Tree Farming: "Timber in the Northeast" ~ 1946 (Logging for Continuous Production)

more at http://quickfound.net/

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives or Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_farm

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

A tree farm is a privately owned forest managed for timber production. The term, tree farm, also is used to refer to tree plantations, tree nurseries, and Christmas tree farms...

As of 2019, an estimated 38% of forests in the United States are owned by families.

Notable corporations include Greenwood Resources, which is owned by TIAA-CREF...

The American Tree Farm System (ATFS) is the largest and oldest woodland certification system in America...

History

The American Tree Farm System was established in 1941 in an effort to promote resources on private land, ensuring plentiful fiber production for timber and paper companies. With declining virgin saw timber available, the industry began to promote forestry practices to ensure sufficient fiber production for the future. Prior to 1941, the majority of fiber came from industrial lands. The first tract of land labeled as a Tree Farm was organized and marketed by the Weyerhaeuser Company to help change public attitudes toward timber production and protect natural resources from forest fires and other natural disasters. The title of "tree farm" was chosen in large part because Weyerhaeuser felt that the 1940s public understood farming as crop production, and similarly tree farming was focused on producing more timber, with frequent replanting post-harvest. The early sponsors of the tree-farming movement defined it as "privately owned forest-land dedicated to the growing of forest crops for commercial purposes, protected and managed for continuous production of forest products." In the early 1940s the concept of "tree-farming" on private land was promoted by the National Lumber Manufacturers Association in an organized campaign to engage timberland owners in conservative timber production...

Current

Since 1941, the system has shifted to focus on whole stewardship, rather than strictly fiber production. According to the Standards of Certification for ATFS, woodland owners must own 10 or more acres and have a management plan. In that management plan, woodland owners must recognize wildlife habitat, protection of water quality, threatened and endangered species, and sustainable harvest levels. The certification standard is subject to multi-stakeholder involvement in the development and revision of the standard, third-party audits, and a publicly available certification of audit summaries. The minimum acreage to qualify for a tree farm refers to "woodland" i.e., forested land. So acreage which includes grazing or other non-wooded lands must have at least 10 acres in forest to qualify. Furthermore, programs in different areas which support tree farming activities may require larger forested acreages as well as additional criteria...

Tree farming and climate change

A forest sequesters carbon in its trees. The forest removes carbon dioxide from the air as trees grow and returns it to the air as trees die and rot or burn. As long as the forest is experiencing net growth, the forest is reducing the amount of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, from the air. Furthermore, if timber is regularly removed from the forest and turned into lasting wood products, those products continue sequestering carbon, while the replacement tree farm trees absorb more carbon dioxide, thus effecting a continuous reduction in greenhouse gas.

Because tree farms are managed to enhance rapid growth, a tree farm tends to sequester carbon more quickly than an unmanaged forest, considering only the sequestration side of the equation and not the carbon release due to rot, fire, or harvest. The fact that managed woodlands tend to be younger and younger trees grow faster and die less contributes to this distinction.

While tree farms absorb large amounts of CO

2, the long-term sequestration of this carbon depends on what is done with the harvested materials. Forests continue to absorb atmospheric carbon for centuries if left undisturbed.

The USDA has an online calculator for how much carbon is sequestered in various types of forests...