Quoted for posterity. You Sir, win my all my internets today! That poor Ford! LOL! I assume you'll give full disclosure to the next owner? Edit: that looks to be Silver, not Sugar maple?
Classic!!! Gotta do what ya gotta do! I once had to bring home a load of black locust in the Saturn. It was all gone before I got back with a pickup.. Loaded family car pics
Actually now that you say it it makes perfect sense. I have ONE. Count it. One tree on my property. Its a scraggly spruce I want it gone! Theres no sense in having a tree my daughter can't climb. id rather replace it with maples and apple trees. The thing is half dead. Also anyone who pulls down a tree and puts more up just has to have reason for hitting the reset button. Some trees just dont look great past an age.
Dang Fulltang! Silver is still gooder, and based on the pic of HOW MUCH you moved, that makes it even more gooder! :stacke::stacke::stacke: Awesome job, man!
There are places for trees, and there are places should not be. I get beaten up for cutting down as many trees as I do, but I plant (via seeds and opening up the canopy) thousands of trees a year. Ultimately they will grow into healthy trees that scrub more carbon dioxide from the air then a bigger unhealthy tree ever could. If trees lived forever, we would be having a different conversation, but like us, they don't. Talk to any forester right now and they will tell you a lot of people are refusing to manage their forests. This is downright stupid. Forests are vibrant and regrow. In twenties years we are going to look back on this current state of repressed forestry and just shake our heads at the stupidity of it all. As for the landowner...I don't think he is a duck at all. It is his land, his house, his window he has to stare out of everyday. Considering how much he pays in property taxes, to me it was his call. It was his tree to do as he wished. I am just glad some one off this forum got some use out of his tree and it did not go to waste.
One big problem with forestry and management is that so much land has been broken up into smaller plots (at least it is in our area). This makes it more difficult to manage a large piece of timber because now instead of one owner, one might have to deal with six or more. Then this also means that many more entry/exit points along with other problems.
Usually creates more "edge" as well. My acreage turns out to be the largest private-owned acreage holding in my township (AEP is largest holder). I don't say this for bragging rights...it's actually disheartening to me. Township is not really developed. Lucky to find an 80 acre intact tract here these days. Land is turning into just another commodity. My total acreage is just shy of 220 between 3 parcels that either touch or border with 95% of it being woodlands. I hope that it stays together when I'm gone. Good chance it will I think being it would be terribly hard to develop due to terrain features. I will continue to manage it for quality timber & Wildlife as long as I can. There is noone as of now to carry the torch after me.
And even our little piece of ground will some day be broken up as we have 2 sons that it will pass on to. Our hope is that one will buy out the other to keep it into one parcel.
A common misconception is that divided equally is fair, that is not really so. In my family I ended up with the farm, and while I was the first in 10 generations to buy it and not have it inherited, in the end it was right. My brother's and sisters wanted to keep the land for recreation, but did not want to pay the taxes of course, and I wanted to farm. By paying for it, I gave my parents money as they went into retirement, but I won't lie and say it was for 100% farm value...it was not. And this did not happen overnight, it took 5 years, but a successful next-generational farm transfer. I have 9 brothers and sisters; each getting a fair split of the pie would NOT have been fair. Acreage along the roads are worth more then inland acreage, and the acreage with gravel and slate is worth areas without. And of course fracturing the farm 9 ways would have been impossible to farm. And equally, getting 9 people to agree to logging/not logging/farming it would have been a nightmare. I farmed this land since I was old enough to walk, fair was paying for it and allowing my brothers and sisters access to it, but evenly split is not always fair even if it is equally divisible.
This is not an issue for us yet. Some land is getting broken up, but there are some bi tracts left. My neighbor has 3200 continuous acres with only 300 acres in fields. Since wood here has lost about 1/3 of its value, while technically he did not lose any real cash, value wise what it was worth 3 years ago, and what it is worth today, is enough to make me cry for him. I have lost enough, yet I don't have as many acres as he has. I was surprised one of last remaining paper mills is even dealing with us landowners. I'm a large landowner granted and every month I probably get 10 logging outfits wanting me to have them cut our wood. I did talk with the paper mill wood procurement branch ONLY because they said being so big they sell directly to the sawmills and that they could get me more money then I could by cutting the wood myself. That did not turn out to be true, due to some VERY fine print, but the point was, they want my wood. This is surprising, most of their wood comes from tracts of land a million acres in size. When I asked them how low they would go to, he said the average was 50 acres! But they have 6 full time foresters chasing wood. Its crazy, already the forester has been out twice hoping for a contract.
