Best practices for logging

Careful ways to harvest a woodlot

A neighbor is having some logging done and I've mentioned before that it is unpleasant to watch. I can understand the harvest of mature trees, but I'm aghast at the damage the loggers are doing to the young trees.

It is sickening to see that many good young trees that have been growing for 20 years or more have their tops snapped off and will surely die. Today I saw a stump they had left that must be 8 feet tall -- why?! This logging company is doing a careless, heartless piece of work. Plundering is a word that comes to mind.

When you go into your woodlands and take logs, there are careful ways to do it. The idea is to leave as light a footprint as possible, to avoid compacting the soil, to avoid injuring the trees that you aren't cutting, and to get the largest usable logs possible from the trees you do cut.

Here's a website that gives a quick, short list of General Harvesting Guidelines. A good quantity of information is available on the internet, and of course you also get free advice from your state forestry service and from your county extension agent.

Our neighbor's woods won't be ready to log again for a long, long time because of the damage done to the next generation of trees. Don't make this mistake in your woodlot.

For the sake of the young trees,
leave a light footprint in the woods.

Photograph credit: Going into the woods for another load. Logging camp near Effie, Minnesota. Photograph by Lee Russell for the Office of War Information, about 1944. From the Library of Congress. More information.