ANTIGO — A total of 4,380 acres of trees were harvested through 51 separate timber sales from the county’s public forests in the past three years, according to Al Murray. The Langlade County Forest Administrator provided an overview of his Forestry, Parks, and Recreation department’s accomplishments in the past year at a county board meeting Monday night.
Of the $1,741,348 in revenue the department generated in 2023, $1,495,827 was earned through timber sales.
Thirty new timber sales which will eventually result in 3,525 acres of trees being harvested were also finalized in 2023, according to Murray, who said buyers come from around the state.
“We have a listing of over 70 contractors that get bids,” he said. “There’s contractors from Forest County all the way down to Stevens Point and Lincoln County and pretty much the whole northeast part of Wisconsin has contractors that come here for sales.
The overwhelming majority of trees will regenerate naturally, according to Murray.
“About 4,200 out of the 4,300 acres were set out to regenerate naturally either from coppice clear cuts, where it comes up from the sprouts, or from seeding.”
“Selective harvesting is seeding,” Murray said. “There’s different varieties of the cuts, but they’re all planned to regenerate. If they’re not, it’s set up for artificial regeneration or planting site prep.”
Murray said that while he often is questioned by the public about when more trees will be planted, the concern is unfounded.
“All of what we do is managed to regrow,” he said. “Either it’s regrowing naturally, or we’re planting. A very small fraction of what we do requires planting. And for the most part, the areas that usually require planting were historically red pine plantations, things that were planted in the early 30s and 40s that now don’t have the natural ability for seed for maple or for aspen to come back.
“So they were converted in the past and it’s limited on what we can get back without planting now. We could convert all kinds of things, but the cost of planting ends up being right around $800 an acre. It takes about 20, 30 years of growth to make up just that planting cost. If we can get it to grow naturally, why wouldn’t you just have it come back to what it would naturally grow?”
Nevertheless, a crew of 20 tree planters working for an Arkansas contractor also planted 210 acres of trees last month.
“They planted 191,000 trees in two days,” Murray said. “They have what’s called tree spuds. It’s just like a straight bar, a planting bar. They jam it in, push it forward, open up the space to put in the tree, and they stomp in the tree.”
He said after logging occurs in county forests, it is often managed extensively.
“All 4,380 acres of timber sales that were set up actually had modifications for wildlife,” he said. “We marked trees for den trees, we do green tree retention. We also manage a lot of our roads. Logging roads, logging trails are seeded down clover. There’s a whole variety of things that happen for basic timber sales for wildlife.”
Murray, who was expansive in many of his answers, said even without human activity, forests would still be destroyed naturally by windstorms and fire as they were in the past.
“People don’t realize that over a million acres used to burn in Wisconsin every year naturally,” he said. “They actually track it based upon fire scars on trees that are still here. They do studies based upon the stumps and the charcoal in the ground. They determined that over 1 million acres burned here in Wisconsin on a regular basis. It was a normal fire regime. Now we don’t have a normal fire regime anywhere because we have firefighting crews that put out every little fire as soon as it starts. It’s a scary thing to think that you’ve got houses built there, and all of a sudden something’s going to burn. So our development pattern really affected the forest more than any forest management does.”
Murray said the primary goal of his department is to ensure the forest is here for the future.
“Really, everyone always gets bogged down into, ‘We’re all out for just the timber products,’” he said. “Well, the timber products are really a side product of managing the forest to get the forest to regenerate…If we don’t manage the forest, it’s going to start to degrade itself just from being too old. It starts to fall down, and you start to get more wildfire hazard because all of a sudden you have a lot of dead stuff laying on the ground. The management is really about regenerating the forest for the future. The ultimate goal is to regenerate, but you generate the income that allows you to do many things from the products that you take off.”
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