Decision Making in Timber Production, Harvest, and Marketing

Marion Clawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317362746
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Clawson explores the issues related to timber management with a particular focus on the harvesting of timber stands in Decision Making in Timber Production, Harvest and Marketing. Originally published in 1977, her study considers biological, economic and management implications of timber growing as well as the decision-making process in U.S forest Situations including methods of analysis. This title will be of interest to students of Environmental studies and professionals.

Past Management of the National Forests by the Forest Service

Faced with an inherited timber situation on the national forests which did not remotely conform to the “fully regulated” forest of the forester, the Forest Service formulated some new concepts or applied and developed concepts formulated by others, for its management of the national forests [17]. These concepts were applied both to decisions about harvesting existing stands of timber and to investment for the growing of additional volumes of timber. These concepts include sustained yield, allowable cut, even flow, and allowable cut effect, each of which must be examined briefly.

In its broadest and most general terms, sustained yield simply means a volume of timber harvest which can be sustained indefinitely from a given forested area. As such, it has great intuitive or emotional appeal, especially to nonforesters. In fact, there exists no such thing as the sustained yield, any more than there exists the yield of corn; production of both timber and corn involve inputs of labor, capital, and management on an area of land, and both sustained forest yield and corn yield are variable within considerable limits, depending upon the inputs. There are many sustained yields, not simply one. In practice, many foresters mean by “sustained yield” that yield which comes from reasonably good “natural forestry”–for example, keep the fires out, as far as reasonably possible, let the trees grow naturally as they will, harvest in ways which facilitate natural reproduction, and the like. But economically ally rational sustained yield may well vary from zero to double or more “natural forestry” yield. In practice, in its use of the term sustained yield and in its management of the national forests to attain it, the Forest Service has meant reasonably good natural forestry.

In its broadest and most general terms, allowable cut is the amount of timber which can be cut annually. Allowable cut is normally constrained by estimated sustained yield but it might be constrained by other or by additional factors. The Forest Service application of the idea to the national forests is fully presented in the Forest Service Manual [18]. The term applies to both the longterm planned harvest and to the programmed annual harvest [7]. The Forest Service generally requires that the trees reach some minimum size before harvest and bases its allowable cut on a planned rotation age for the particular timber stand. Since old growth stands are generally older than the planned rotation age, and since timber volumes average much higher than they will be under a planned rotation, a conversion period from old growth to rotation is necessarily involved. Numerous formulas, some quite complex, have been developed for calculating allowable cut under these circumstances. The conversion period on national forests is one and one half times the number of years to reach the culmination of MAI. This results in a slow harvest of the mature old growth timber, often over a period of 150 years.

Forest Service estimates of sustained yield and of allowable cut on national forests are based directly upon the kind of age-growth-volume biological data in table 1 and in figures 1 and 2, but they implicitly include some economic factors as well. The output of all kinds of products and services from the forested parts of the national forests has risen over the years [19]. Timber harvest has risen from around 1 to 1½ billion board feet annually in the 1920s to an average of over 11 billion board feet in the period centering on 1970. This increased harvest of national forest timber reflects the increased demand for it, as more accessible stands of private timber were harvested. Additional areas were opened for harvest by the building of roads to more remote areas, and some species of trees came to be utilized commercially when at an earlier date they were not considered commercial species. Over the years the Forest Service revised its estimates of sustained yield capacity of national forests, from an estimate of about 9 billion board feet annually in the mid-1950s to one nearer 15 billion board feet in the late 1960s [20]. Management of the national forests to maintain sustained yield capacity was clearly mandated by the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960.

The Forest Service developed the concept of even flow as a special version of the sustained yield and allowable cut ideas. In its most extreme form, even flow requires an exactly equal cut of timber each year. In practice, small deviations from year to year are allowed if the average cut over a period of years (usually ten) averages at or close to the allowable cut. Variations from year to year might be in response to the need for salvage, if salvage cuts are included in the allowable cut calculations, or in response to market conditions. The Forest Service seems to have believed that even flow of timber was required by the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960, but others have doubted that such a management program was really required by that act [11]. In practice, strict application of the even flow concept on a national forest by national forest basis results in substantially less allowable cut than does some relaxation of even flow either through time or by area of application.

The typically long transition period between the inherited mature forest and the fully regulated forest involves a heavy physical waste of timber which often disturbs foresters (as well as high capital costs, which seems to concern them far less). Some foresters, concerned with this problem, have invented the concept of “allowable cut effect” (ACE)[21]. The basic idea is that some practice, such as the planting of seedlings on a tract otherwise not regenerating (or even, presumably, on a tract never having borne trees in the past), is begun now, its effect upon sustained yield at some future date is calculated, and this amount is immediately added to the allowable cut of the inherited old growth timber. Obviously, this would be impossible were there not a large volume of old growth available for cutting; other conditions for application of the allowable cut effect are specified by these authors. “ACE is the immediate increase in today’s allowable cut which is attributable to expected future increases in yields….ACE is not limited to instances where bare land is brought into production. It can result from any management practice that increases average growth rates” [21]. By comparing the present cost of the management practice for the anticipated future harvest with the present increased income from the harvest of existent old growth, some highly favorable “benefit/cost” ratios can be attained.

As typically applied, the “allowable cut effect” does not consider the later costs of growing to maturity the timber which is expected ultimately to result from the present practice. That is, the cost of planting an acre now is compared with the value of the old growth timber that can be harvested now from an old growth stand. If the full costs, including the capital costs, of growing the timber to maturity were included, of course the benefit/cost ratio for planting would be very much less; the economic result would be the usual one of analyzing benefits and costs over the rotation period of the timber stand.

The allowable cut effect approach to timber management is fallacious. It is simply a rationale for cutting inherited mature and over-mature timber faster than the rate which the sustained-yield-allowable-cut-even-flow approach has indicated. Foresters, having adopted a management philosophy and plan which results in very long periods of cutting the inherited mature stands, with the attendant high costs and wastes, now seek some rationalization of abandoning their self-imposed limitations. Speeding up the harvest of inherited old growth timber because of “allowable cut effect” accomplishes nothing that the same acceleration of the old growth harvest would not have accomplished in the absence of the allowable cut effect measure.

There are many situations in life where some group or individual, having adopted some course of action, then seeks a rationale for abandoning it. For instance, within the past year or two, someone has seriously proposed compulsory installation on private autos of a device which would limit the car’s motor from developing more power than would carry the car along at a top speed of 55 miles per hour. The proponents of this idea have argued that such devices could be made and installed for a cost per car of about $25.00, and that, at this price, such devices would be “highly cost effective”. No doubt this latter statement is true, if one grants all the premises. Having built a needlessly powerful car, at the cost of some hundreds of dollars more than would have been incurred in building a less powerful one, we now propose to hobble the car with an additional device, to bring it to a speed which we regard as desirable. The proponents of this idea seem not to have faced the possibility that the same political muscle and the same popular acceptance (or non-acceptance) problems would be encountered in the application of their idea as would be involved in compulsory restriction of auto design and construction to achieve the ends they sought, and that the latter might be vastly more “cost effective” than the control device. If we really wish to accelerate the harvest of inherited old growth timber stands, to avoid the heavy physical and economic costs that their slow harvest entails, why invent “allowable cut effect” to persuade us to do so?

Those who apply the allowable cut effect do not, typically, consider shortrun markets or timber processing economies, any more than do those who calculate sustained yield and allowable cut.

The allowable cut effect calculations should never be allowed to justify forest management practices which will not stand on their own, as economically sound over the full lifetime of the stand. This includes proposals to plant trees on sites where natural regeneration is not producing a stand, on the grounds that the “allowable cut effect” makes this practice feasible economically. A forest manager should not plant sites on which the cost of growing timber to harvest, including interest on realizable capital during the growing period, exceed the expected values of the timber at harvest time. Leaning on “allowable cut effect” does not repeal the effects of time and the interest rate.

In its management of the national forests the Forest Service has always placed a great stress on “community stability”. In part, this emphasis by early Forest Service leaders grew out of their rejection of the “cut out and get out” system of private harvesting of old growth timber stands which had prevailed over so much of the United States. The communities built up during the harvest period were usually abandoned--and the land often laid waste, ravaged by uncontrolled fires. Community stability as applied by the Forest Service contains an explicit or implicit equation of the constant volume of timber flowing out of sustained yield with a constant employment and hence a constant income to the community. There are several obvious shortcomings to this approach: (1) a constant volume of timber may not mean a constant level of employment, if technology changes; (2) with the future (especially the future 150 years from now, implicate in long timber rotations) remaining so unknowable, it may well be that the present communities will prove not worth saving--this has happened in the past, with forest communities; (3) community stability could not in any case be guaranteed with national forest timber alone, since in nearly all areas it is but part of the total supply; and (4) since the rate of harvest of privately owned timber has been variable, a constant rate of harvest of federal timber may actually be destabilizing.

Sustained yield, allowable cut, and even flow have all be defended as contributing to community stability. A slow rate of harvest of the mature old growth timber has been defended as a means of avoiding or of minimizing a “drop off” when the old growth timber has all been cut.

The management philosophy applied to the national forests in the past has not been the only philosophy that could have been applied to them, even with the same basic legislation governing their management. In particular, more intensive forestry could have been practiced on the national forests, with significantly different results in terms of timber harvested under a sustained yield-allowable cut philosophy--and even under an even flow philosophy, untenable as that idea often is. The drop-off in timber harvest when the old growth timber has all been harvested is a function of the management program followed, not an inherent necessity of forestry.

The data in table 1 and in figure 1, are sufficient to permit some illustrative different forest management plans for the Douglas fir site class II forest show in that table (table 2):

1. Management Plan A is a very long rotation (164 years of growing period, 171 years between harvests, the seven years difference being required for natural stand regeneration) of good “natural” forestry. At the time of harvest, the stand would contain about 21,000 cubic feet of harvestable wood. The average annual growth of harvestable wood for the whole harvest-rotation period is 123 cubic feet per acre. This is somewhat the kind of management that would exist on a national forest where the inherited stand of mature timber was cut over a long period of time and where the next rotation of “natural” forestry strove to produce about the same kind and size of trees.

Table 2. Alternative Timber Management Possibilities Output, Site Class II, Douglas Fir

Source: Data from Table 1.

2. Management Plan B is also “natural” forestry, also with a seven year period of natural stand regeneration after harvest, but with a relatively very short rotation (50 years growing period, 57 years between harvests). This system provides three cycles of growth and harvest in the same period of years as one cycle under management plan A. Due to the fact that the trees would be cut nearer their age of maximum mean annual growth, the average annual growth per acre would increase to 155 cubic feet per acre, or about 25 percent higher than under management plan A; the figure would be still ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Characteristics of Timber Growing
• Time-growth--volume relationships for timber production
• Timing of timber harvest
• Components of timber supply
• Forest management situation dominates optimum timber management
• Willingness of small private owner to harvest existing stand
• Willingness of small private owner to invest in growing wood
• Willingness of vertically integrated forest industry firm to harvest its timber
• Willingness of vertically integrated forest industry firm to invest in the growing of more timber
• Important characteristics of national forests today
• The Forest Service as a far-sighted oligopsonist since 1905
• Applicability of biologic and economic analysis to national forest management
• Past management of the national forests by the Forest Service
• Potentials for future national forest management
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Determination of the economically optimum age of timber harvest
• References