Q: What do the Ruffed Grouse Society, The Conservation Fund, Minnesota Forestry Association, Forest Capital Partners, and 26 other organizations have in common?
A: All have signed-on as sponsors of the upcoming Family Forest Stewardship Conference: Sustaining Our Commitment, Advancing the Agenda. If you’re planning to attend the conference and haven’t registered yet, please take a moment and do so now by visiting the conference web page.
I’ve often heard it said that while most family forest land owners don’t identify timber management as a top priority for owning their land, most do end up harvesting timber for one reason or another. Sometimes the reason is financial, and sometimes it’s because the forest just starts to fall apart and obviously needs help. Like a garden, forests need tending to be productive and stay healthy, especially absent natural fire regimes. After lots of thought and planning, my brothers and I have contracted for a harvest next week of about 300 cords of over-mature aspen off our 40 acres in Lake Ponto Township in southern Cass County. With the help of our private consulting forester, we’ve used the DNR’s Field Guide to the Native Plan Communities of Minnesota to identify the land’s native plant community used that information to plan our harvest and regeneration strategy. And so, despite the “timber shock” we’re likely to experience when we see the woods again in the immediate aftermath of the cut (see MyMinnesotaWoods.org for a good discussion and images of what you can expect post-harvest), I can feel confident I’m being a good steward of our woods.
Helping more of Minnesota’s family forest land owners be good stewards is the goal of the Family Forest Stewardship conference Blandin Foundation is sponsoring September 12-13 at Saint John’s University. More than thirty other organizations have joined us to embrace Vital Forests/Vital Communities’ ambitious goal to increase by one million the number of acres of family forestland in Minnesota under sustainable management by 2015. The work accomplished towards this goal in the past year is summarized in this Pre-Conference Backgrounder.
As we come down the home stretch to the conference, our hearty planning committee, including Dovetail Partners’s Katie Fernholz, U of M Extension Educator Eli Sagor, DNR’s Gary Michael, and MFA’s Bruce ZumBahlen, are nailing down the final details of what promises to be a lively meeting.
Besides foot tapping to the old time music of the Eelpout Stringers and touring Saint John’s Arboretum with one of my favorite Minnesota foresters, Tom Kroll, we’ll hear Pinchot Institute’s Catherine Mater and USFS Analyst Brett Butler discuss their ongoing research and new findings about what how most effectively to connect with family forest land owners. Most importantly, we’ll discuss – with your input – how to advance our agenda to improve stewardship on the 40 percent of Minnesota forest lands owned by families like yours and mine.
