Managing for a forest’s future

Lyle Defrees surveys his family’s forest in Sumpter Valley. The Baker County Small Woodlands Association toured the Defrees property last week. (Baker City Herald/Ed Merriman)

With the depressed market for saw logs, Lyle Defrees said most of the logging on his family’s land, in common with most other private forests in Baker County, is designed to make the forest more vigorous rather than to produce the maximum amount of profit.

“We want people to know we are all  managing our timber the best we can with the resources we have,” Lyle said.

He told the group of 60 who attended the Thursday tour — many of them also forest owners — that finding a niche market the generally small-diameter trees cut during forest health projects is the key to surviving the sluggish wood market.

“As growers we need to do everything we can to get a niche in the market, so we can get as much income as we can to keep managing for forest health and fire prevention,” Lyle Defrees said.

Tourgoers rode hay wagons though the Defrees’ forests to look at six sites where the family is managing stands.

At other sites, Lyle Defrees said those factors might limit the potential height of century--old pine trees to 60 feet.

The height that pine trees will grow in 100 years is called the Pine Site Index. Defrees said there are 26 different criteria that go into determining a Pine Site Index.

The point he emphasized to tour participants is that to manage different sites properly and to maximize tree growth and forest health, it’s important to know how the growing conditions vary from site to site.

At the first stop on the tour, Defrees reported that the root depth was 40- to 60 inches, the elevation 4,200 feet and the average rainfall 24 inches per year. The site has an average of 59 trees per acre, the average age of the trees is 96 years and the average diameter at 42 inches off the ground is 17 inches.

In 1991 the site had 23,555 board-feet per acre of standing timber, and since then the family has harvested 9,559 board-feet of timber per acre. Today, the site still has 9,040 board-feet of timber standing per acre, and it is a much healthier and fire resistant site than it was in 1991, Defrees said.

The second stop was a grove of aspen trees, where the Defrees family is thinning out pine trees to open the canopy and allow more sunlight on the aspen grove.

Pines and other conifer trees can over time crowd out and eliminate groves of aspens and other deciduous trees.

In addition to ponderosa pines and aspen, the Defrees’ forests include western larch or tamarack, Douglas-fir and others species.

“We like a good diversity of trees. It keeps the bugs confused,” Defrees said.

He said the overall average for the family’s woodlands is 89 percent ponderosa pine, 5.8 percent tamarack, and 4.3 percent Douglas-fir, along with some stands of aspens, oak and other species.

At another stop, Dean Defrees pointed out a mistletoe infestation, which he said is not the kissing kind of mistletoe.

He said mistletoe infestations choke off tree growth and destroy tree health, and the only way to eradicate it once a stand gets infested is to cut down the mature trees and leave only the young trees that haven’t been infested yet.

Unfortunately, he said there’s no market currently for the 12-inch diameter mature trees they’re logging to halt the spread of mistletoe.

Since 2006, most of the timber the Defrees family has harvested has gone into the pulp,  post and poles or firewood markets, with a small percentage sold for saw logs, due to the depressed housing market and foreign lumber competition, he said.

Normally, Defrees said, they like to do most of their logging in the winter when the ground is frozen, to minimize disturbance to the soil and plants.

However, in the case of the mistletoe-infested site, they are working hard to get the sickly trees harvested before the snow falls.

The Defrees’ approach to managing their forests could serve as a model for other landowners, said Bob Parker, Oregon State University Extension forester for Baker County.

“The thing that has always impressed me about the Defrees family is they always look long term,” Parker said. “They are very thoughtful, and everything they do is carefully done. They are about as fine an example of private forest management as you can find. They are really top notch.”

Following the woodlands tour, five-time world champion crosscut and M-tooth saw log cutters Jim and Bill Demastus gave a demonstration of their log sawing expertise and techniques with the different types of saws they designed and custom built to win the world titles.

The Demastus brothers demonstrated old-time timber falling techniques the hard way, with a crosscut saw and the speedier M-tooth saw.

“We won the world championship five times, in 1971, and again in 1980, 1981, 1982 and 1983,” said Jim Demastus.

He said the key to winning was having the best saw designs, which they developed through trials and experiments with different angles on the blades and different sharpening techniques, first with the crosscut saw, and later with the M-tooth saw, which was originally an Australian type of saw.