Family Forests: Loving Care, Heavy Burdens.

IN TREE FARMING THE REWARDS ARE GREAT, BUT SO TOO ARE THE TAXES, REGULATIONS, AND PUBLIC RESISTANCE TO LOGGING. IS IT STILL WORTH IT?

Down the narrow roads that head from small towns into the countryside, beneath the green canopies that shade streams and nurture wildlife, family forestlands across the nation may look as serene as they did a century ago.

For their owners, however, life on America's back forty is troubling. As the moms and pops who own nearly half the nation's private forestland steward their timber stands into a new millennium, the time-honored cycle of planting, pruning, and harvesting trees has an anxious edge. Taxes, regulations, and public resistance to logging are combining to make their chores a little more trying, their joys a little less abundant. Some are selling out, cashing in their legacy and quitting tree farming altogether. Most persevere for the sake of the forests, their children's children, and their own love of the land.

To survive today's challenges requires more planning than ever before and a conscious commitment to sustainable management, says AMERICAN FORESTS member Glen Massie, 76, an Illinois forester and tree farmer with a half-century of experience. "It's going to be the private landowners that provide the wood resources of the future. That's quite a lot of pressure. Some people seem to think trees will live forever, but if we aren't careful, the family farm will become an endangered species," Massie says.

He has planted native red and black oaks, walnuts, and conifers on more than 400 acres, much of it livestock grazing ground when he bought 40 years ago. Every 15 years Massie selects mature trees for harvest, opening the stand for younger trees. Hunters, anglers, and hikers flock to his woods and ponds, where he welcomes them as long as they sign in at the mailbox.

"We get kind of grumpy if they don't sign in," says Massie, who recently turned over his Scotch pine Christmas tree farm to his son, Kevin. Three states to the east near Pittsburgh, George and Joan Freeman supervise a similar operation on their 645 acres of forestland along the Allegheny River in Clarion County, Pennsylvania.

When they bought their first land in 1957, the rolling hills were farmlands in various stages of abandon, some engulfed in grapevines, some recently plowed. Today--52,000 seedlings in the ground later--95 percent of the Freemans' acreage is wooded. They have supervised six improvement cuts and five commercial harvests since 1960. One 12-acre site is divided into six separate plots thinned in six different ways to demonstrate various harvest practices.

Named 1998 National Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year by the American Tree Farm System, the Freemans' primary goal is to demonstrate how their efforts contribute to the long-term health of the ecosystem.

"More people are more concerned about the environment and natural resources than ever before. If we're going to save the forests, we have to manage more carefully," says George Freeman.

By converting farmland into forestland, the Freemans and Glen Massie are models of the natural resource managers most valued by society today. They are protecting forests widely regarded as national treasures. Most Americans cherish trees. They want to see forests flourish--for wildlife, for water, and for sheer scenery.

But this reverence for tree-covered hillsides has backed tree farmers into a dicey corner. Public outcry over logging on national forests in the last decade has reduced annual federal timber harvests from an average of 13 billion board-feet to around 4 billion. The over-cutting has also stimulated a campaign to end commercial logging on public lands and brought closer scrutiny of timber industry management on private tracts.

With wood products less and less available from public and industrial lands, the pressure is on the nation's private nonindustrial forests. Families like the Freemans and Glen Massie own around 59 percent of the country's commercially viable forestlands. Despite the pressure for production, however, these forest managers face the same public objections to cutting trees that reduced the harvest elsewhere. Visitors from nearby cities and neighbors, too, are often critical of even modest logging operations.

The dilemma has forced many private forest owners into all or nothing decisions: harvest everything. a heartbreaking choice that leaves little for the next generation, or harvest nothing, a choice that takes timberland out of production altogether.

"It's a bad deal all around," says Robert Simpson, director of the American Tree Farm System. "These mom and pop tree farmers provide such a benefit to the community yet it goes unseen."

Any tree farmer in business for more than a decade has felt the increase in government regulations. Once trusted to make their own decisions, they now face local, state, and federal codes that control everything from how much they can cut to when and where. While every forest owner can name a handful of neighbors who mismanaged their land for the sake of quick profits, it is the conscious stewards who are now paying for these transgressions. Along with the loss of autonomy, they struggle with the increased costs.

AMERICAN FORESTS member Jim Doerksen, a Santa Rosa forestland owner named 1999 California Tree Farmer of the Year, paid $1 in 1969 for a permit to log his land. Today it costs him $25,000. Laws designed to regulate industrial forest owners operating on millions of acres of land apply equally to Doerksen and his 122-acre redwood and Douglas-fir forest in northern California. The state's timber harvest regulations, among the strictest in the nation, exact the same protections for logging one tree or 100,000.

"I should be thinning right now but I'd have to thin too severely to recoup my costs," Doerksen says. "Do regulations help? Do they make a better tree farmer? I sure don't see it."

On top of increasingly strict regulations, family forestland owners are burdened by taxes that compel them to make management decisions against their better judgement. Estate taxes, levied after the death of a landowner, are notorious for forcing the heirs to either over-log the family farm or sell it.

Lynda Beam, whose family has managed forestland in Georgia for four generations, holds the government responsible for much of these hardships to tree farmers. "The government is doing everything it can to break up the land. If we can turn that around, it would be a great incentive to work even harder," she says.

Many blame taxes for the fragmentation of private forestland, which is increasing the number of parcels of less than 100 acres at a rate of almost 150,000 a year. As more and more people buy smaller and smaller forest stands, good management is becoming more and more difficult.

Beam and her husband Kirby, 1994 National Outstanding Tree Farmers, are seeking legislative changes at all levels of government and lobbying for complete elimination of the federal death tax.

While regulatory relief might help, it must be accompanied by a shift in public values almost as fundamental as the outcry over excess logging that created the recent restrictions. For family forestland owners to reclaim their right to make decisions to benefit the Long-term future of their land, the public must have a deeper understanding of how forests grow and natural ecosystems evolve.

Tree farmers are doing their part. They host Tree Days, Family Adventure Days, forest walks, and stewardship demonstrations for thousands of school kids; neighboring landowners; community leaders; and state, national, and international representatives. Education is a responsibility of every tree farmer, and getting people into the woods is key, says Betty Udell, who with her husband Bert owns 1,700 acres of forestland in Oregon.

The public and the politicians "need to become aware of how they get the beautiful scenery they're looking at," she says.

But these conscientious tree farmers represent less than 1 percent of the nation's 9.9 million private forestland owners. Many of the rest bought their property for aesthetic or wildlife values. Even when they decide to harvest trees, they often don't know how to do it or who to ask for help. John Buzzell, who owns forestland in Wisconsin, is part of the Volunteer Initiative Project designed to make forest landowners aware of programs and expertise to help them make decisions.

Along with public education, certification helps establish confidence in timber management. In this era of deep distrust over natural resource management, a scientific team that includes environmental, economic, and social interests can assure that landowners are protecting watershed and wildlife while harvesting timber. That guarantee can restore the public's trust that the land is being managed for the long term. Eventually, it can provide the social license to practice forestry, says David Ford, president of the Certified Forest Products Council.

"We need to build public confidence that landowners are practicing good forestry," says Ford. "The reality is that people don't care about the means as much as the end."

If family forest owners can convince the public that they are managing their lands for long-term sustainability, they believe that can lead to reduced regulations. The goal of many professional foresters is to offer enough incentives for sound management that landowners will need no government-imposed codes to comply, says Michael Goergen, director of forest policy with the Society of American Foresters.

One financial incentive being discussed would give landowners credit for the carbon they store in their forests. They could trade these to corporations producing carbon in an exchange similar to air pollution credits. Forestland owners could use their carbon credits to increase the value of their land, giving them collateral to help finance long-term forest management, says Diane McEllison, a third-generation owner of family forestland near the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

Tree farmers themselves have come up with several solutions to death tax. Jim and Betty Doerksen have created a conservation easement on their California forestland. It restricts the land from development, reducing its assessed value and the Doerksens' taxes by $600,000 a year. In Oregon, the Udells, who are AMERICAN FORESTS members, have transferred ownership of their family forest to a limited liability corporation. They can sell or give shares as gifts to family members, dividing the financial responsibility without dividing the land itself and reducing the assessed value by increasing the number of legal owners. Other forestland owners have created revocable trusts that leave their land intact when they die.

Still, the burdens of government regulation and public education on top of day-to-day forest management are sometimes overwhelming. As the price of developable land soars and the cost of farming forests climbs, the possibility of selling out is tempting.

What drives America's 70,000 certified tree farmers to jump through the management hurdles is more than sheer love of the land, At a time when both property and families are increasingly fragmented, nurturing trees from seedlings to saplings to maturity is a satisfaction few other professions offer.

Like most family forestland owners, Massie is tending the hardwoods and walnuts he has planted in hopes that his grandchildren will eventually harvest some sawlogs. It's a dedication to the land and a commitment to the future, says Beam.

"If you have something stable like land, it gives you a sense of being, of who you are," she says. "It's something you can always return to and pass on, against all odds."

Contributing editor Jane Braxton Little covers environmental issues from her home in Greenville, California.