High-grading
High-grading. Causes and Effects.
“High-grading forestry practices, which cut down so many healthy trees, leaving runts and bent ones to reproduce.” As stated from my speech.
High-grading is: the harvesting of quality trees from a given stand, leaving uncut the poorer-quality timber. A given stand can be a few-acre cluster of trees, or a forty, or thousands of acres cut by a timber company. Quality trees are: those having value to a timber company because that timber company can re-sell those harvested trees to another for some acceptable amount of money. So, the real issue is money, as expected.
Although times are changing, high-grading in the UP appears to be a common occurrence. To me, it is an amazing and terrible thing which has happened and is happening to the forest, and I wonder how it may come back to haunt us. But there is a current silver lining: state forests are much more valuable than those which have been high-graded, and this creates the trading opportunities which can create these parks.
High-grading is caused by the realities of the forest itself and demand for certain types of wood over others. Use drives demand, which drives profit. Biologically, junk trees are fine, but are of little use save as pulp, and therefore economically of little value. But I want to give you a concrete examples, because how can one say a tree is useless?
Let’s imagine a high-schooler or graduate male, who finds work in the forests here in the UP. He has learned much about the woods in his short years on earth. He can handle a chainsaw, and he’s quite healthy. He hires out as a jobber, as the work is called.. This is where he goes out and cuts down trees with his chain saw. Sometimes he has to work in the deep snow, sometimes in the cold, sometimes fighting the bugs.
His boss teaches him that they get better dollars if they get the straight trees. This kid can easily and quickly learn such a thing. I quickly learned it, too. If the kid produces straighter trees, he gets paid better. He’s getting paid by the piece, it is called. This kid develops an eye, and he covers the ground rapidly. Up and down the hills, around the swamps and swales. Now, can you see what’s happening here. The desirable, straighter trees get cut out, the poorer ones remain. The operation quickly moves on to another forty. If the kid cannot cut enough trees, he cannot pay for his new chainsaw, or new pickup. Or if he’s married with a new baby and young wife at home, he’s motivated to produce. So, the kid gets his job, but the forest gets butchered, high-graded.
But why are the straight trees more valuable? Because they do not warp, and warping happens to poor quality wood, wood that is not so straight. It means a twisting or turning of wood. One may have thought that warping is just what happens to “some” wood., but such is not true. Warping has a cause. And then afterwards there is a result.
Let’s focus on a specific tree. A leaning tree. Imagine, gravity pulling down on that tree for all of its existence. Just slowly sit back and think of this. If the tree is leaning, it grew up leaning. The heart of the tree is slightly off center, I might think. The forces of nature have always been pushing downward on an angle on this tree. Time passes by, and many years later, the tree is cut. Placed straight up and down, it looks OK. Someone buys it, it goes to a sawmill, and is cut up into nice boards. Next it is stickered to dry, still it looks OK. Let’s say, half of the moisture comes out of it.
Now along comes a furniture maker. He reshapes the boards, glues them into a chair, puts the chair in a showroom. The wood continues to dry, and time passes by some more, but in a dry place, and then suddenly the wood warps, because it was cut from a stressed tree. A leaning tree. The chair comes apart or looks terrible and reflects terribly on the chair maker. He did nothing wrong except think the wood was from a normal healthy straight tree.
He trusted the merchant he purchased from, but he was cheated. In response he will no longer purchase wood from this merchant. The merchant eventually goes out of business, well-meaning though he may have been Eventually, these humans learn. No stressed wood is to be sold. A form of trust evolves; straight healthy wood will only be purchased. Therefore it makes no economic sense to cut the crooked, kinky, knotty, disfigured, burl-line, whatever trees. They remain standing, and these stressed trees somewhat take over the forest. Then more time passes (20 years), and loggers come in again and take out more straight trees, again leaving the crooked, knotty, leaning, snaky trees. All it does is get worse. You end up with what is called “high-grading.”
If you multiply this one warped tree by the thousands, you end up with forests of poor quality, warped timber. Thus high-grading has become a practice, or way of doing business, with significant effects. Really mind-boggling effects. Effects that are just massive, so much so
that I don’t want to go into them, right now, anyway. A can of worms--it’s too depressing.
Further; the roads are a major issue here, too; because the log hauler must make money for his truck payments which come from the value of logs hauled out of the woods, and if the value is low as with poor quality logs, then he is in trouble. Now, if these roads are bad, it is hard on vehicles passing back and forth costing him more. I used to complain about these creatures, too; and believe me it is hard on vehicles. Not only did I complain, but logging truck drivers did, too. The logging roads can be very hard on an expensive logging truck, which costs around $100,000. The truck driver has to make payments too, which is another huge story. If the logging truck driver won’t haul the wood, what does this do to the kid with his new chain saw, it motivates the kid to cut more valuable trees.
An alternative method of harvest is: A trained forester inspects the forest and marks the trees to be cut. He comes back, to make sure the trees he marked are the ones cut. Therefore the jobbers don’t have the free rein in the forest, as the forester is really in control. But the forester has to be paid for his work, creating a job for him. But this means less immediate money for the owner of the forest. But notice the word, immediate.
Sometimes a forested parcel is in such a rough location that one cannot get either group, forester or high-grading, to come out to cut it, because supposedly nobody makes any money. It is spared the cut. But this is changing, too, as logging innovations come out, or the trees go up in price. Whatever influences the economic equation will affect the woods.
Spared forests are very interesting, and will be talked about extensively later. Actually, such spared forests are extremely important for you the reader to understand, as they are one of the foundations of the “Four Parks”. Yet my description here is only one way to describe it.
Now, I have taken you from our kid and high-grading directly to the Four Parks. But it is much more complex than this. But at least now you have a general understanding of high-grading.
A concluding thought to high-grading is: If the Four Parks sites were all quality timber, one could never create such a thing, because the timber companies would not trade this land away. So, the Four Parks will have many warped trees, to say the least. I don’t see this as a bad issue for what is gained.
Let’s not really conclude this topic after all, because there is more to explain. What is pulp? It is the bent, damaged. crooked, burly, knocked over, leaning, snaky, small stuff I mentioned above, and more. It is the leftover stuff in the woods. For a long time there was no market for this wood, but within the last 5-10 years some markets have developed for this wood, although the damage has already been done from high-grading.
It’s obvious that past practices (high-grading) are affecting matters today (we had approx. 70-50 years of this). I mean, now that a lot of straight trees are gone, the market for the poorer stuff increases. An analogy would be an ocean: when the big fish have been taken, the fishermen will go after the smaller “trash” fish.
So, the new practice is to cut down everything; this is called a clear cut. A tweety bird has little to land on after such an operation, and must pass along. Such extreme cutting has its own, often dreary story. Was this kind of land left after the Great Depression? A worm of a different color emerges from the can. But the topic depresses, for now, I have had enough, I must move on.