My reasons to grow trees is two or threefold: 1. avoid some natural forest be chopped down 2. avoid long distance transportation of wood from that natural forest 3. potentially earn some money if the lumber market is good enough at the moment that the trees need to be harvested.
The last point is contentious, because harvesting itself is costly (labor) while wood prices go up and down. Also, I have invested in buying 17,000 of the 1-year trees for about $5k and having a company specializing in this tree managing the planting and the growth over the first 3 years, so all in all I have more than 10k invested and an unknown yield. I may come out ahead, I may not. However, the vast majority of the value is located in the acreage so while I enjoy having a forest growing and the idea to offset some lumber harvesting from a far away country, I am realistic enough to understand that the real money maker is going to be the rise in real estate value of the farmland involved. I could have left the land fallow to avoid the risk with low wood price, but what is the joy in that? Cor. On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 3:49 PM Willie via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote: > > > > On 2/19/20 2:02 PM, Mark Abramowitz via EV wrote: > > Forests are important carbon sinks. > > I accept that my understanding of the carbon cycle may be imperfect. If > so, I'm sure I will be corrected. > > Trees are grown as a long term crop as I've read that the trees in > question were being grown. Just like annual crops of grain, vegetables, > cotton, etc. Growing, harvesting, planting occurs every year. Tree > fruit crops have a longer time frame. Most prunus, for instance, have > short lives of 10-20 years. Some nut crops, such as pecans may go > 50-100 years. Then they die or lose productivity and are removed to > allow the crop land to be reused. The "removal" is typically bulldozing > and burning. Here in the South, the predominate lumber crop is pine. > Pines may be harvested in as little as 30 years, perhaps as long as 50. > Then they are harvested and may be replanted. Highly likely, the land > gets "developed" into suburbia. Remote land may be repeated replanted > to timber over 100 years or longer. The production of timber removes > the carbon from the cycle only for a relatively short time. Worst case > is pulp wood which is likely converted back to CO2 months or a few years > after harvesting. Construction lumber may be removed for 50-200 years. > In essentially all cases the return to CO2 is from either burning or > rotting or combination. The only way I know that significant quantities > of wood can be removed long term is by burial. That requires glaciation > or flooding with sedimentation over vast areas. > _______________________________________________ > UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub > ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html > INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org > Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA) > _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
