I am involved in companies producing over 100 million board feet of pine lumber in South Georgia, as well as a utility pole business.  These companies supply large volumes of pulpwood and chips to several paper companies.  At least weekly for the past 40 years I have to evaluate tracts of timber my foresters have presented to me for bids.  One of my first questions is about the quality of timber and the second one is about the species.  Since we have primarily produced dimension lumber (2 x 4s through 2 x 12s), an emphasis on what timber produces the best yields and grades for this lumber has always been paramount in our evaluations.

The higher grades of lumber in this dimension are a reflection of the density (measured by annual ring count and percentage of summerwood), and other factors contributing to strength.  Engineered wood trusses are a large market for dense, strong Southern Pine.  A recent innovation is MSR lumber (Machine Stress Rated) which measures specific gravity and other strength factors of the lumber.  To receive the higher stress rating needed for longer spans in trusses it is a known fact that longleaf pine, with a high percentage of summerwood, higher specific gravity, etc., will produce more MSR and dense lumber (other factors being equal) than loblolly.  We find that loblolly tends to have more and larger limbs and more fusiform rust, creating what we call "cankers" that will lower lumber grades and yields.  For these reasons, we usually bid less (or not at all) on loblolly pine stands.

There are other reasons we find loblolly not as desirable.  Typically the longleaf is a straighter tree with a higher form class, and this gives us more lumber yield per volume of logs.  This straightness allows us to make lumber in longer lengths without sacrificing yields.  These long lengths are necessary for the truss markets.  These characteristics of longleaf also produce a quality utility pole where we find that very often loblolly does not (straightness, form class, and strength again being factors).

One of the particular paper companies to whom we sell our pulpwood and chips have found loblolly will give them very low yields of their primary products and also low by-product production.  They do not plant loblolly and try not to buy any on the open market.  Loblolly pine is also more susceptible to pine beetle damage then longleaf.  We have also found that longleaf pine straw is in greater demand than loblolly.  Naturally, however, there are areas and sites where loblolly should be the preferred tree to grow.

The Southern Pine lumber market has lost much market share of its 1" production (boards) to radiata pine and much of its #2 common grades of 2" lumber to other imported species.  The market for higher strength, dense wood from timber like longleaf is a niche we hope to preserve.  We Southern Pine manufacturers must produce what the market demands and with any competitive advantage we can offer over other species.

At one of our plants, all of our 2" lumber passes through our MSR machine, and we rarely find lumber from loblolly that meets the requirements to be graded as MSR.  Young timber and juvenile wood from all species of yellow pine typically fails also.  Naturally, there can be exceptions to all this and we have found many stands of mature loblolly better and more valuable than some stands of longleaf.  But, don't make the mistake of not recognizing the inherent qualities of longleaf pine from a buyer's or manufacturer's perspective.

 

 

My whole life is about trees and forestry.  In my business of timberland investment, we manage forests all over the country, but I’m most turned on by longleaf pine forests.  In my opinion, there is no forest prettier than a mature stand of longleaf pine with the setting sun making the trees and knee-high wiregrass seem to glow.

Several years ago, I began to look for a small property with longleaf pine growing on it.  Since that time, my wife and I acquired about 800 acres in rural Baker County, Georgia and carved out a piece of land to care for.  We call the place “Longleaf.”  Our first impression walking over the property was the beauty of the old stands of longleaf pine and the carpet of wiregrass.

Our objectives on Longleaf are both recreational and to improve the land by preserving and restoring the longleaf pine forest.  We want a place to hunt bobwhite quail and we’d like to sustain a mature, multi-aged longleaf pine forest with a forest floor dominated by wiregrass.  We’ve invested a great deal of time and money trying to maintain these objectives.  I can’t prove what kind of return we’re making on the property.  However, when you’ve been making investment decisions in forestland as long as I have, you tend to rely on gut instinct.  My gut tells me we’re making a really good investment.  Heaven forbid, if we ever had to sell Longleaf, I think we’d get our money back because I believe someone else would recognize the value.

To us, the most appropriate measure of value at Longleaf is in terms of enjoying life.  One of our greatest single returns on our investment in Longleaf happened last year.  On a balmy winter day, we were able to get my 88 year old father (who could barely walk) and his 80 year old brother down for a quail hunt.  After several tries, we were able to get the dogs to point a covey of quail close enough to the jeep.  We eased my father out of the jeep and up behind the dogs.  On command, the dogs flushed the quail.  One shot later, my father had one bird.  To us, the REAL value of Longleaf cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

 

 

When I think of longleaf pine, the sensory memories come first: the soft wind singing through the impossibly long needles of the pines; the smell of fires past and pine resin present; the pure flutelike songs of Bachman's sparrows coming from all directions, near and far; the multiple colors of wildflowers arching above the wiregrass.  The sunshine.  The overwhelming peacefulness.

Only after a flurry of such memories has passed is it possible to consider the scientific facts of the longleaf pine ecosystem.  This is really more of a savanna than a forest, although it can be called either.  It was once the dominant vegetation of the southeastern coastal plain and extended into the piedmont and even the southern edge of the blue-ridge province.  Its herbaceous layer rivals in diversity any plant community on earth.  It has more imperiled species than any major forest type in the United States.  Its natural fire frequency is virtually unparalleled, and the vegetation actually promotes fire to perpetuate itself.

Both the sensory and the factual memories are accompanied by an unavoidable sadness.  Why did we eliminate more than 97% of this marvelous ecosystem?  The stands that remain, although undeniably beautiful, are mere scraps.  Restoration projects seem so puny.  Yet we must accomplish them.  We owe it to the red-cockaded woodpecker, the brown-headed nuthatch, the pocket gopher, the gopher tortoise, the diamondback rattlesnake, the cloudless sulphur, the calopogon, the summer farewell, and the hundreds to thousands of other species closely associated with this ecosystem.  And, we owe it to ourselves and our grandchildren to let the most wonderful pine forest on earth regain its former glory.

 

 

The landscape that owns my body is the longleaf pine.  I was born to it, as my ancestors for seven generations were born to it, although as a child I did not know its name, or its habits, or the names of its inhabitants.  All this I have come to know.

Maybe through my genes I inherited a vision of the original longleaf pine flatwoods, because I seem to remember their endlessness.  I recollect when the coastal plains of the South were one daybreak-to-dark, rust-and-bronze longleaf forest.  It is a monotony one learns to love, through days and seasons and years, for this is a landscape of loyalty, that you devote yourself to more with the passing years, like a beloved friend.  The more you know of it, the more you love it.  The more it gives you, the more you give in return.  A longleaf pine forest never tells its secrets at first meeting, but reveals them slowly over time—and a longleaf forest is full of secrets.

In a longleaf forest, miles of trees forever fade into a brilliant salmon sunset and reappear the next dawn as a battalion marching out of fog.  The tip of each needle carries a single drop of silver.  The trees are so well spaced that their limbs seldom touch and sunlight streams between and within them.  Below their flattened branches, grasses arch their tall, richly dun heads of seeds, and orchids and lilies paint the ground.  Purple liatris gestures across the landscape.  Our eyes seek the flowers like they seek the flashes of Bachman’s sparrows and ruby-crowned kinglets, and the careful crossings of fox squirrels and gopher tortoises.

You can still see this in places.  But mostly you do not see vastness, but little pieces of longleaf, a few acres here and a few there, as fragmented as our lives have become, and you have to wait longer to know the essence of this forest.

What thrills me most about longleaf is how the pine trees sing.  Even in the fragments you can hear the music.  Horizontal limbs of flattened crowns hold the wind as if they are vessels, singing bowls, and stir in them like a whistling kettle. I lay in thick wiregrass—and in lopsided Indiangrass and splitbeard bluestem—covered with sun, and listen.  The music cannot be heard anywhere else on the earth.

In the choirs of the original groves, the music must have resounded for hundreds of miles in a single held note of rise and fall, and stirred the red-cockaded woodpeckers nesting in the hearts of the pines, where I also nest.  Now the music falters, a great tongue chopped in pieces.

I drink in longleaf pine forest like water.  This is the homeland that built us.  Here we walk shoulder to shoulder with history—our history.  We are in the presence of something ancient and venerable, perhaps of time itself, its unhurried passing marked by immensity and stolidity, each year purged by fire, cinched by a ring.  Here we see ourselves as human, as southern, in a natural order that is again grand and whole and functional.  I am humbled, not frightened, by it.  I am comforted.  It is as if a roundtable springs up in the cathedral of pines and God graciously pulls out a chair for me, and I no longer have to worry about what happens to souls.