Northeast Forests Turn Ailing Farms Into Green Acres

Joyce Kilmer, who wrote the poem “Trees,” would be pleased.

As farms have been failing across the Northeast, forests have been spreading from Maine to New Jersey, where the poet was born.

New York hasn’t had so many trees since the pioneer days of the 1820s. By the time tens of thousands of farmers had dispersed across New York a century ago, just a quarter of the land was forest.

Fast-forward to the farming-efficient 1990s, and the maple, hemlock, pine, ash, beech, oak, cherry, aspen, spruce, birch and basswood are ubiquitous again, growing three times faster than they are felled.

No less than 62% of New York state--18.6 million acres, or an acre for every resident--is now covered with trees. That’s a gain of 3.5 million acres of forest since 1953.

The trend applies across most of the Northeast. Ranging from 90% of Maine to 42% of New Jersey, trees shade more than 68% of the nine-state region, up from 60% in the 1950s.

Timberland contributes $4 billion to New York’s economy each year, employing 62,000 people producing everything from furniture, paper and Christmas trees to bowling pins and floral picks. And its canopy shelters a diverse wildlife, not to mention humans in search of fresh air and solitude.

Said Roger Dziengeleski of the Empire State Forest Products Assn. “The forest is an integral part of the human psyche.”

Humans throughout history, he said, “have been creatures of the forest. Our primal fears as well as our primal well-being are tied to it.”

The quality of the trees, the care given to lesser-known species and the forest’s shape and size “are all indications that we’re doing a lot better job harvesting the forest’s fruits for human use and, at the same time, keeping it healthy and growing,” he said.

John Hamilton, 73, a retired doctor, owns a 250-acre forest in Springwater in western New York. His wife, Harriet, who died in March, got it started in the 1930s, planting a stand of red pine on soil depleted by overfarming.

Hamilton and his three children treat the land as a nature preserve, inviting in friends and nature-tour groups for camping, hiking and fishing. The forest provides maple syrup, wild berries and firewood in abundance, and its beauty fills each day.

“This is probably the most important thing in our life, both managing the trees and helping the environment,” Hamilton said. “My wife used to say, ‘Managing the forest is like having your cake and eating it too.’ ”

For farmers such as Roger Clark, the forest has been a godsend, providing income to replace dwindling profits from his cropland.

Clark, whose farm lies in the ridge country between the Finger Lakes and Lake Ontario, has run a sawmill with his son-in-law for 20 years, first as a sideline, then as a vibrant business that ensured his livelihood on the land.

Without it, his 630-acre farm would have gone under in the 1980s when prices for wheat and field corn crashed and farms folded by the thousands.

“We had to do something different or we’d have lost it all,” said Clark, 61, his smiling face craggy with wrinkles. “The lumber business has been an excellent adventure for us.”

His experience straddles two monolithic changes in the New York landscape: In the last 40 years, farmland has shrunk to half its size, and the forest has spread across a quarter as much land.

Bob Potter’s grandfather started a sawmill in Allegany during the oil boom along the New York-Pennsylvania line in 1910. The business now employs 42 people, churning out 5 1/2 million board feet of hardwood each year.

The lumber industry “is something that could go on forever, if that’s what people choose,” Potter said.

Nonetheless, as with many businesses, automation is tightening up competition.

With big lumberyards buying up much of the better-quality, more profitable trees, smaller sawmills are increasingly having to depend on coarser wood that goes into pallets, crates and shipping boxes.

The mill run by Clark and his son-in-law, Rudy Zimmerman, is medium-sized, relying on timber of all qualities. “We’re looking for niches we fit into, something the big guys overlook,” Zimmerman said.

They spent more than $200,000 this summer to install a much narrower, eighth-inch band saw that can yield more volume from the trees they buy from landowners up to 75 miles away.

“You’re always working for ways to convert less of the raw product into sawdust,” said Zimmerman, 44, who supervises eight employees.

Judging a tree’s quality before it is sawed up is another key step because, come grading time, “the value of our loads fluctuate all over the place,” he said.

The family farm remains marginally profitable.

“If we were looking at dollars and cents, we probably should have gotten out of farming a long time ago,” Zimmerman said.

“Just because it’s not making you rich, it should not be overlooked that being happy has a lot to do with why you keep at something. And my father-in-law lives for farming.”