Trailblazing NTFP collection permit approved

ANTIGO — At a meeting Wednesday afternoon, the Langlade County Board Forestry and Recreation Committee approved a commercial collection permit for The Blessed Fig Tree LLC which will allow the owners of the 5th Ave. shop to harvest non-timber forest products (NTFPs) from the county’s forests for their business.

Christian Radcliff, who owns the shop with his wife Brandy, said they plan to use the NTFPs in herbal products they already sell at The Blessed Fig (previously, they had harvested from land they own in Iron County).

“Right now, this is a very exploratory thing,” Radcliff told committee members. “We want to see if there’s a market for it here. We need enough for just woods-to-table products for our store, some teas and some basic stuff. But we’ve been spending two years going around and looking at all the stands. The Crocker Hills area and west of Augustyn Springs will be some of the best areas because they’re off the main trails.”

The Radcliffs, members of both the North American Mycological Association and Wisconsin Mycological Society, said they have collected NTFPs from local forests for personal use for the past two years already, in part to gain a better understanding of herbs they contain.

Their permit application outlines plans to target plants and fungi well-established enough to replenish on their own, others adversely impacted by environmental changes caused by logging, and invasives.

Radcliff said that to his knowledge, this will be the first permit for NTFP collection that has ever been approved in Langlade County, meaning the potential for the local industry to grow — and, in turn, to provide revenue to the county — could be large.

“Other states, if you look into Alaska or Oregon, they have an established non-wood or non-timber forest products sector, and they charge a per-pound or per-gram fee for seeds, mushroom, and plant materials and they then collect all those permit applications and collect money from that. If we sell things through the county because our business is based here in the county, they get a portion of our taxes for everything we make in the store,” he said. “So if this then becomes larger, they have more taxable revenue from that and more permit stuff depending on if we do large-scale harvesting. Right now, it’s exploratory, and there’s a very small amount of things that we’re going after, but these are big industries in other places. It could mean millions of dollars of potential revenue for the county, which is huge — 120,000 acres is massive.”

Langlade County Forest Administrator Al Murray acknowledged that currently, other than balsam bough harvesting for wreaths, which is common in the area, very limited commercial-type permitting exists, which can be problematic.

“I believe there’s a lot of commercial harvesting going on, but it’s not tracked at all. There’s no one that comes in for a permit,” Murray said. “I know that there’s mushroom pickers that go out and they’ll pick mushrooms from the county forest and they’ll sell mushrooms to craft markets in Chicago for $150 a pound on what they found. Ginseng is the poster child of over-harvesting because the price of wild ginseng at one time was up to $400 a pound. Well, if you spend some time and know how to find it, the next thing, they harvest every bit of it because ‘I’m going to get it before the next guy.’”

Radcliff, though, said enforcing sustainable harvesting — in Langlade County and throughout the entire country — is no easy task.

“The National Forestry Department released many studies on this — there’s very little traceability of actually how much is harvested outside of specific industries,” he said. “Really, there’s local people harvesting huge amounts of stuff and people from outside of the state or outside of the county area already coming to these forests and mass harvesting stuff, but it’s not really regulated. This county’s huge. They don’t have people to monitor all of this stuff here.”

Because of that difficulty, the importance of establishing some type of standard through further permit-issuing could be growing, he said.

“We’re trying to establish a sustainability standard because we want these woods maintained for as long as possible, and if you don’t have a standard or something else and this becomes popular — and this can become popular; every year this is an increasing trend because technology, AI, scanning apps are getting better at locating what’s out there, so it’s so easy to identify what’s there now — you can have people mass harvesting stuff and selling it online. They need to kind of work with people to regulate this, or it could be law of the commons degradation of everything. It happens in some places,” Radcliff said.

Murray suggested the Radcliffs detailed understanding of sustainable plant and fungi harvesting — and even determining the terms of their own trailbreaking permit — could help his department develop more detailed sustainability standards to include in future permits they issue.

“Until you have someone that’s that deep into that collection and knows more about it, how do you ever get those kinds of terms into a permit?” Murray said. “We just started on the Natural Heritage Inventory (NHI), which is the state inventory of endangered plants. The initial discussion I’m going to have to have with them then is, ‘Ok, let’s determine which area you’re collecting in,’ so that I can determine that there’s no endangered species habitat that might be impacted and whatnot. Then, once we do that, I’ll do that NHI search and then we can write the permit, and then we set up the terms of how much they’re collecting.”

Murray said anyone in the county that is profiting off NTFPs they collect on county land must obtain a permit to do so.

“If you’re going to be out there foraging and picking for your own use, fine,” he said. “But if you’re going to be doing the commercial, these people are doing it right — they’re coming and asking for a permit.”