Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: My father is a twin. His birthday was Tuesday.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: Oh, yeah? Yeah. They were born on the first day of spring too, the year

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: they were born. Spring. Birthday.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: Well, I'm a Leo. July summer man later.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: Do you have a brother or a sister twin?

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Okay, we're

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: live. We're live. So, we're gonna refocus here.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: My name is Alan Thompson. Thank you very much for the invitation to be here. I'm the board president of Vermont Woodlands Association. I live in Waterbury, and professionally, I am also a consulting forester serving private landowners in Northern Vermont. I interrupted an introduction.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Introductions are always best, so that's good. And we're glad to have you with us this morning. So thank you for joining us.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: You're welcome. What I hope to do is just to give you a brief overview of the Vermont Woodlands Association, what we do, what we want to do, and how we think about policy both here and in the greater part of the state. I brought most of what we end up doing is education outreach. So I brought examples of those, which you're welcome to keep, and how we present ourselves to the community. These are different brochures leave some stickers scattered around for folks here. The Vermont Woodlands Association's mission is to educate and advocate for the practices of productive stewardship, use and enjoyment of Vermont forests. It's a pretty big space to be in. We've got a lot of forests. Most of it is privately owned. And so we focus a lot of what we do on private forest landowners and the stewardship of those privately owned forest woodlands. VWA originated as the Timberland Owners Association, And at the time, there were real literal fires to be dealing with, and Vermont Woodlands Association acted as a conduit between the state and federal governments who hired, I guess, and built the towers that monitored forest fires and reported forest fires. And we paid some of those watchers, I guess. And as those literal fires waned over time, mostly as a result of the forest, the railroad industry, the purpose of VWA waned with it. The land ownership and forestry culture was changing at the same time. Vermont Timberland Owners Association was predominantly membership and was predominantly large timberland owners. That culture has shifted and VWA has shifted along with it. So now our focus is still forest health. Our fires are less literal, more metaphorical. But we've got over a hundred years of history in the state. Most of what we do is public advocacy, trying to reach out to community members, practitioners, landowners, and help them understand what forest stewardship is and what it looks like. We do that through newsletters, emails, and many, many dozens of public workshops that are open to the public throughout the year, inviting anybody who wants to see an active timber harvest, a managed forest land, or a tree farm is invited to show. In its most simplest form, why it matters is because primarily we love our forests, and we all have a long list of reasons of why we love it. But we also love wood. One of the more extractive uses of that forest is the timber harvesting and the stewardship of those woodlands. And most of that wood in Vermont, in New England, and in The United States comes from family forest owners. It's not public. We own land. It's not corporate ownership. These are family forest owners who are people like me and presumably like you, who have small forest ownerships, have diverse interests and diverse ways of accomplishing their goals, but conserve the greater community by bringing wood products to their neighbors, which is a huge part of what VWA wants to continue to support both now and to ensure that those forests can continue to provide those resources in the future.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative Brian? Who writes

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: The Game of Logging or maybe similar sort of chainsaw and logging programs?

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: The Game of Logging is a for profit company that is based off of the teaching style of Thank you. And so it's unique business model that uses a really important technique that goes all over the world now to teach chainsaw skills. I've taken it, Jed's taken it, most people who run chainsaws have taken this course and love it. Dave Birdsall would be the owner of the company that runs Game of Logging currently.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: I mean, I'm wondering if you could just define what makes a forest. I mean, like, you're talking about people sitting here and, like, I have five acres and I would say four acres is wooded, but what's a forest? What's a family forest? I haven't heard that expression before.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: Let's see. What makes a forest? Boy, any size makes a forest. Now you get to define what goes on in your five acres, and your objectives might overlap with recreation, aesthetics, bird habitat, visual screening. In the context of forest stewardship, there needs to be a substantial enough size that would provide you to grow and harvest from some of those resources. Current use program uses 25 acres. NRCS uses and Tree Farm uses 10. And there's a really great organization that's run by the UMass Amherst Family Forest research program run by Brett Butler out of Amherst again, and they would use 10 acres. So any forest that's owned over 10 acres satisfies this family forest definition. So my previous, or maybe it's coming up, is 75% of Vermont's wood comes from land owned by family forests on properties 10 acres or more.

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: Okay, thanks.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: That's using the 10 acre definition then? Yep.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: But there's not much wood you can take off of a 10 acre wood sustainably and feed and satisfy your community needs. You keep going smaller and smaller and all of a sudden you've got one tree or no trees. So VWA wants to support all these values. It's a big bucket, but we believe that healthy productive forests mean a healthy productive Vermont means healthy productive forests. And it's a beautiful, wonderful loop.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Just quickly on the following up on Michelle's,

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: is there a definition of when a piece of land becomes a forest? I'm thinking there's so much in Vermont that was agricultural hay fields, etcetera, pasture, pine, poplar, etcetera, moving in. Is there a sort of line in your world where you can look at it and be like, that's a forest now, or that's still just You

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: know what, personally, I could look at an agricultural field that's one year fallow, and I could imagine making decisions and turning that field into a productive forest very quickly. Current use has a definition of forest as 300 stems per acre. That's a pretty easy threshold to meet, especially if you have tiny little trees that could take a year to go between corn and trees. But it takes a long time for it to go from small tree to trees worth stewarding.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: But it can happen in a lifetime.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: It can happen a few times.

[Rep. Gregory “Greg” Burtt (Member)]: A few times in

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: a lifetime. In a lifetime. Yep. And, yeah, it can happen a few times in a lifetime if you're lucky and smart.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: And then do you consider Christmas tree farms? You know, for, you know, balsam fir, and they're growing it to harvest every ten years or so, eight, ten years. Do you consider that a forest?

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: No, I think that would be the quickest answer. The forestry would be using mostly principles of sunlight and soil and stewarding the trees around them. When you're managing Christmas trees, they're relatively on an individual basis. Each tree has 100% sunlight all the time. Then what you're managing is soil quality, pests, shape and form. So personally, that's more on the side of the agricultural version of use. And I think that that is true for even the current use would call Christmas tree farms agriculture. Some of the more specific programs you might be familiar with is the tree farm, which is a national program under American Family Forests, and the Vermont Woodlands Association has been the sponsor and manager of that program in Vermont, certifying properties for meeting various higher level standards than other standards. And so you might recognize the sign with its main tenants being wood, water, wildlife and recreation. We also run now the LEAP program, the Logger Education to Advance Professionalism, a logger training program, which operates in Vermont and throughout Vermont loggers, the Women in our Woods program, Vermont Wow, recognizing demographic shifts, with increasing ownership of woodlands by women and making sure that stewardship of those woods is an accessible thing for everybody. And woodland legacy planning where VWA recognizes that we want to engender a certain forest stewardship ethic. And then upon generational transfers for any succeeding owners, those ethics get passed down with that shift in ownership because that's an inevitability. And oftentimes that's when land management, land uses can change very quickly, both on an individual level, family level, community level.

[Rep. Gregory “Greg” Burtt (Member)]: Representative Gregory Where does maple come into this program or does it?

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: It's I would say it comes in the same way that firewood, timber, hunting, all these other uses and values fall in this for stewardship as a product available for anybody to elect to choose for. On my property, I cut timber, I tap trees for maple syrup, I hunt deer and grouse, and I want all those things. And my management supports those uses happily. As it relates to policy, the things that, and especially contemporary policy, the things that we tend to be most concerned about is protecting these value appraisal programs. We want that program to be stable, predictable, and easy. And almost every single year, we see something that either supports the stability and predictability of that program, or works to shift that and make it something other than its original intent. The success of this program is really based on that stability and predictability for landowners and for the greater community, I think too. Act 59 passed a few years ago, and folks are working on the Vermont Conservation Plan to administer Act 59. If the conservation plan works to achieve act 59 as written, that would have some pretty big impacts on on forest stewardship, the ability for landowners to use and steward their forests. And we would hope that this conservation plan can protect the Vermonters' ability to own, use and steward their forests. VWA is on the technical advisory committee, I guess we have a seat at that table advocating for landowner and landowner interests. Working lands coalition, slow camp, low interest loans, advocate for strong forest industry. We've done that with the strategic roadmap and on the implementation steering committee. That's a pretty big bucket. Anywhere we can, we would advocate for forest industry interests. Of course, Act two fifty, that's currently on the table now, thinking through the tier three stuff and any of the extra criteria that could impact a forest landowner's ability to use, own, and steward their forests. That's the buckets where we do we think about I mean, those are pretty big and far ranging buckets. And I think that on a day to day basis, it's really implementing educational opportunities to bring landowners, practitioners, and anybody who's interested in learning about forest stewardship to the table to see what it really means to manage forests, what it smells like, what it looks like. Often, it's not as pretty and romantic as I say it is. It can be muddy. It can be smoky.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: What was this?

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: Admiring that Knuckle Boom Loader book that I know a few kids really appreciate. That's not a romantic view of Vermont's forest landscape, but that's the reality in which many of us operate in at some point or another.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: We've had the opportunity to go out a couple of times to, I think, the hardest part is active sites, either with the committee or individually, And I've seen that.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: Good. I have found that as a consulting forester, that those there's like an evolution where almost anybody landowners, practitioners, or even general public goes through, where the more experience you have with seeing it, making decisions around it, and seeing the result of it over time, the more willing you are to have that be part of your life. And it does take practice, it's not something that everybody can do right out of the gate. I've watched clients of mine shutter at the felling of a tree, and ten years later, those same landowners will have, in a sense, apologized for their initial reactions because of their perceived ethical dilemmas that they were dealing with at the time. How do I both kill a tree and love a tree at the same time? Ten years later, when there's a 100 more pine trees, it's way easier to see, but it took ten years for them to realize that.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: I'm just thinking of sort of similar dichotomy to what you just mentioned, when this committee looks at Vermont, we often hear, what is it, 77% of Vermont is forested now, and it's growing. So as far as a place where forests love to grow, Vermont's fantastic. Certainly, know on my farm that it would be happy if I went away, it would be just total forest in about twenty years. So we have that reality. And then on the economy itself, connected to the forest land, the forest economy is challenged beyond belief. Farming, same situation, both really hard to make a living at. So where does the Woodlands Association fall on making those two things work? I mean, we have a great place for forests, where we manage it, where we interact with it, really hurting.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: Those economic realities occur at the landowner level decision, the forester level decision, logger level decision, but it also occurs on the international landscape. We sell wood across borders and across oceans to communities across the world who impact the decisions we make on our land, that's an important part of it. I don't want to demean that, but to give an example just how big our forest economy really is, it's huge and it's complicated, and there's not one clear knob to be turning. The one knob VWA wants to have a good strong handle on is the culture of forest stewardship. And it really is to bring that practiced perspective so that somebody isn't shocked. Oh, how often is Jed cutting trees? Somebody's immediate response is, it's a subdivision. Jed does is cut trees for development. I know Jed and I work with Jed. But the gut response is you're not doing this to steward a forest, you're doing this for some other selfish reason. The recent Vermont Digger article about the Fix Our Forest Act was titled something like, Is this a free pass for loggers? As if loggers are the primary decision makers for what is happening in the national landscape of forest stewardship. They're an important part of it, but the decisions for our forest industry are big and vast and we really want to make sure that anybody who's making decisions about any of these bills that have any effect on poor stewardship and use of enjoyment, that they think about logging, they think about sugaring, they think about Christmas tree farms, and they aren't making decisions that make that part harder.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Alan, you mentioned one hundred years ago or a little bit longer, the organization's been in existence for a century plus, and that it was founded by landowners who were concerned about fire, storage fires. And that I hear correctly that was often caused by railroads. So sparks from passing trains would ignite the undergrowth. So untold. Interesting bit of history. And that makes me think also that we know that at one time, prior to that, much of the state, much of the Northeast was completely denuded that there were no forests or there's a lot less forests than there was today. And it must have grown back enough by 1915 that the landowners were this was a concern.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: Most of those landowners that existed as large timberland owners at the time are now the state and federal forests that have since transferred into public ownership or some of the existing larger corporate timberland owners that we currently have in Vermont, Weyerhaeuser, would be the biggest and best example. So I know Jed's got

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: a question too, but I just, while I have the floor, wanted to ask about, again, about the 75% of that figure of Vermont's wood supply, I think, was what you were calculating there. And I'm wondering, so in addition to family owned farms, would be, once you just mentioned, there's still some corporate land and then state and federal land. And are you in that percentage talking about the amount of wood that is used in the state? So whether it's for construction or firewood or anything else, you telling us something else there? It's mostly the wood that's cut

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: comes from and harvested comes from private family forest owners. The utilization is also really maybe goes a little bit to some of the economic questions. Some of that wood goes out of the state. Some of that wood goes out of the country. Some of that wood stays right in that person's backyard. We're also importing a lot of wood from out of the state, from other states into Vermont and other countries into Vermont too. So there's a little bit of a mixed bag depending and especially depending on where you are in Vermont, your access to certain saw mills or pulp mills and the species you're dealing with as well. The northern part of the state has a pretty difficult access to hardwood sawmills in Vermont. So their closest location is Canada. If you're in Southern Vermont, chances are you're either selling it to mills in the southern part of the state or you're going to New York

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: to sell your hardwood logs. It's a mishmash of everything else. Most of the softwood logs are eventually shipped out of state to New Hampshire or Maine or Canada as well. So this is a supply, talking about supply here, and we, I guess my sort of what I am thinking is we hear a lot, as you just mentioned about timber sales, timber harvests on public lands. Those are the ones that seem to get people's attention. But the majority, the vast majority is actually family owned land. Private and family owned land. Correct.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: And proportionally, private landowners are producing more wood than public ownership is too. So there's just an interesting reality, partly related to meeting a variety of public interests and any regulatory hurdles that harvests on public land have to go through. It can be a daunting task to get a timber harvest or any activity achieved on state or federal land for a variety of reasons. And as you know, Vermont forests, as I think you know, Vermont forests grow much more wood than we're harvesting. So one of the burdens the forest industry isn't complaining about is a lack of wood. That hasn't been a problem for many, many years. We have wood, it's ready to cut.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative Lipsky.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Yeah. First thing, Alan, thank you for being here. Just from a courtesy point of view, you have not met Jack Brigham. He's only been here about six weeks, representative. Three weeks. Brian Cina, and then Aldridge. But he's a long time dairy farmer but operates a family sugar bush, a significant one. So it's good that you Thank you. I I wanted to play. Me. And you must now represent Bartholomew. You've been in here for all the others, I believe. So, anyway, with that courtesy out of the way, thank you for being here. You know, I'm gonna be presenting, and I and for the record, I do work both professionally and policy wise with Alan and have for a number of years on many issues. I think we both are on the implementation steering committee for the futures did you grow the map? And, you know, we haven't talked in a while. I was at an event where one role Alan plays is that of an educator, and he hosted a a tour at the family forest, which he has been the managing forest for for a long time. And it had a diverse group of some were just interested, maybe some were guests, many were local residents. And Alan does a great job at communicating that complexity of a force, responsible as a force. So one thing that you referred to act 59 as a cons that's different than 30 by 30.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Same thing.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: Same thing.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: But but but so I just think at some point, we will look forward to you when, you know, at, like, one eighty one. Because somewhere, being a representative of forest landowners, woodland landowners, you know, somewhere not just industry rights, but private property rights every time an act which sort of declares 50% in another twenty four years each to be permanently conserved. That impacts potentially conserves, but also, you know, threatens the viability of a certain percentage of their land, achieving any income stream could be disruptive, but also certainly complicates and threatens and some use of term like confiscatory or takes away certain rights or did impact not just that landowner, but the whole viability of a community, the grower, the houses. Get into it's a EWA get into advocating on some of the impacts or sharing the impacts or potential risks that some of these actions have taken by our legislature?

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: The

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: most easiest way we've been doing that is on the technical advisory committees as being one of the only landowner advocate, though not to take away, there's plenty of people who think strongly about landowners, but we play a very strong role advocating for private landowner and landowner rights. But also one of the few participants thinking about forest stewardship and the impacts on potential forest stewardship. Act 59 is laudable goal. As written, a very difficult thing to achieve. If achieved as intended, we would want to make sure protects the ability to steward forests. We see a lot of issues with that being the case. So we would hope to be able to share more thoughts with you and others.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Got at least one more question, but we then we need to wrap up. Representative Nelson?

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: On current use, there is a provision on current use to preserve woodland. You know, no touch, no cut, is considered gets a a status in current use. Yes. Where does your group fall in that? Do you see that as viable? I see current use as an instrument for working lands where we manage and and realizing that a hardwood stand might be seventy five years between managements.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: The original intent for current use was written to support productive forests and productive agricultural land. The reserve forest category, I think you're referring to was put into law a few years ago, and in that law changed the definition of the purpose of current use to include the protection of ecologically sensitive spaces. That's not a verbatim thing, but what it showed me is how easy it can be to change purpose and how a change of purpose can result in. It showed me how risky current use current use could be at risk to additional changes or anything else could be at risk to additional changes. At the worst case, it affected the predictability and stability of the program because it could just as easily change again in one way or another. That part scares me. I've often felt that Vermont and Vermont stewardship needs a place for these wild spaces. I get nervous when, I mean, I believe we have that now without mandates, and we've been getting that now without mandates, without public support. So I get nervous about mandates and public support for one side of a spectrum. And it is a spectrum without an equal and opposite reaction to say, let's support the thing that's really hurting, that needs the support. We have bigger, older trees and more wild landscapes than we do today without additional public support. And we did that pretty easily. We've lost a heck of a lot of our forced industry infrastructure at the same time. So I'm on optimism, I really work hard to be and use positive supportive language around things. And so that's what we try to do.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Okay, yeah, let's take this as the last question. I

[Rep. Gregory “Greg” Burtt (Member)]: to Maine this fall to hunt, did a clear cut area, it had to be a thousand plus acres and you wanna talk about a shot to it had just been done, but it was all replanted to softwood. They were like this high. But I mean, just to drive into that thing and it's bigger than Franklin County, it seems like, you know, it's just except for the wet areas where they turn around. But if you drive around up there and see twenty year clear cuts that are coming back, but it's kind of a shock from looking at this blowing up there with no trees. Yeah. Well,

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: thank you for coming in giving us some and Everybody loves talking trees. You're welcome. Yeah. Thank you. We may delve into some of these issues, the ones that you've mentioned later this spring, we'll perhaps have you back. Thank you. You're welcome.

[Alan Thompson, President, Vermont Woodlands Association]: Thank you, everybody.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: We're going to wrap up for

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: the