1000$ Trees ???

[YooperMan]

My wife & I own a small tree farm in Upper Michigan & expect to be having a timber sale in the next 9-12 months. The property supports approx 22 acres' mixed hardwoods & aspen,  approx age 60-70 yrs, 12 - 15 acres' spruce/balsam/cedar, 70-80 yrs,  and 6-10 acres' red pine approx age 42 yrs.  It also contains a total of approx 12 acres' open grass lands. This will be our first major thinning & the goal is timber stand improvement & aspen regeneration for wildlife habitat. Most of the property was farmed until about the 1920s, but has largely re-forested over the last 50-60 years.  Our long term goal is quality hard maple growth & there are a significant number of fair-sized sugar maple now on the property. So my question is this: I have heard many times people in these parts talking of buyers paying 1000-1200 $/tree, for mature sugar maples.  Do these numbers sound accurate, realistic, or even plausible?  And secondly, if my goal is -- 8-12 years from now -- to have 80-120 1000$ sugar maples ready for harvest, how can I maximize the potential & probability of that happening? Any insight, hints, suggestions, or advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Ron Scott]

Are you in the Tree Farm System and where are you located in the U.P.? You should be working with a Consulting Forester and an established Management Plan to meet your objectives. I don't know of many $1000 sugar maple trees, especially in today's markets unless you are in the birdseye maple ecosystem of the U.P.

[beenthere]

Welcome YooperMan.

You've come to the right place for some good answers. We look forward to hearing more about your objectives and some ideas to meet them.

Brouse back through at least the "Ask a Forester" board, and you will see good discussions of similar beginnings and methods to meet/beat the challenge.

[tyb525]

Welcome the forum YooperMan! Like beenthere said, this is the place for good information.

[stonebroke]

I have had a few thousand dollar trees but their were extremely large old trees. I think you could produce them but it would probably take two hundred years.

Stonebroke

[Clark]

Sorry to say, but $1000 trees are the exception to the rule.  You are on the right track though, managing your forest will return higher quality trees in less time than "letting nature take its' course" (which seems to be the rave amongst the granola crowd).

You mention managing for aspen and maple...the two don't mix on the same piece of ground.  You've got enough room to do both, but they don't compliment each other on the exact same space.  Next to each other?  Sure, but never together.

Like Ron said, get a consultant in there who will make sure that your maple stand stays a maple stand and not turn into raspberries.

Clark

[crtreedude]

Sorry to say, but $1000 trees are the exception to the rule.  You are on the right track though, managing your forest will return higher quality trees in less time than "letting nature take its' course" (which seems to be the rave amongst the granola crowd).

You mention managing for aspen and maple...the two don't mix on the same piece of ground.  You've got enough room to do both, but they don't compliment each other on the exact same space.  Next to each other?  Sure, but never together.

Like Ron said, get a consultant in there who will make sure that your maple stand stays a maple stand and not turn into raspberries.

Clark

Not that there is anything wrong with raspberries.... 

[tyb525]

Food 

[SwampDonkey]

I've picked over 40 boxes this season, I lost count how many above that.  Just about as many fell to the ground for worm food on my garden patch, no way to pick'em all.

Back to the $1000 maples. I was wondering if the rumour or word of mouth started out as $/MBF for veneer logs and not per tree? Bird's eye can bring in those dollars but they are very picky buyers. I've only seen one birdseye personally that was more than $1000. I found a small grove of old growth maple since then, that had birdseye, but only in the sapwood. The 40 dbh trees went to the pulp mill after being rejected on the yard, they had 1/2 heart wood. The trees were on a town lot that was used as a water supply up until the last 20 years or so. Some poacher had hacked some of them inspecting for the figure. I don't know how they expected to get them out, no road before we built one.

[Ron Wenrich]

Managing tomorrow's forest for today's markets can often lead to disappointment.  30 years ago, you would have wanted to manage for walnut, 20 years ago it was red oak, 10 years ago it was black cherry, and now its hard maple.  You could also throw in ash and white oak.  And during that same time, those high valued trees also hit market lows.  Markets fluctuate and its hard to hit a moving target. 

If you have high quality trees, no matter what species, you can find a market.  The site should dictate what you're managing.  Get rid of the low quality trees, and manage for the high quality.  Maintain good spacing to allow good crown expansion and optimum growth.

[Frickman]

Ron W. hit the nail on the head on managing a woodlot according to the site, not some particular species. Sycamore grows good along a creek bottom but not on a dry ridge, so I don't try to grow it on the ridge. As a sawmiller and logger I can always move high quality wood, no matter the species.

I have bought quite a few $1000+ trees, most were wild grown black cherry back in fairly inaccessible sites, and all went into veneer. I've also bought some high dollar black walnut and red oak. $1000 trees are not the norm though. $100 trees are pretty common in our hardwood timber though. I've bought thousands of $100+ trees over the years.

[JimMartin9999]

As you mentioned the bigger trees are simply older. I guess it is clear that you canīt plant any hardwoods and expect to harvest them in 12 years.  Seventy is more like it.  Not many of us are going to harvest trees we plant.
    That means that you have to take care of the better ones you have.Crop tree selection is a management practice by which you select the best trees, spaced about 20 feet apart,  and cut down any trees which take their sun.  If a tree has sunlight on it on all four sides, it will have the best chance of growing at its fastest rate. Arlyn Perkey has an excellent  small book on the subject. Free for the asking.
   Talk to people who know the trade--usually foresters; read.  Usually  the state has foresters who can put you on the right path and athere may be a forest owners association in MIchigan.  There is a great one in NY where I have some land.  there is also the  extension service which can give you more information  than you probably deal with.

[thecfarm]

I heard just about the same stories when I was cutting too.There is always someone that made a small fortune with logs.Yes,money can be made. I can pick out the ones that are just talking to hear them themselves talk.

[chevytaHOE5674]

Where abouts in the UP is the property located? Unless the HM is good birdseye then 1000 per tree is a long shot.

[Reddog]

My thought is we got trolled.

Name:  YooperMan
Posts:  1 (0.037 per day)
Position:  Member*
Date Registered:  August 05, 2009, 01:20:37 AM
Last Active:  August 05, 2009, 07:13:25 PM

[Raphael]

The best way to guarantee $1000 trees is grow them for wholesale nurseries....
But that's horticulture not forestry.

[crtreedude]

I have seen a lot of 1,000 dollar trees. Not uncommon to have Spanish Cedar trees measure out to much more than 1,000 BF and stumpage is around a dollar a BF.

Harold knows about a Pilon which we harvested (he was involved). We paid only 20 cents a BF for the tree, but it was more than 5,000 BF!

We have a caobilla on our property that has to have no less than 3,000 BF in it, and about roughly a dollar a BF, you can figure out how much it is worth. Huge tree.

But, to get into the big numbers, they have to be straight, tall and in great shape.

[Ron Wenrich]

Then there's those $1000+ logs.     I've seen some of those.

[SwampDonkey]

I was walking among some figured maple today. They were adjacent to my thinning block. Will be cutting right up next to them with brush saws. I saw many rock maple that someone was looking to poach and I know many were poached after the adjacent stand was harvested (our thinning block). There were many 20-25 inch trees with hatchet marks into them. I don't know why they are so stupid they can's see it in the bark. Here is a sample piece of bark that clearly shows birdseye. The only way to tell if it's highly figured deep into the wood is the cut the tree down.




Had to get a profile shot of this, because flat on all you see is a dark spot where each dimple is. On the flip side of the bark each dimple has a nipple. It's not bird peck as it's too random and this was 4 feet from the ground. Also this tree had hatchet marks into it revealing the figure in the sapwood as well. The big trees are looking handy to 80 feet tall. It was a very good growing site with white ash and yellow birch mixed in the maples. On another section within the thinning block I found a black cherry, very out of place. It's a sapling near a machine trail where the regen was not as dense.

[True North]

Hi Yooperman,

We have a 40 in the eastern UP which sounds very similar to yours minus the pine and fields. Last year, we did a management cut on the maple. Ours had not been cut in 80 plus years, and we had and still have some large maples. We sold ours before the market really dropped, and did ok. We found that the larger trees rack up the cordage, but are generally of lower quality due to defect. The 18-24" veneer trees are the ones you want to grow for profit. The forester who did ours said one of the maples was the biggest he had ever scaled in the UP, and unfortunately it came nowhere near $1000. We are in the process of cutting our aspen, spruce, and balsam which we are going to saw with our mill, and are creating food plots in the process. We are having a blast, and I hope you do to.