 Welcome to another seminar series from the Blue Mountain Natural Resources Institute. I'm the Institute Manager, Larry Hartman. The Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute is a part of the Pacific Northwest Station of Forest Service Research and is also funded by the Pacific Northwest Region of the National Forest System. Our territory includes all of the Blue Mountains, including 10 counties in Oregon and four counties in Washington. The Institute achieves its success by working with its partners, which include federal, state, tribal, and local government agencies, as well as industry, environmental organizations, private landowners, and educational institutions. The Institute does three main types of activities. First, we offer educational activities and technology transfer, including seminars like this one. And we do research management tours, publications, videos, and we even sponsor conferences. Second, we conduct applied research, which is designed to meet real-world resource management problems. Third, the Institute serves as a neutral forum for discussing environmental issues so that people or organizations with differing opinions can get to understand one another better. This presentation exemplifies the Institute's goal of putting science to work. It's part of our ongoing commitment to bring science results to resource managers and to the general public. This seminar series is entitled Cottonwood and Aspen, Managing for Balance, Ecology, and Management, which examines the importance of cottonwood and aspen as components of ecosystem diversity. The last of the three sessions features speakers that discuss three subjects, cottonwood and aspen, economics and management, cottonwood and aspen management, and cottonwoods on eastern Oregon farms and ranches. I hope you find it interesting. This evening, our first presenter will be Paul Esther. Paul has a bachelor's degree in forest management at OSU. He has a master's of science degree in forest entomology from OSU. Paul is an extension forester. He's been with OSU Extension Service since 1980. He was originally in Coquille, and now he's been in Legrand for a number of years. And Paul will address economics and general management of cottonwood. Second speaker is Otis Lowry. Otis has a degree in engineering from Heinz Junior College in Mississippi and a degree in forestry from Mississippi State University. Otis has been with the federal government for 29 years. He's a civil culturist with a BLM, with an emphasis in fiery collagen reforestation. Otis will address the function of cottonwood and aspen management and economics from a federal viewpoint. Rick Wagner is a third presenter, and Rick has a bachelor's of science degree in forestry from OSU. He graduated in 1979. He's been a forest practices forester for the Oregon Department of Forestry in northeast Oregon since that time. He's a co-leader on the ODFW, ODF Cottonwood Education Project. And Rick is also a member of the Union County Rescue, Search and Rescue Team. And he was called out this week to help find one of our good friends, Roberta Bates, in the watershed up here, in the Legrand watershed. So thanks for that, Rick. Rick will address cottonwoods on eastern Oregon farms and ranches. And with that, we'll have Paul Esther come up and begin his presentation. Thank you, Bill. I'm going to talk about cottonwood and aspen, economics and management from the perspective of the private landowner, as Bill said. And my objectives of this presentation are to help people understand the basic concepts of selling aspen and cottonwood and to help folks get some idea of some general management guidelines for healthy stands. I think the first thing most landowners are going to ask themselves is, why am I doing this harvest? And I've put down a few ideas here. There are probably others. But generally, you might think in terms of what kind of income am I going to get from this harvest? And hopefully, I'm going to make a profit. Am I going to improve the health of an existing stand? You may have a stand that's been damaged from wind or ice or something like that, and you might consider going in sanitizing it, thinning it, cleaning it up. You might want to convert a stand that's decadent to a healthy new stand or create habitat for specific wildlife like piliated woodpeckers or maybe grouse habitat or pheasants or something like that. And you may want to eliminate a nuisance. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later on. Well, to get started, I might want to think about what the markets are in Northeast Oregon. We've got basically two markets. One is for chips, for paper products, both for low quality and high quality paper products. And that kind of depends on whether the paper mill has a digester or not. And I've listed three companies in Northeast Oregon that have bought chips in the past. There are other companies, the Warehauser Company, Longview Fiber, James River that are not actually located in this area but that do buy chips and they ship them or truck them down to generally the Portland area, West Coast. Generally, these trees have a diameter of about three to four inches at a minimum, 10 to 12 foot minimum lengths, and the prices run from about $20 to $32 per ton delivered. I think the important aspect here is that from what I understand from talking to folks in the industry is that those prices are at some point in time in the future are going to rival conifer fiber prices, which have been in the neighborhood of $40 to $50. Another market is veneer. Generally, this is used for plywood core stock. Boise Cascade has purchased cottonwood logs for this kind of use in the past. It's kind of a sporadic market. Right now they're not buying for veneer. Alpine veneer and Portland's also purchased logs and trucked them to Portland for veneer, which is usually cottonwood again. These are generally higher quality logs, but they're not the bigger trees. These are trees that are younger age trees. They have small diameter limbs, fewer limbs, and the kind of the wolfie, larger older trees are not good, do not make good veneer. So generally, though, the top diameters are somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 to 20 inches. As you can see, the price is up there. It's $40 to $45 a ton, so it's a better market price-wise if there is a market. Landowners that might be considering selling probably want to answer several questions before they actually go through the process of shrink it. Here we go. Oops, that's focus. Is that focus? Can you see it? Is that better? I can't really see it. So some of the questions they might want to ask before they go through the process of selling their wood would be, what are my goals and objectives for doing this sale? What's for sale? Do I have a plan, a silver cultural plan for this forest? How will the timber be sold? What's the bottom line? What can I get? What's my net to me? What is the hard value worth the other soft values? I'm going to go through each one of these in a little bit more detail. What are my goals and objectives? There's probably lots of different goals and lots of different objectives, and I've just listed some here as an example. In terms of long-term goals, ownership goals anyway, we could grow timber for profit, either for fiber or for veneer or both. We could try to produce cover for things like pheasants, rough grouse and white-tailed deer. We might have a cottonwood forest or an aspen forest that we use as a recreational site. We may have a stream through it. We might like to bring our family there and have a picnic or whatever. And we may want to hold it as an investment. Our sale objectives on this side could be we want a net top dollar for the sale. We want to get a fair price. We want to minimize the hassle. We want to complete the sale as quickly as possible. We might want to follow our civil cultural plan. We might want to just improve forest health. The point here is that these two need to match up. If we have a long-term goal of things, something like personal or family recreation, and yet we want to minimize the hassle and hurry up and get this thing over with as quick as possible, you can run into conflicts. You may not be satisfied down the road after the sale is over with what actually came out of this because it does take time and effort to do a good job. So the point is to prevent conflict, these need to be compatible, at least need to think about them. Okay, what's for sale? Listed here are just a few things that you could think about in terms of getting some kind of an inventory for your particular forest or thinking about selling. We look at species. A lot of these stands have conifer species that are scattered through them, and you have to decide, are you going to sell those conifers with the aspen or with the cottonwoods? Generally, the conifers are going to be worth more, and you need to decide whether they're going to go or not. And also, you don't want to sell them at the same price as the cottonwood, for example. What's the quality? Do you have veneer logs or just chips or both? You don't want to sell veneer logs for chip prices. You want to get an estimate of the total volume, and that relates total volume and also per acre volume. That relates to you knowing something about the value of this timber you're thinking of selling. It helps you get a fair price, just like anything else. It's also used as a bargaining tool or a marketing tool you can use with the buyers. The more information you have and the more knowledge you have, the better able you are to get a fair price. Some knowledge of the defect in a stand is important. If you've got a lot of defect, you don't want that going to the mill. You're paying for the logging, the skidding, the trucking, and all that, and yet when it gets to the mill, you don't get paid for it. You only get paid for the net, merchantable value or volume of that timber. If you knew that, if you had a high defect, you might want to leave that in the woods. It has other advantages anyway. And then average diameter and piece size of the logs relates to logging costs. Small timber is going to cost more to log than larger timber. How's the timber going to be sold? There are different ways to sell timber or logs. You can pay... Usually there are two basic ways, stumpage and delivered logs. The owner, in a stumpage sale, the owner's paid a price for the trees on the stump. The buyer arranges for the logging and the transportation, and the price then accounts for that logging and transportation. Delivered logs, on the other hand, is where the owner or the seller sells the logs delivered to the mill, and the owner then has to arrange for the logging and the transportation. There's more risk involved there, and there's also more effort and time and knowledge on the part of the seller. But usually they get a more net profit as a result. The point here is that there are different ways to sell timber. There are advantages and disadvantages of these different ways. And it depends on the landowner's interest, experience, and the amount of time that they have in terms of how they want to do that. That's pretty much landowner-driven. What is the stumpage recovery value? This relates to the net to the landowner. That's just the mill delivered price minus the sum of the logging costs, the trucking costs, the taxes, the state and federal tax, and the administration of the sale. That equals the stumpage recovery value or the net. In this example, we can see that you've got $32 if you're getting $32 a ton delivered for fiber logs, subtracting $25 a ton for logging, $4.40 a ton for transportation. In this case, it's a 100-miles round trip, and you can also do it by minute or hour. Plus $0.50 per ton for the state tax. I didn't include administration or federal tax. You come up with $2.10 per ton net to the landowner. If you take a truckload of that, a truckload of haul of about 25 tons, multiply that times the stumpage recovery value, and you get $52.50 a ton. Of course, as the distance increases to the mill, if you maintain the same price, your stumpage recovery value is going to go down. What are the hard values, worth the soft values? We've talked a lot about the benefits of Cottonwood and Aspen throughout this seminar series, and you could weigh the wildlife, the visual, the water, the filtering benefits of retaining Cottonwood and Aspen with the net dollar you get, whatever that is. The bottom line, then, is a stumpage recovery value less than, equal to, or more than the value of these other things. That is up to the individual landowner to decide it depends on their perspective of this whole thing, also their values. I don't think there's any real right answer as long as you're within the law. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about silvix and management. Silvix is the biology and ecology of the particular species we're talking about. This relates to the tolerances this species has to things like moisture, light, and temperature. Excuse me. So, in other words, like I said, it's the ecology and the biology of the tree. And there are probably a lot of different things you could put down here, and I just selected what I thought was probably the most important, which I'm sure there's differences of opinion. But anyway, you see some ideas just for food for thought, I guess, thinking about this. But for Aspen, some of the key things are that it's intolerant of shade. It needs open conditions to regenerate. It resprouts readily from fire or logging disturbances. And it's important to note, I think, from what I've read anyway, that this is related to the amount of overstory you have. The more overstory you take off, the more sprouts you get. The other part of that is that in decadence stands unhealthy trees yield unhealthy roots. And so the longer you let these stands go and become decadent, the more difficult it's going to be to get your regeneration or your sprouting. And I've heard it over and over. We need a limit browsing to successfully regenerate Aspen, at least in the Blue Mountains. It does respond well to thinnings, at least studies in other parts of the country have shown this. In one study, they got a 42% increase in diameter growth as opposed to not thinning. It prunes itself very well, naturally. It has a low resistance to stem diseases, which is important in terms of wounding. It's resistant to conifer root diseases, which I got from Otis. So that may have some implications for managing it in primarily conifer stands. And in looking at wildlife habitats and managed forests, I counted 151 species of reptiles, birds and mammals that use Aspen, which is about 40% of all the wildlife species in the Blue Mountains. So it does have a significant wildlife benefit. Cottonwood has some similarities and some differences. It's intolerant of shade, same as Aspen. It regenerates by seed, by broken shoots, and you can also use rooted cuttings and non-rooted cuttings. You need exposed mineral soil for regeneration, successful regeneration, particularly with the seed and the broken shoots. It's sensitive to vegetative competition, and if you want to get cottonwood established, you need to do something with that competing vegetation, at least in the establishment phase. It has rapid initial growth, heights of 4 to 6 feet per year, diameters up to 6 to 8 inches in 8 or 10 years. So it grows very rapidly initially. It has a low resistance to stem fungi. That can relate to if you fall it, and you're logging it or whatever you fall it, and you don't get back in there for a year, it could have quite a significant amount of rot in it. And also for wounding, it's important. And it responds also well to thinnings. Just as an exercise in kind of generating some discussion, I put down some options, I guess, we call them. First for aspen, one with a timber production objective and one with more of a wildlife water aesthetics objective. Under timber, both for timber and for the wildlife water and aesthetics, in order to regenerate the stands, you're going to have to use some kind of even-aged management silver culture. You're also going to have to manage the browsing. But for timber production, doing things like thinning young stands before they begin to compete to the point where they slow growth, removing the poor quality disease trees to promote quality trees down the road is going to be important. Limiting stem damage and promoting conifers and root rot pockets may be some ideas for managing in terms of timber production. In terms of the other, leaving snags and recruitment snags, different sizes, in terms of diameter and height, creating several age classes between stands. Different wildlife species use different age classes of aspen. So if you created different stages of development of aspen on your property, if you had a large enough property, you would increase the diversity of wildlife. And promoting the understory allows more diversity at the forest floor level and vertical diversity plus cover, plus perhaps food, which would enhance wildlife anyway. Cottonwood, comparing timber and a wildlife objective, timber, I think you'd probably want to go with an even-aged system on short rotations, particularly if you're interested in fiber production, planting superior cuttings, controlling, competing vegetation, and then thinning young stands, promoting quality, pruning selected trees. This tree doesn't prune itself naturally as well as aspen does. So pruning for veneer, for example, may be something to think about and limiting damage. With wildlife, you could have a fee-hunting operation, for example, and some of these stringer cottonwood stands provide good habitat for things like pheasants and also whitetail deer. And in my opinion, it's just an observation. It seems like whitetail deer are on the increase and there may be a potential for fee-hunting whitetail deer in the Grand Ron Valley or other of these valleys in northeast Oregon. Again, snags, some new, some old. Some older stands, but also some newer stands to create that diversity, edge effect, and so on. Plant more acres equals more habitat. Keep density moderate to high for the cover for both game birds and for deer. I think it would be important, but that's also, at the higher levels is going to shade out your understory, which could, there's a balancing act, I think there. Okay, I'd like to say a couple words about nuisance management. It's not my term, I stole it from somebody else. But this is a very real situation that a lot of landowners have to deal with and that is some of these stands are older, stands of cottonwood. I've got dead tops and are declining, and you see them all over throughout this valley and also in Olao County. And those branches during the winter come out, fall on the farmer's field and get some cotton to swath her. He's trying to hay. Other farm equipment has, he's got to deal with that. These stands shade his crops and lower his yields and they may damage fences. They fall on the fences, cattle get out or sheep or whatever, and then he's got the cost of repairing them. I don't know what the solution is, but one idea would be to grow short rotation cottonwood along the fence line, or along those crop lines and along the fences. And then older stands next to the stream. Now some of these stringers aren't that wide, but some of them are and you could maybe do that. In doing that, you keep the heights down along the field with those shorter rotation trees. And then if you, and the other aspect is if they're younger trees, they have smaller branches and they don't break off as easily, or as often as older trees. Then you could also thin heavier along the field to allow more light through there. Of course it depends on the orientation of the stream and to the field and so on, but that's one idea. But also you could weigh the benefits of the trees in terms of its wind buffering effects for reducing soil erosion on those crop lands, protecting cattle from cold winds in the wintertime, and then snow management, orienting or growing cottonwood so that you control where the snow goes instead of on the road it's in the field. This just gives you an idea of my attempt at artistry, which is pretty pathetic. One thing I noticed, I forgot to put my water in the stream. But if this is north up here, then the sun is going to be in this pattern. And what you could, this is kind of carrying on with the same thought. You'd have the older stand next to the stream. You have some snags, some larger trees, provide shading, stream bank stability, the wildlife habitat and so on. And then in a strip along the field, this is the field over here and this is the fence, you'd have short rotation trees growing denser towards the larger timber and spaced out towards the field. Just an idea. In conclusion, from folks in the industry, it's their opinion that all fiber is going to be growing in value, that as that value increases, I think there'll be more options available to folks. There'll be more money involved and so we'll have more dollars to invest in things like multiple use practices on these cottonwood and aspen stands. Plantations may be much more attractive financially so we'll see just more stands developed or grown. And if landowners are considering selling, I think it's important to weigh all the benefits, both the soft benefits we talked about for the environment and the financial benefits and think about that in the long term. What's that stand going to be like in the future? Where do you want it to go? What are the values going to do in terms of as far as the timber quality and its production in terms of tons per acre or whatever in the future? But think long term. And if you decide to sell, then if you follow the steps and we have some publications that can help there too, you'll have a successful sale that meets your objectives. Okay, thanks, Paul. I'm sure there'll be questions later. Our second speaker then will be Otis Lowry and Otis is with BLM again and he's going to talk about management from a public viewpoint. Thanks, Bill. I want to just give you a few ideas tonight to think about and my perspective is going to be from the BLM point of view. However, I'd like for you to look at it for its pertinence and applicability to all land managers. I want to start by reading a paragraph from the proposed Sand County Almanac and then I'll give you some general functions, important functions of cotton, wood and aspen in the environments in which they grow and then I'll talk about a management strategy we're considering, some things we've already done, their success and cost, which we'll get us into a little bit of economics, not much, and that'll wrap it up. So let's start by going to Madison, Wisconsin on March 4th, 1948. The essay is The Round River. The outstanding scientific discovery of the 20th century is not television or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little is known about it. The last word in ignorance is the person who says of an animal or plant, what good is it? If the land mechanism as a whole is good and every part is good, whether you understand it or not. If a biode in the course of eons have built something we'd like but do not understand, then who but a foo would discard seemingly useless parts to keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. So in our hoped for intelligent tinkering at the BLM, we decided to keep the cog and wheels of Aspen and Cottonwood. It's a new thing for us, hardwood, civil culture, hardwood management. Let's look at some of the things that are important to us and I think to everyone as far as the function of these species in their environments. Looking at the streams, riparian zones, we find probably one of the most important functions of Cottonwood and Aspen in providing for fish habitat, shade, woody material and insects for the fish themselves and something that's really important that really impressed me is water storage. If you look at a riparian segment, a stream segment that's quarter mile wide and a half mile long and 25 feet deep, you can store about 35% of that volume, can be water, can be stored water. If the stream is on the surface and the area is vegetated with Cottonwoods and Aspen, other hardwood trees and shrubs, you can store up to 687 acre feet in that area. If the area is eroded down six or eight feet, there's no Cottonwood Aspen, there's no other hardwood trees, no shrubs, you're looking at 135 acre feet in that same area. It's amazing. You can store huge amounts of water in a healthier riparian zone, a place where Cottonwood and Aspen are growing. An engineer friend of mine with SCS was quite taken by that. Below ground storage and no dams and no maintenance and whatever. When you look at that, you have to realize that there's been a lot of research done in that area. In the Prairie States, they found that as Cottonwood declined and left the riparian zones, that prairie grass came in and took over the site and they had massive erosion. They could tie that directly to the retreated Cottonwood. Looking at Cottonwood, not only in the riparian zone, in the stream zone, but also in the uplands, it's really a key wildlife habitat for birds and animals and that's really important to us in our wildlife management programs. Look at Aspen, for instance. Rough grouse populations can be tied directly to Aspen populations, almost one for one. Sharp tailed grouse, we'd like to reintroduce those birds, we'll make it an attempt, riparian zones with Cottonwood and Aspen are very important to those birds. White-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, riparian zones with Cottonwood and Aspen are upland stands to provide important habitat for those species. Something that we're really starting to look at for probably the last 10, 12, 15 years are the roles that these bird and animals play in the health of the upland forest as well as the riparian forest as well as the farmland or the grasslands and a species that comes to my mind is the flying squirrel living in a Cottonwood cavity and transporting mycorrhizal fungi into the conifer stand and that's really important we're all becoming aware of that or if you look at a barn owl family living in that same Cottonwood tree in another cavity they might consume anywhere from 12 to 1400 ground squirrels from nearby field or pasture but a lot of interrelationships between the birds and animals that utilize Cottonwood and Aspen as habitat it's really important habitat an interesting fact about palatability and nutrition from Cottonwood is I read that you can feed livestock up to 48% of their diet with Aspen pellets and they don't lose weight you can maintain them and that was really interesting to me if you look at some other functions of Cottonwood and Aspen they're a real buffer in our forest they buffer insect disease impacts and also they're really important fire breaks they buffer the spread of wildfire Aspen is identified as one of the very best green fire break species probably historically we had a lot of Cottonwoods and Aspen in our major stream zones and in our side draws intermittent streamed areas and within our stands and this broke up the continuous host type for insects we all familiar with the situation in Blue Mountains with the defilterators and the continuous host type well Cottonwood and Aspen an opportunity to break those continuous host types up as far as disease organisms, root rots Cottonwood and Aspen are a good species to go in those pockets of root rot to provide structure and all the benefits of a hardwood forest getting back to fire we have a lot of continuous fuel loading we talk about continuous host types for insects and with the next breath we talk about continuous fuel loadings due to the absence of fire in our ecosystems and stringers of hardwoods in particular Cottonwood and Aspen provide valuable fuel breaks to break up these continuous fuel loadings so that we'll have a chance to catch a fire in these large acreages so there's a lot of benefits to Cottonwood and Aspen the functions they serve and the environments in which they grow provide a lot of different things and the area of water storage and really interesting fact is beaver can really dramatically increase that water storage when they're put back into the system but you've got to remember that beaver eat about 4 pounds of bark a day takes about 200 Aspen to keep one beaver going that's where you come in to keep your water system going and put beaver you might lose your whole investment let's look at a management scheme that BLM is proposing we're looking at an inventory process which everyone should do to find out where your populations of Cottonwood and Aspen are and then you need to map those and then it's really handy to have some kind of a database probably a computer database and then you look at these populations and creating what we call mother stands or mother plantations and what we do is by mulching or fertilizing or pruning or burning or harvesting these stands we encourage sprouting and we'd also need to protect them from browsing like Paul talked about and what you do is you go into these stands after you've done this and you collect plant materials seed and cuttings and you propagate them in a nursery or you take them directly to the site and take cut limbs and stick it right into the water of the creek and what you do is you bring that material back to the same area that you got it from and you begin to repopulate your environment with Cottonwood and Aspen in the places that they historically grew so interesting things to look at is you need to go to a specialist and talk to them about this procedure because I'm just hitting the top of this and one thing about Aspen is you need to keep it within two degrees north and south or about 120 miles of the location that your material came from so if you collect material, seed or cuttings, it needs to go somewhere within that two degrees north and south these are some things that people can tell you about at BLM or State Forestry or Wozze Cascade, people that are working with these species in the case of Cottonwoods Cottonwoods have both a male and female tree and the males tend to cling to the drier sites and the females to the wetter sites you find the females more in the upper parts of your draws the males in the lower parts and so you need to collect material propagate it, go back the next year see what sex the tree was try to get the other sex from the same area and move it also you need to be careful to put males back on dry sites and females back on more sites and that's what we're looking at doing as we build these new mother plantations you know, spreading Cottonwood and Aspen out into the other parts of their environment we have to get a little bit into economics and so let's look at some things we've done in the past we have about 50 exposures on the Baker Resource Area of the BLM and we've done a lot of work with hardwoods in those exposures and with really good success we have quite a bit of Cottonwood mostly from cuttings we have some Aspen from seed we did some work in the Doobie Mountain Law Fire we fenced about 1500 acres and revegetated 4.5 miles of stream we put in about 20,000 plants 3,000 Cottonwood 3,000 Aspen and 1,000 Cottonwood looking at cost these plants the Aspen were from seed, collected in that area and grown at a local nursery and then taken back to the site and the plants the Aspen and Cottonwood that were from about 3 feet high cost 60 cents a piece we used inmate labor to put them in the ground and that cost us about 3 cents each had you done that with a contract on the open market it would have cost about 10 times that much we did do 125 Cottonwood we grew them 2 seasons to 8 feet tall for structure and they cost $12 a piece so it's not cheap and what we're looking at in the economics of Cottonwood and Aspen management is we have to have a lot of input in the beginning our stands are really few and in bad shape so it's going to take a lot of input to get them back we'll have some immediate output or gains in wildlife habitat water storage those kinds of things we're going to our streams and we're bringing the water table up reforesting with Cottonwood and Aspen other species and seeing immediate gains in wildlife habitat and so you do have some immediate gains we hope in the future to look for forest products gains to be able to go in these stands and to recycle these stands by harvest and encourage the suckering and production of seed and healthy plants I think that it's an area well worth pursuing and we plan to pursue it and welcome any questions stop by the office, see what we're doing we're pioneers and beginners and learning as we go so we encourage you to ask us some questions thank you our next speaker is Rick Wagner from the Oregon Department of Forestry I'm going to get to ask the first question when it comes to question and answer I want to find out where Otis looks to find out what sex these trees are they're male or female here I'm going to probably pick up a little bit where Paul and Otis left off on the discussion there I want to give you a little bit of background about how the Department of Forestry got involved in some of this during the early part of the 1990s we began receiving notification of operations for Cottonwood harvesting because in the state of Oregon anytime you harvest a commercial species you have to go through the Department of Forestry notification process and that triggers a couple different items one is that we check to make sure that we're not winding up with damage to a resource out there, there's some rules that have to be followed and then in certain cases oftentimes there's some harvest and severance tax that has to be paid and although there was hard cash to the landowners as Paul identified for the Cottonwoods in Aspen we're going to see those values very minimal if you get to thinking about how much wood is on a log truck and you look at $52.50 at this stage of the game that's not a lot of money and we saw a lot of folks taking advantage of this situation though to harvest trees in certain areas and they took advantage of this due to the perception that as Otis said, especially reading from the San County Almanac there a lot of people's belief that there were very minimal benefits across the diversity of values and objectives primarily on the private lands and I'm going to get into some of this stuff but I want to primarily focus on the ranches and the farming here in eastern Oregon for some of you folks you may even be in that realm and so day in and day out you're trying to drive an income from that property out there so in essence we saw a lot of operations taking place and I think one of the main reasons we saw them is because for many folks they saw as Paul identified these trees basically as nuisances and we'll visit about that a little bit anyway in the spring of 1994 several foresters, specifically forest praxis foresters and biologists from the Department of Forestry and Department of Fish and Wildlife came together we were looking at a variety of issues but one of the issues we were specifically discussing was this the cottonwood issue, the harvesting and those different things it turned out many of the folks that took part in that discussion were not only foresters and biologists but they were also landowners in different areas like myself my wife and I own a small ranch out there at Lad Canyon and on that ranch we've got about three acres of cottonwoods in the intermix with some other stuff we have there so we had both, for some of us we had both professional biological interests but we also had private interests that took place there and one of the primary fundamental issues that we focused on was the fact that historically there were a lot of these values as Paul talked about these soft values that were not easily quantified they were not easily identifiable especially relative to other facets of farming and ranching and oftentimes those values were looked at as being nuisances rather than some kind of value as Paul showed up there had this cost of when he ran those figures $52.52 or $0.50 a log truck load of for cottonwoods versus these soft values and how do you weigh these, how do you do that and so ultimately the issue was based on how little money actually these trees were really worth versus a question of are they worth far more to a farmer and rancher if left and propagated and effectively integrated and I think that's a key word into the overall farming and ranching operation how could we integrate these species into the farming and ranching operation and actually do better farming and ranching and I think there's some things there that will identify here in a minute thus there were several of us that embarked on this project to basically quantify some of these intangible values you know if somebody says I'm going to give you so much money for X number of wood that's pretty tangible but how do you come up with a dollar figure of how much snow gets trapped in a cottonwood stand how do you quantify that sort of stuff and so we wanted to take a look at that and basically come up with an informational and educational tool to help landowners better evaluate the true value of the commodity of those trees you know especially before they virtually gave them away believing that they're essentially valueless and so what happened was a lot of these folks in their mind they say well you know we're convinced they're causing us all this problem and one of these days I've just got to go out and I'm going to have to get out and take care of all those I'm going to have to get them all cut down and all of a sudden somebody shows up in their doorstep and says hey we'll give you a couple of pennies for those trees and you know they're sitting there going okay now let me get this straight I don't have to go take care of them and you're going to clean it up and you're going to pay me a little money on top of this and so people were kind of getting excited about that and so tonight as we jump into the heart of this and I think what I'll do for the screen I'll put the basic script over here where we can flip it up for folks taking notes but I'm going to put my script over here because I've got all the little squibbles on here I want everybody to see all the little notes I'm making but I'd like to share tonight some of those benefits I'm going to go into considerably more depth but some of them are going to be the same that Paul and Otis shared but specifically more to farming and ranching to an operation that maybe you some of you folks that are here tonight may be engaging in it but you might evaluate those against what you're doing personally and then and part of that purpose is to stimulate and motivate thinking about those trees on your private farms and ranches and again evaluate their true value as you can consider managing them for a variety of purposes again just a little tiny bit of background to not only my forester but just to the east of the mouth of the canyon Elaine and I are three kids there have a small ranch where we raise alfalfa horses, cows, kids raise a little bit of fuss and a little bit of cane from time to time but we have a good time but what's interesting out there and the reason I bring that up is because it turns out to be a fairly harsh climate out there there's nothing like a good old ad canyon wind 20 below zero and wind coming in horizontal sometimes let the kids out the front door and you want to make sure you've got a rope on them or you've got to go pick them up in the marsh against a fence someplace after a big blow down there so that might be too small ok, we'll hold off on that anyway to jump into that and I'm going to re-emphasize a couple of these mainland owners have traditionally not favored the growth or establishment of these the cottonwoods or assmen and specifically here for a little bit I'll be talking cottonwoods because of the reality that they are brittle they wind up in irrigation ditches on fences as Paul said can get out there in your pasture where you're trying to mow hay and there's also been a perception and it's actually been a perception that has been promoted by historic government documents that these plants transpire an incredible amount of water and there's a truth to that but the belief was that if I could get rid of all these trees I would have more water available for my irrigation needs and there's a little bit of a relationship there but it's interesting as you talk to some of the scientists that it's not as easy as just that there's some other things going on there so we heard that a lot we've got to get rid of these cottonwoods because they're taking all the water out of the creek and they haven't got any water for irrigation but anyway so those were some of the negative things but as we talked about there's a lot of other beneficial things that we believe that are a significant benefit to the landowner and the landscape in many ways that basically haven't been well understood and ultimately fully evaluated and really can equate to increase profits to the farmer and the rancher we're talking specifically cottonwoods and aspen in this series but bear in mind there's other species that also can fulfill many of these functions so the willows some of the other things there so it's not specifically limited to that so basically what has been traditionally viewed as a nuisance as a pain, as a hindrance to the farming and ranching operation may in disguise and I emphasize that may in disguise be a benefit if it's properly managed and integrated into that operation so I'm going to go through and list some of these things some of these are going to be a little bit about what Paul talked about but again the groves of cottonwoods and other hardwood trees we talked about buffer winds that dry out and carry away valuable topsoil critical for production a lot of times we say that but we don't know what it really means until you live in a wind tunnel one of our alfalfa fields is just off to the side of one of these cottonwood groves and there's a significant change in wind velocity as you step about 50 feet from inside the grove to the outside to grow our soil out there is very porous we can wind up pouring a lot of water out there we irrigate every year but those stands of alfalfa that we have that are behind some of those cottonwood stands I don't have the water nears often because I'm not good that ground is not drying out Paul talked about on the crops he talked about some crops are very need a lot of light but it turns out in that particular climate out there I'm actually looking for some shade why would you need shade on alfalfa part of it is again that ground dries out so fast and we've got the warm temperatures out there but we're having a hard time keeping the water to the alfalfa and you can actually see wherever I have any of those trees you can actually look alongside of the field and you can see the height of the trees almost by the stand of alfalfa that's out from it there because it's a little higher I've even got a rock pile out in the middle there and as the sun goes over and that rock pile starts to cast a shade I have a better stand of alfalfa on the shade side of that so not only are we planting out there east-west rows of trees for wind but we're also basically going to start looking at planting north-south to pick up some shading from those trees because we're finding some advantages to that and I think it's probably as much anything a function of desiccating and drying out as opposed to keeping water in there again the trees, the other thing they do is they're going to provide privacy to your ranch, to your farm for sounds, roads, railways undesirable noises if your ranch house is real close to the road and you get to dust the inside of the house at all, you know what that's like those trees will catch a lot of dust and so they'll help out there again in those harsh climates when the wind's blowing out there hands can produce a significant impact to your feeding regime and to the stress regime that's on your animals and if you don't believe that you know next time take your jacket off take your t-shirt off and go stand out in the middle of the wind and then go stand back inside of those groves and then put yourself in the position of a cow I know, I haven't measured this but I'm absolutely certain we are feeding less feed per animal and there are folks next door to us that don't have any shelter for those animals I know we're feeding less feed and those animals are in better condition they go through the winter in better condition because they've got that buffer again behind again you've heard this before trees that are strategically located near homes ranch buildings, farming operations are going to also help your heating and cooling costs during the summer and during the winter it's going to be a significant difference there one of the things Paul talked about these trees they are brittle they break down a lot in a one standpoint you look at that and you say that's a real negative thing but often times if we take a minute and we stop and we look at that a little bit sometimes we can turn those negatives into positives we used to burn all that stuff that fell out of the trees and got in the way down there now in the spring we take a couple of days and we go through there and we've established some east-west brush piles that are basically wind rows and we've kind of tied them in there that also catches snow inside of those cotton wood stands but I also find the animal standing on the lee side of those and there's also brush that comes up through there and so there's a couple of benefits well the third benefit they also provide a lot of habitat for the quail and anything else that's going on in there we've also taken some of those brush piles and stacked those along the stream where we don't have fences for the livestock that actually keeps the livestock out of there because they can't get in there and step around all that slash and so we've got new plants growing up in there and that will take care of another problem I'll identify here in a minute the shade those trees if you've got ponds, stock ponds you've got some other watering areas in there they're going to help the evaporation on those hot days there's an incredible amount of evaporation that takes place and that shade is very important there a lot of those cottonwood stands Aspen other hardwood stands as may have already talked about are critical to fish habitat but one of the things we might not think of as landowners is the value that they are to the actual property in resale and it turns out that in some of the studies that actually side by side farms and ranches all things give an equal those with a fairly good stand of trees on there are worth about 30% more and because there's a visualness there there's an aestheticness there and for those folks that can buy in on what those trees are doing they bought in on that an interesting point talking to Errol Clare who was one of the fish biologists out of John Day there he told me in recent years he would get several phone calls from real estate agents and they had very wealthy clients that were looking for ranches that had a good fishery stream they had clients that wanted to buy those ranches for fisheries well you know if you're selling your ranch at some point in time you may like to see it kept in production maybe those folks will keep it in production but why not have a very healthy stream in addition to a very productive farm there's no reason you can't have that there are some farms and ranches in parts of Oregon and Clameth Falls specifically that are making a huge percentage of their yearly farm just from fee fishing alone fly in fishing to blue ribbon trout streams these trees will help will help you in in some of that developing habitat for that as Otis talked about the roots of cottonwoods and other hardwoods help to create a soil structure in the stream side that can absorb excess water runoff much like a sponge the water stored and released slowly become available later in the summer when water needs are critical in many cases the eastern Oregon streams have improved and to give you a simple example that I usually use this when we talk about landowners I said you know go over there to your house and rip off two pieces of gutter let's lay them on the back of the tailgate of the truck and let's put sponges in one of those and let's put nothing in the other and take a gallon of water and dump it down both of those and yeah you're going to get a lot of water down one but you get it all at a time of year you don't need it nobody needs all that water to irrigate in April and May what they need water on is later on but those sponges the root structure of the soil the things that take place in there wind up absorbing that and wind up releasing that slower over time so there's a very big value there I still yet to find somebody and I've talked to quite a few people who live eat and drink cotton woods and aspen to give me some actual numbers when we talk about transpiration versus evaporation and transpiration is what those trees take up and utilize and give off into the air versus the function of evaporation you know there's a shade over the tree again part of that's related to the fact that a lot of people say well you gotta get rid of these trees because they're sucking all the water out of the creek it's not that simple folks there's a lot more complicated and don't run out there and knife all the trees down simply because you think you're going to get more water from what I can tell even with some of the local professionals to deal with this stuff they know there's a variety of functions taking place but as as Otis said we're beginning to see that we're storing much more water with those than without them so I think that's very important for those of you folks that own farms and ranches on streams especially if you got valuable top soil every spring you probably fight loss of that property and that's pretty important and those trees can help buffer the erosive effects of those streams especially if you're in an area with a lot of ice that ice rips and tears away at those stream banks and pretty soon you start losing real estate and at the price of real estate anymore we can't afford to lose too much more of that real estate one of the neat things about cotton woods and aspen specifically is that they will regenerate fairly fast this year we finally got part of our stream fenced out for a little bit and I've got an area that's been chipping away every year at part of the bank there and it looks like within two years just naturally we'll probably have a pretty good stand of cotton woods to help buffer that corner there and so that's another benefit the groves help trap and retain significant amounts of nutrients and top soil if you've got a runoff situation taking place so they're actually holding that in a buffer strip cotton woods and other hardwoods not only provide snow breaks to critical portions of your farming and ranching operation but there's a lot of water that comes out of those snow drifts and as I saw in my alfalfa field I got about a quarter mile field I watched all of it, it would snow and we'd get about a foot of snow on the flat and then overnight it would be gone and I'd go over and look at my neighbor it was all stacked in his backyard well being kind of the selfish individual I was I thought well I don't think he needs all that water for his flowers I just soon put that back on my field back there so that's one of the reasons we have planted some of the east to west windbreaks there to try to catch some of that snow he's going to be happy because he can get into his house now but will also be able to trap a significant amount of water and keep that on the property there if you have a pond in a wind zone orient your trees behind that pond so that it catches snow drifts and you'll have that snow that snow drift to help fill your pond in the spring so there's some things there again it doesn't take much of a tree or anything to start stacking some of that up the cottonwood and other hardwoods again as they've talked about provide critical habitat for a number of game and aquatic species can often improve hunting but there's some other values that the public is becoming more and more engaged in you might not think of this but there are people out there that will pay a fairly sizable fee just to come in for photography or other recreational opportunities you know and sometimes I look at that and I go boy that's a pretty minimal use on the land if a person could derive some income and integrate that in with their operation so they might not have to work the land quite so hard that might be something to consider I know down south here in the Ironside country there's some folks down there that are deriving a fair amount of income just from that and of course those photography opportunities are based on the fact that there's some wildlife some other species taking place there to take pictures of it just appears to me on our small operation that farmers and ranchers need to basically take advantage of every opportunity that they can to you know to integrate different opportunities of money making things in there and as our urban areas get larger and larger more and more people are seeking if you will rural experiences whether that's on a farm or out in the woods and some people are willing to pay a significant amount of money for some of those experiences one of the things that we saw excuse me on our on our farm out there very dramatically was the value of these trees relative to predators as farmers and ranchers you deal with a lot of different things on your crops on your fields out there and sometimes it's hard to quantify just how many bugs a bird eats or how many squirrels and owl eats but I know when we bought that place out there we had quite a problem with the ground squirrels chewing up the alfalfa fields and you don't notice that until you start riding your horse out there you start trying to mow hay and every time you're mowing you're mowing rocks and dirt mounds and everything else and so I said I don't know how are we going to get rid of these squirrels and so you start thinking of the traditional methods of you know of different control measures traps and poisons and things like that and I was talking to Mark Hengem one day and this had to do with up in the woods and we were talking about the value of snags and I said well can you quantify some values to these snags to landowners I mean it's nice to see birds and they're pretty but what do those birds mean in dollars and cents to a landowner and he says well at this stage of the game we haven't done much up in the woods but we did do this study and I noticed that he alluded to that that they looked at a family of barn owls in the valley and over the course of that one year we consumed between 1200 and 1400 squirrels, mice, rodents that's one family of owls well I quit worrying about snags in the woods and I started asking him I said okay now how do I get a hold of and where can I buy a handful of these little owls and so Mark got me turned on to some owl nests and surprisingly enough we have a couple families of owls now but one of the things we did do out there is in most farms and ranchers there's what I call dead ground that's actually not prime farm we're not running the plows and the discs and the cedars and everything through sometimes that's near fences, sometimes that's near creek, sometimes that's near rocky seams out in the fields there and one day I got to thinking about that and I thought if those owls do so well maybe I ought to help them out because our fields are fairly flat out there I thought maybe we ought to stick a perch out there and maybe ought to put it right where the squirrels are and so when the owl sits on there he's a lunch-bucker right between his legs there all he's got to do is jump off there and so we did that Chris for my son and I we took some 55 gallon drums and cut the tops out of them rolled them out there filled them full of rocks and stuck some 20 foot poles in there with a crossarm and sat back and watched and we set those up on the edge of the fields where those squirrel colonies are I should have counted those but I know we had probably over 50 to 50 to 60 different squirrel families out there two years ago and as a result of some of the stuff we do we had a hard time finding some to hunt this last spring I figured we were down to probably 10 or 12 and we actually saw some of those predators hunting off those perches and so that was something simple to do I got Mother Nature working for me it's not costing me anything and we're making some we're doing fairly well there and that stuff we can see and we can quantify predatory relationships out there that we don't see that are very important basically and that's kind of the bulk of these things in a nutshell but in summary as farmers and ranchers there's natural processes that take place out there from the streams to the wind to a lot of different things that take place and those natural processes are very powerful and they continually affect what it is we do out there and often times as farmers and ranchers we find ourselves fighting those forces and they become a battle day in and day out and sometimes they tend to wear us down and one of the things that we tend to take a look at we talk about some of these forces specifically with the cottonwoods the issue is maybe if historically the reason why you're trying to get rid of those is because you believe they're a negative thing to your operation it might be an opportunity to take a look at those rather from the negative side to the positive side rather than fighting them try to figure out how you can integrate those into your operation to do better financially aesthetically biologically and overall have a better operation taking place there for you and so we believe that when closely evaluated many opportunities exist to cooperate with these natural processes specifically with these trees to manage operations in a more practical and profitable manner rather than try to fight those things so the value and benefits of cottonwoods and other trees and associated brush species we don't believe have been very well historically well understood or documented relative specifically to farming and ranching and so we throw a lot of these things out we're in the process of developing of cottonwood brochure we do have some handouts here for this group and if some of the other stations would like some of the information we have some stuff on windbreaks conservation trees, riparian buffers and if you'd like to write to Bill we can get some stuff to you there but as you decide to do different things with the commodities on your property we wanted to provide this as a tool with which to evaluate don't just jump out there and decide I'm going to strip everything off there because of some perceptions that everything's totally negative before you do that at least give that an opportunity think about some of the positive things that may be taking place out there after I personally completed working with these folks completing this project I started taking a long hard look at the stand we had behind our place and begin to look at it a little closer and the values that that actually provided us and the values of those cottonwoods are going to have to significantly increase beyond $52.52 a log truck load before I harvest any of those trees I may manage those a little differently I may cut some of those down but we will probably use the residue to bolster up some other portion of the operation whether that's a wind break or along the stream or buffering a corner of the stream with a big piece of wood to use that there so one of the very last things for you folks that may be motivated into doing some stuff through the watershed health program this last year and in cooperation with the private land forestry network department of forestry and several other groups and agencies we are in a process of constructing a fairly large cooler tree facility here in La Grande that facility will not just store trees but we're also going to be having a significant amount of tools educational opportunities videos and so basically if you decide you want to plant something on the property for whatever it is you want to plant it it's up in the piney woods or down in the riparian areas hopefully that will be a one stop shop if you're into riparian stuff or wildlife sort of plantings will obviously refer you to the fish and wildlife folks but a lot of that material we hope to maybe come through there and we're probably not going to let it get out of there until you have a good understanding of how to get it planted and achieve the best result for survivability because past years history has shown that we're getting a lot of mortality because trees aren't and hardwood trees and conifers aren't being handled right after they leave the cooler and with the tools and things we have there we hope to increase that it's going to be a significant facility the first cooler we're putting in has the capacity of a million seedlings we'll put another one close to it shortly thereafter that will probably be half a million so in the coming years there'll be a facility there to basically help folks propagate the different trees they want to handle there ran a little bit over time but that'll finish my talk and Bill I'll turn it back over to you here and we can go ahead and have the other speakers go up front there and Rick you just stay put and we'll have questions for you hopefully the audio bridges are hooked up and ready to roll do we need to push any buttons up here if anybody asks a question or you're just live, you're okay questions from the audience here in LeGrand and we can start here in LeGrand go ahead just push your button down once and then when you're done push it back up I have a question concerning site preparation for cottonwood cuttings we're trying to plant them out in our meadow and there's a lot of grass growing there and we've just driven them into the ground but the grass is probably not doing them any good what should I do about that several options your objective of course is to get rid of or reduce the competition and you can do that and the other thing if it's an old field you might want to think about whether that field is compacted from either we thought about clipping those on your nose but it doesn't stay on whether it's been compact or the soil's been compacted from maybe livestock years of livestock use or something like that that'll help loosen the soil and you get good root development one thing you can do when they're already in the ground and you want to you know improve the survival and growth of those trees about the only thing you could do that I can think of is a herbicide application and that may you know we can talk about what options you'd have there there are several that you probably could use but if you don't have them in the ground first I would recommend some kind of summer following almost to working the ground you know maybe an herbicide application of something like roundup or a cord to kill the grass and then some kind of plowing or disking working the ground through the summer so it's pretty much weed free when you go in the following spring to put your cuttings in one thing to remember in Cottonwood is like to have their feet in the water and so the first couple of years they get down to the water if you don't put them right in the water to start with we put Cottonwood right in the water and have good success is you need to water those trees and they are real susceptible to competition grass especially and so you can hand clear on each seedling you know hand scalp a spot and put your cutting in but the real important thing is water availability they really need to have water for success I might add to that a little bit again in the the harsh desert of Lad Canyon out there one of the things we did this year upon recommendation with NRCS and I saw some I scoffed at it when we first did it and now that it's done have seen some values there that I'm not even sure that they had quantified but we used and especially in a field operation this works very well the first thing you do is till probably about a 10 foot wide if you're planting them in rows and get that tilled up worked out pretty good get that sod layer rolled over and if you have an opportunity to even do that several months ahead of time then disk that again to kill that grass but we used a mulch mat and we used it's a 6 foot wide you can get at different widths and there's a machine that goes right behind the tractor it's a 3 point machine that that roll goes on and basically you anchor it down on one end there and then there's a person that sits back there and you can either plant the trees after you lay this down you can cut a little slit and plant it or you can plant your trees first lay it over and then as you as the tractor rolls forward and the stuff rolls out the person with the little can of spray paint as the tree goes underneath the roll he marks it with the can of spray paint and then the kids or whoever comes behind you cuts a little axe and pulls it up through there well I've done several things that particular mulch mat is dark so number one it warms the soil so your soil is a little warmer after the ultraviolet breaks down the fibers in there it will absorb water but it does not allow it to evaporate very fast and so it holds moisture in there and thirdly what we found was that when we plant those trees if we can create a little bit of a divot where those trees are and then set a rock pretty close to that tree when it rains it acts like almost a a guzzler situation and the water comes down and runs off that and focuses right into where the tree is and so rather than the water percolating all the way around the tree it's focused right around those roots and then the final thing we did is we bought the guts for a drip irrigation system and hooked that up it sounds like a big deal but it doesn't take a lot of money and effort to hook that up in that first year now again that may not help you out in the piney woods or along a creek but if you've got a ranching farming operation and you're trying to do something with that where you can get machinery in there I decided that was well worth the money it cost a little money but my survivability was extremely high on my caragana I had 100% survivability on my other hardwoods I was probably in the 96, 97% my conifers I was a little bit lower I was probably 80% but we had a lot of success with that one thing to remember in planting hardwoods is our first attempts on riparian planting we had long straight rows of cottonwood and straight rows of red-o's or dogwood and we were putting the cottonwood and red-o's or dogwood slightly away from it and the willow opened the bank but we realized that's not how these species occur in the natural world and so if you observe as you drive around how things grow together what they grow with and how they grow we started family planting cottonwoods, aspen red-o's or dogwood, willow and we found two benefits one is they seem to just do better together and the other one is they're more resistant to browsing if you've got a straight row of cottonwoods an elk or a cow will go right down that row and take them all if you've got a clump of 15 they'll just work around the edges you'll have some survivability so look at family planting look at putting them back in the site the way they occur naturally it was family planting not family planting family planting I had one small thing but Rick was saying there are mulch mats that are available if you want to plant if you have an area that you can't get machinery in and you want to use individual mats they are available that would do the same thing have the same benefits how about the remote sites, any questions out there? let's take some more from LeGrand then Rick have you had much success with farm and ranch owners with this series of arguments and opportunities and advantages the answer is yes but it's how do you quantify that oftentimes as human beings we want to see everything change overnight 100% and as human beings oftentimes it takes us a long time to get to a certain place and so sometimes it takes us a little while to change our thinking my personality is such that if you show me and if you can show me and I can touch it and I can see it and I can feel it and I know it's there then I'll give it a shot but something just don't change overnight but what we do see we don't see whole scale changes but what we do see is people trying a little bit at a time and they have incremental success they try more the real level of success is not going to probably come from government programs or laws ramming things down people's throat but individual landowners doing things and other landowners looking over the fences and going well Fred now what are you doing over there today and I've had several we're bordered by seven different landowners and at least two of them as soon as we get the solar pump set up our trees are growing and in the past they haven't had much luck growing theirs out there you know we've had to go we've had to do a lot of things but a lot of that is looking over the fence and seeing what's taking place and you know there's a there's a concern that you know governments out there trying to take over and so there's a lot of skepticism when the government's in there trying to tell you how to do things but when your fellow rancher is doing it your fellow farmer and if they're working out for them then people can buy into that and you know that's where we got some of our ideas and I think that's why some of these tours are extremely valuable out onto the private lands because those are the people that they haven't got huge million dollar budgets to try to make things work they got to work it off a shoestring and if you can do it off of there and make it work then you probably got something and so the answer to your question is yes not whole scale overnight but folks are doing some things more questions go ahead Rick you mentioned fee photography what kind of fear are we talking about I didn't this didn't come from the horse's mouth but the figure I heard on one of the one of the opportunities in south of here was in the neighborhood three to five hundred dollars a day for the opportunity to basically have access on to land and photograph large deer and elk and wildlife and aspens and things like this that's kind of shocking but if you try to if you try to load the family up go to Yellowstone to see the same sort of thing and somehow try to squeeze a spot in between everybody else taking pictures that's not too bad especially for a professional photographer that might make a significant amount of money off some of those pictures so again you know there's some opportunities there questions from the remote sites quiet out there hope the audio bridge is up can somebody let us know if the audio bridge is up out there in the meantime maybe somebody has to oh good for you great everybody else there is how about Enterprise okay go ahead when you're cutting back on the existing aspen stand what kind of openings can it be closure, density or whatever have you been using it's a good question I don't know the answer to that the question relates to the size of the gaps for regenerating stands I don't know we thought we just talked about that and we were thinking that perhaps something like a tree height might be enough by creating gaps that were about a tree height or maybe a height than a half for a minimum size might work but I don't really know I don't have any experience in doing that I know that we're trying that OSU is trying some kind of innovative things down in Corvallis and Mack Forest where they're using this gappy gappy clumpy sounds official it's very official but what they're trying to do is they're creating the different size gaps in the forest to see if they can get natural regeneration they're also planting some of those it's for more forests that have more diversity for wildlife and so on they've got a social part to it where they're trying to get people's perceptions of how they feel about those kinds of stands aesthetically and so on but also looking at the wildlife and the timber production but those gaps are about a tree height okay, thanks any other questions from remote sites? more from LeGrand are we winding down folks? go ahead Jim I have a question for Otis what about the BLM how receptive is the the line off the management and the BLM to really this kind of intensive focus and spending on cottonwood aspen? the rear was receptive and they've been really encouraging as far as finding some shortcuts and some cheaper ways of doing business the cut and poke method of cottonwood go cut a limb off and stick it in the ground so it's feet wet it's pretty cheap compared to taking and cutting and propagating you know getting root callus putting in the bear root nursery aspen, gathering seed yourself something as simple as scattering aspen seed on the upper part of an enclosure and let it wash down find its own place there's some limiting factors aspen and cottonwood seed is very subject to exposure it's real sensitive seed so you gotta know all about that some new fencing methods for exclusion of livestock until your mother plantation or your area where you want to get plant material is big enough to stand those kinds of pressures the ribbon fencing they're doing electric fencing etc they're real supportive there's not a lot of money out there to do this and they're real supportive of innovative ways to do this repairing pastures, changing grazing systems to support this kind of effort and we've got enough facts and figures to show downstream water users we can store a lot more water on the upper part of the watershed than we could before and so that gets us a lot of support from those kind of people Paul I have a question for you were those figures that you used were those realistic figures for the value of the cottonwood? it depends on the market and timing for example those are all prices that have we've seen in the past whether they're there today or not I don't know but because I do fluctuate quite a bit annually throughout the year different years during the season sometimes they're pretty close very very low prices unless you have a lot of volume well part of this Boise Cascade for example has been paying about I think I can say this close to $32 per ton in time for cottonwood but that's delivered to Umatilla and you've got quite a hauling cost involved in that and the hauling cost I used was for a 100 mile round trip well Umatilla is farther than that so your trucking costs are going to be higher so you can come out a negative pretty easily on that $32 but they're putting in a new digester over there according to the folks I've talked to and once they do that they can use the cottonwood for higher value paper and the price will go up and so then it becomes more attractive Bill along with that you know there's obviously a large process that takes place in order to to harvest trees whether they be cottonwoods or whatever and as a landowner makes a decision to do that especially where there's not a lot of value hard cash dollars they can't afford to have too many things go wrong during the harvesting operations and so if you don't pick the timing right if you don't judiciously select the right person with the right equipment to do the job by the time some of that heavy equipment meshes two or three culverts a mess gets left out there fences get torn down and a few other things that even more substantially is a disincentive to what everybody's to do and so you know if you are going to engage in that and there's certainly a lot of good reasons to do that you know make sure that you've got a pretty good handle on the process that's going to take place because it's just not something that magically happens there's big machines and things taking place out there and it can be done right and done very well as long as it's managed carefully but you don't have a lot of money to play with if something goes wrong to you know to recover damage from something you might look at is taking your cottonwood or aspen volume if you want to harvest the stand and encourage suckering so you can collect that material and move it to other places on your property you might look at large woody material we found a really good cheap way to slow the stream down to bring that stream back up as it comes up the water table comes with it so if you have an incise stream one is down there four to six feet, eight feet and you want to bring that up and spread out your water table and have more area for cottonwoods and aspen or whatever take your trunks and large limbs and just fill that watershed up with large woody material it really sounds crazy and looks crazy but we've had phenomenal success with just filling streams up with large woody material and then nature moves it around as the flood comes down and you find tremendous accumulations of soil, the stream coming up really fast and the water table rising and spreading out so if you want to increase your water storage on your place or right out in your field that material is large woody debris one thing about cottonwood aspen strips along your streams that I read as they've got studies that show that up to 80% of the runoff from your fields nutrients, farm chemicals can be trapped by these strips which is really important these days when we're dealing with water quality so much that's good any other questions from remote sites Paul had another comment here just briefly just to follow up a little bit with what Rick was saying and what I wanted to say was that logging in general if you ask somebody about logging costs it can give you it varies quite a bit actually it depends on the terrain how steep the ground is it depends on just a lot of things but one thing about these cottonwood strips is generally a little more expensive to log them because you have to change your landings more often than you would in a forest stand so that's something that could even erode your profit even a little bit more and the other point was that we do have if people are interested in selling logs and timber we do have information on how to go some steps to go through so you prevent these disasters that might occur in the woods we've got two or three different publications plus one on contracts too that would help forge an understanding between the logger and the landowner Any other questions from LeGrand? How about remote sites? Last chance On the mat is that better to use the mat? I'll let Paul maybe ultimately answer that but some of the chemicals that we wind up utilizing in the piney woods for the conifers you've got to be real careful on the deciduous and the broadleaves because some of those you know could definitely harm those I think if you're going to do that you'd need to very carefully check the labeling on that as well as check with maybe somebody that's had experience with that and Paul you might want to follow up on that a little bit Well frankly I personally haven't had a lot of experience in using herbicides on hardwoods and Rick is right you need to be very careful and read the label and so on there are some though that are registered for hardwoods and one of them is fusillade there's a couple of others but my recommendation would be they can be very expensive and to say one thing is better than another I can't tell you what the cost per acre is or per tree might be for some of these herbicides that are used on hardwoods but I do know the mats are relatively expensive on a per tree basis but you know the main idea is you know you have to look at the economics you also have to look at the benefit from using that particular technique for meeting your objective for weed control how effective is it the risks involved in using this whatever it might be in terms of damaging your crop in this case hardwoods I just think there's a lot of options and to say one is best better than the other it kind of depends on the landowner's objective I guess and how they want to go about it but certainly if you're interested in getting recommendations for herbicides and what they cost for this kind of work I can find out give me a call and I can let you know and same with the mats what kinds of options you might have in terms of cost one thing you might look at is be really careful about what your problem is a lot of times we look at a situation and we think that the problem is moisture stress and it's temperature and so you need to have somebody come out and look at your problem and see exactly what the situation is because you don't want to treat a situation that's not going to help you it's going to cost money come out and look at it if you don't know what's going on and say what do you think is happening here and get a couple of opinions and that will help guide you what direction to go as far as treatment that's a very good point one of the other things with herbicides that some folks have done and this might be more practical especially to hardwoods is pre-treating the site maybe often times a year before or a season before you actually plant one of the things I've seen if you do that you need to get some sort of marking little wire flags or something the elk isn't going to pull up or whatever because when you go to plant in the spring that ground looks dead just like everything else beside it and you don't actually see that until it starts to green up so it will help you some of those folks are actually pre-treating little spots all over the landscape maybe in the fall and then plant it in the spring if herbicide is the choice you decide to go and those plants are somewhat susceptible that might be a viable option get your grass killed but not have the residue there that will hurt your little trees one thing to look at also is we had some really good success with scalping and putting cottonwood in and then we planted these eight-footers and we were so proud of ourselves we had wonderful success and they looked phenomenal and then we came back after the first fall and deer had rubbed the bark totally off all of them not some all of them and so what we found out was you can take a strip of burlap and just staple it and wrap it around that area they like to rub and they don't do it so you're going to have to keep up with this all the life of the plant the whole new adventure for all of us is what it is great any other questions go ahead what about porcupines oh yeah porcupines are quite fond of aspen and cottonwood bark and I don't know we haven't had that problem yet so I think the solution is probably trapping and releasing the offender or eliminating the offender they tend to hang in the same area and work on all the trees any other animal damage critter you might watch out for they like to chew at the base of the not only conifers but hardwoods any other questions from remote sites hearing none I'd like to have you help me welcome or thank these guys for their presentations we're going to go home and go to bed