable to disease or insects. I’m very concerned about some of the invasive pests we may be getting in this area like the emerald ash borer. I don’t want to plant just one species in case there is a problem.”

The idea to get some new oak by using fire and the idea to plant a mix of species originated from the Forest Stewardship Plan for Erickson’s farm. With help from the area forester for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Erickson wrote a woodland management plan in 2007. He is a member of the Farm Bureau and as such has a healthy reluctance to get overly involved with government bureaucracies. He feels his experience with the DNR’s Forest Stewardship Plan has been positive, however.

The relationship with the DNR forester can go beyond planning.

“They’ll walk through your woods and maybe they’ll see you have some popple that need harvesting,” Erickson said. “If you’re a small operator like me I don’t have enough popple to make it worth a logger’s time to come in here and log. If you work with a forester he probably knows the fellow down the road has the same problem. Between the two of us the DNR forester could put enough wood together to make it worth a logger’s time.”

As Erickson studied and observed his own woodland, the conviction that it is a part of a larger forest landscape in Otter Tail County began put down roots in him. When the Farm Bureau asked him to join an effort to make a plan to manage and protect the entire forested landscape in west central Minnesota he didn’t hesitate long.

“They wanted a farmer on the west central landscape committee,” he said, “So I accepted. It’s frustrating because it seems like it moves so slow. But we’re moving forward.”

The West Central Landscape Forest Resource Management Plan has been put together by landowners, resort owners, loggers, hunters and others from nine counties in the region. Since the area has lost more than half its woodland in the last 100 years, but still has 780,000 acres of woodland, there is cause for both concern and hope.

One of the major concerns that the landscape committee identified was increased fragmentation of the existing woodland because of development pressures. Erickson’s own experience is that it is difficult to get small parcels of woodlands to pay for themselves. If they don’t pay for themselves, landowners don’t have an incentive to keep them intact.

“We need to keep the woods intact so that people can make some income from them,” Erickson said. “We know what’s happening to property taxes and if people aren’t harvesting anything and there’s no money coming off of it, it’s hard to see the value. A lot of them like it for the aesthetic or hunting value. That’s fine. But what concerns me is that we have so much cellulose out there that should be harvested and put into a boiler or turned into sawdust for livestock bedding or for many other products. I just don’t want to waste it.”

Erickson, along with the entire landscape committee, have set a goal of actually increasing the acreage of forested land in west central Minnesota. Along with that goal, in recognition of the forest’s economic and ecological values, they have also set a goal of assuring that the existing forest is better managed.

For more information about the West Central Landscape Forest Resource Management Plan log on to www.frc.state.mn.us or call (218) 495-3321.

“We are always looking for new committee members,” Erickson said.

For more information about Forest Stewardship Plans log on to www.dnr.state.mn.us/grants/forestmgmt/stewardship.html.

        

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