Forestry
When we bought our farm it was all in crops. The land is very steep and all highly eroded loess soil. Even with conservation tillage the soil loss would have been unacceptable to me. We starting putting everything back to grass over about a 7 or 8 year period. We then started planting trees and have planted 25 acres so far.
We also had about a 30-acre woodlot on ground to steep for farming. Most people called it brush. Didn't know anything about forestry but read everything I could get my hands on. Also had the state forester come out several times and he has taught me a lot. Did a lot of TSI (timber stand improvement). Pulled grapevines off trees and cut a lot of low value trees to give the better trees a chance to grow. Starting to see 20" dbh walnut and red oak now. The forester says I need to be thinking about a sale one of these days if I don't start cutting more trees down for my mill. I think it is pretty cool growing more fiber than what I can use.
Our goal is to leave the land in better condition than we found it for future generations.
This is the first windbreak we planted. Trees are a mix of jack pine, red and white pine, plus a few cedars. The ground is a high ridge that runs east and west. Never could grow any crops on top the ridge or either side because the hot south winds would burn everything off. The windbreak provides two benefits that we never thought of when we planted the trees. Crops started growing better on both sides of the pines because they kept the ground from drying out so bad. The trees also provided a natural runway or funnel for the deer to run from the neighbors ground into our woodlot. The ground is all in CRP now.
A few years after we planted the windbreak we tried planting hardwoods. We put in about 300 pinoaks. We transplanted a lot of these into the yards of city folks.
The trees will never make good lumber but they will provide a lot of firewood.
We really got serious about planting trees about 8 years ago. Planted 12,000 seedlings on 25 acres. They were red oak, walnut, hickory, green ash, tulip popular, and hackberry. After the trees got going good I went back through and planted white oak acorns in the rows.
These trees are tulip popular. Don't know a thing about them other than they sure grow fast.