Most farm properties have a woodlot. Certainly many of us self-reliant types glean firewood from it but little else. Too often we don’t see that little forested acreage as a serious asset; it tends to be the hands-off part of the property. Let’s change that.

Trees play an outsize role throughout the Bible. From the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden to the Tree of Life in the New Jerusalem, trees figure prominently in story after story. Diminutive Zaccheus climbed a sycamore tree. Absalom hung his long locks in the boughs of a tree. Abraham dwelt by the oaks of Mamre. God prohibited the Israelites from cutting down fruit trees when they entered the land of Canaan. David procured cedars from Lebanon for the temple. Noah built the ark out of gopher wood. Jesus was a carpenter and died on a wooden cross.

Although pastured livestock dominates my farming rep-utation, working in the woods energizes me just as much as grass. Woodlands respond just as dramatically to the human touch as pastures do. Let’s dive in with some woodland principles.

Perhaps the most important principle is that any given acre can only grow a certain amount of biomass. The question is what kind of biomass is growing there. Several factors influence growth potential. In the northern hemisphere, south-facing slopes tend to be more limited than north-facing slopes because the hot afternoon sun dries out southern aspects. Northern aspects stay moist longer, encouraging more growth. Of course, rainfall, frost dates, and soil fertility influence growth.

Foresters measure trees by diameter at breast height (DBH). If you wrap your arms around a tree (tree-hugging, yes), that’s the dimension. Overall basal area is determined by the total square footage of all the trees’ DBH. In other words, if you took a measurement of DBH of all the trees growing in a given acre, you could figure a total occupancy rate or square footage of basal area.

Virtually every forested acre in the U.S. is overcrowded. If the optimum basal area on an acre is 80, for example, and it actually has 120, everything is being stunted. Weedy woods are the norm. What that means is that the acre’s carrying capacity has too many undesirable stems on it. Just like weeds in the green beans, weedy trees clog our woodlots.

A weed tree can be identified by numerous characteristics. The most obvious is disease. If it’s full of sores or dripping rosin, has a big split, or sports lackluster leaves—all of these indicate a tree in distress. Trees are living things and are susceptible to all sorts of diseases and bugs. Culling the clearly struggling trees in your woodlot not only reduces disease transmission to other trees, but it also opens up the canopy to give more precious light and soil resources to the remaining healthy trees.

The next culling criterion is deformity. Who among us isn’t awed by magnificent cathedral trees, growing straight and stately into the sky? But then nearby might be numerous crooked, twisted, slanted, doglegged trees that will never amount to anything. Culling those enables the remaining good trees to grow to their genetic potential.

The final culling decision rests in overall space. While we don’t want to turn our woods into a monoculture of a single desirable species, we also don’t want to stunt the good ones by allowing too many ill-fitted competitors to take up sunlight and soil resources. The rule of thumb for proper thinning is to select your keeper trees, measure their DBH in inches, change that into feet, double it, and cut everything in that radius.

“The rule of thumb for proper thinning is to select your keeper trees, measure their DBH in inches, change that into feet, double it, and cut everything in that radius.”

A 12-inch DBH tree that’s a keeper, then, would have a radius of 24 feet cleared and no more. As beneficial as thinning is, over-thinning is worse because deciduous trees have thousands of dormant buds up and down their trunk that can sprout if shocked with sunlight too fast. This is why you often see fuzzy trees in housing developments in formerly forested areas. The landscapers take most of the trees and leave a few pretty ones, only to have these residuals sprout suckers up and down the trunk the following year.

Limiting the thinning to the formula I’ve outlined maintains enough canopy shade to the residual stems to forestall this epicormic sprouting. This trunk sprouting ruins the lumber and destroys the tree. If you’re thinning aggressively, like creating a silvopasture out of a woodlot, you can leave nurse trees, especially on the south side, of keeper trees to protect them from sunlight shock. In about five years, after the keeper trees acclimate to the new level of sunlight, you can cull the nurse trees.

What I’ve described here is a process to maximize your forest potential. The problem is that taking the worst and leaving the best isn’t what modern Americans do. For a bit of history, think back to the Native Americans. For centuries, prior to Europeans coming, these indigenous people used small wood. Big trees intimidated them. Sometimes a village would spend a week stoking a fire around the base of a large tree to finally bring it down. Without steel, carving and cutting big trees generally wasn’t worth the effort.

Firewood, lodges, and baskets all utilized small-diameter material. The primitive forestall economy revolved around small dimensions. The routine fires lit by the Native Americans culled out diseased, weak, and smaller trees, leaving the giant ones to continue living. Their whole forestall relationship revolved around taking the worst and leaving the best.

When Europeans arrived, however, this incentive was inverted. If you only have stone tools, you work with bendable lightweight wood. But if you have a saw, you want the largest diameter material you can find. What for centuries had been a small-diameter forestall economy suddenly became a large-diameter economy. Cutting the biggest and best became the operative forest protocol and literally mongrelized our forests.

As a culture, we’ve now spent several centuries taking the best and leaving the worst; foresters call this high grading. What happens when for many years, you harvest the best and leave the worst to propagate? Any animal or plant breeder knows you want to select and hang onto the best specimens and cull the worst. Many foresters now believe America has literally lost the forestall genetics that grew those magnificent cathedral trees we see in heritage black and white photos of early lumberjacks. What a shame.

Proper stewardship mandates that we reverse this American tradition and restore the spaced-out and protected best trees in our woodlots. But how do you make such a policy pay? Must it only be a labor of love? Can we make culling profitable? Yes, and here are some ideas.

Firewood. As petroleum rises in price, wood heat becomes more desirable and affordable. One industrious young person with a chainsaw and truck can definitely earn a decent salary in most places by cutting firewood for sale.

Wood chips. On our farm, we chip the cull trees for our wintertime livestock bedding and compost it. That is literally the heart and soul of our fertility program. Nobody in America needs to buy fertilizer. All we need to do is get into our woodlots and upgrade them with judicious thinning by chipping the culls. An acre yields many, many cubic yards of material that can grow lots of soil microbes. Furthermore, integrating forestall fungi with pasture bacteria creates the most fertile biological soil community.

Just imagine if all the money currently spent fighting forest fires and buying petroleum-based fertilizer were diverted to woodlot stewardship. We’d build more soil and grow more fat earthworms than anybody can imagine. Biomass is the secret to soil fertility.

“Just imagine if all the money currently spent fighting forest fires and buying petroleum-based fertilizer were diverted to woodlot stewardship.”

Value adding. Carefully working through a woodlot can yield many special pieces of wood. A small, crooked cherry tree can be cut into rolling pins. Small trees entwined in vines can be dried and sanded for unique gnarled walking sticks. I just thinned a two-acre woodlot that yielded 100 locust posts for an electric fence, five feet long. Have you priced wooden posts at the lumber yard recently?

If you have or know someone who has an artistic woodworker’s eye, walk through the woodlot and flag especially artistic or interesting pieces. That way, when you’re aggressively running the chainsaw, you won’t inadvertently cut something for firewood that has decorative potential.

Specialty wood pieces offer all sorts of commercial potential. A bundle of small diameter sticks, for example, can not only be pretty next to a fireplace, but can offer a quick, small fire for some urbanite not wanting to tussle around big pieces of firewood. A lattice fence woven with small diameter branches is a beautiful way to functionally and decoratively define a garden or yard. Weaving grape vines into wreaths for front door adornment offers additional sales opportunities.

Rather than looking at our woodlots as the armpit of our property, we should look at our woodlots as a pot of gold and a gift from God. Leaving our woodlots in a healthier and more abundant state than we found them is not only economically beneficial for generations coming behind us, it’s a policy of stewardship—returning more than we take. That’s a good return on investment (ROI) for
the Creator.  //

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What would you like Joel to write about? Joel is always looking for reader suggestions on which topics to cover. Please email all suggestions to: re******@*********es.com.

Joel Salatin co-owns, with his family, Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Four generations of his family currently live and work on the farm, and his farm services more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets, and a farmers’ market with salad bar beef, pigaerator pork, pastured poultry, and forestry products. When he’s not on the road speaking, he’s at home on the farm, keeping the callouses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local, regenerative food and farming systems. Salatin has published 15 books, and he is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, granddaddy catalyst for the grass farming movement. He passionately defends small farms, local food systems, and the right to opt out of the conventional food paradigm.

Photos by Millpond Photography