Lucrative Cottonwood May Squeeze Out Hay and Corn
Pacing across his 100 acres of Chehalis River bottom land, George Atkinson mulled over the idea of planting cottonwood.
“It’s like a corn crop growing,” he mused, wading through 6-foot grass and thistles. “But it (the economic return) is better than crop farming.”
All he gets now, the 56-year-old farmer said, is about $50 an acre each year from the hay, peas or corn he can grow on his farmland southeast of Elma. And that doesn’t count the cost of planting, fertilizing and harvesting.
Atkinson, and other farmers in southwest Washington, could do a lot better by following the lead of the paper industry and growing hybrid cottonwood, said consultant Phil Woolwine. He has studied the returns on cropping the fast-growing tree, a hybrid from Eastern cottonwood and Northwest black cottonwood. A cottonwood harvest, he said, requires a $1,300-an-acre investment over the seven years it takes to grow a crop. In the seventh year, the crop would be cut and chipped in the field and the chips trucked to a paper mill.
The farmer, Woolwine said, could expect to sell an acre’s worth of cottonwood chips for $2,700, leaving a profit of $1,400 per acre. A pessimistic projection shows the grower with a profit of $837 an acre, Woolwine said. “It’s still attractive.”
Under the rosier scenario, Atkinson would at least quadruple his income from his farm and, most of the time, all he’d have to do is watch the trees grow to an average of 60 feet tall and 8 inches in diameter.
But Atkinson wonders aloud whether he can wait seven years for a payback from the first crop--and whether the market will be as good seven years from now.
“That’s going to be the big sticker, waiting seven years,” he said. “It’s going to take some gamblers. . . .”
Woolwine said his study indicated a continuing need for fiber, since the Northwest paper industry has suffered from slowdowns in the timber industry the last several years. Paper mills in some cases have resorted to importing chips from Alaska and Central America.
On top of that, cottonwood is an ideal material for white, high-quality paper, he said.
It is an ideal replacement for alder, another hardwood species that has been used extensively in the paper industry. Future harvests of alder are expected to decline, because of areas protected under forest-management rules. Cottonwood is classified as an agricultural crop and thus its cultivation and harvest are not subject to forest-management regulations.
James River Corp. already is using cottonwood for 5% of the fiber flow at its Wauna, Ore., mill, augmenting the supply of hemlock and spruce chips that come from waste at James River lumber mills.
Cottonwood helps to produce high-quality white paper because its short fibers fill in the long, stronger fibers of softwood species such as hemlock. It also easily “cooked” in the pulping process and results in a lighter, brighter pulp.
Don Rice, manager of James River Corp. fiber plantations, said growing cottonwood in place of more traditional crops, or livestock, has environmental benefits. He said herbicides are used only the first two of the seven years it takes from planting to harvest, no insecticides are needed and erosion and runoff are reduced.
“It’s really quite environmentally friendly,” he said.
