Collins Pine

For the winter break, I went to Chester in California with my family and family friends Leslie & Mike. This post is about one of my favourite experiences there.

Leslie is one of one of the best people I know, always extremely enthousiastic and full of great ideas. Knowing I’m majoring in Natural Resources Conservation and that I’ve had some experience with forestry, she was super pro-active to get us a tour of the Collins Pine forest operation, based in Chester. We toured the some of the private forests and the mill with the Forest Manager, and I was very impressed with what I saw.

In the US, forestry is done somewhat differently than in Canada. In both Canada and the US, the East side is where more of the private land is found due to the initial colonizer settlements, but overall in the States has a higher proportion of private land than Canada. In California, for instance, about 50% is private whereas in BC only about 5% of forestland is private (Vancouver Island is an exception, it’s like 23% private). Half of the Californian private forests is owned by smallholders (usually each owns about 70 ha) and the other half by companies such as Collins Pine.

The Collins Company is a private family company operating in California, Oregon and Pennsylvania. It was the first company in North America to become FSC-certified back in 1994. It has no publicly traded stocks, so I think this is what drives the sustainability of the operation – things go beyond the short-term profitability needed to make the quarterly statements look good. The land in this part of California was bought in the early 1900s and logging started in 1941. Currently the Collins Almanor Forest (CAF) is abut 94 000 ha with only 10 permanent staff (Forest Manager, RPFs and wildlife biologist) and about 100 mill workers (and logging is done by contractors).

They practice uneven aged management, which is very different to what I had seen in BC (with clearcutting of old growth) or in Chile (with intensive plantation management of non-native species). For this type of management, the maximum area that can be completely cleared is about 1 ha whereas for even aged management the clearcut sizes are 8 – 12ha (versus 40 ha in BC’s coast and 60 in the interior!) In Oregon the maximum is about 50 ha, in Pennsylvania about 260 ha (so a huuuge range of maximums…) The Collins Pine land is intermixed with another company, Sierra Pacific, which is SFI certified and practices even aged management, so we also got a chance to drive through a couple blocks that were completely cleared.

Uneven aged forest management

The Collins private land was also mixed with National forest (public land, which in the States is mostly under federal jurisdiction), and there was a stark difference between the two. Due to decades of fire suppression in the National forests, there is currently a very high level of accumulated fuel that will make any upcoming fire very severe and intense. These National forests are not at all like the natural forests, where early settlers could drive their carts through. Nowadays it is hard even to walk through: tree density is extremely high, trees have a lot of branches and there are many dead and dying trees everywhere. The forest is thinning itself out, but with the potential of fire it is a disaster waiting to happen (like the recent and devastating Moonlight Fire in the area). Even if fire is part of the natural disturbance regime, Collins does not use fire in its management practices. Instead, they use selective logging and biofuel harvest to thin the forest and get rid of excess biomass.

National forest with tons of fuel accumulation

Thinned demonstration private forest

With selective logging, about 30% of the trees in a stand are taken every 15 years or so, creating a multicohort forest with a variety of species, ages and sizes. There is a lot of natural regeneration and good wildlife habitat with all the seed trees, snags and downed wood left behind. There are five main species being harvested here: ponderosa pine (similar to the very common Jeffrey pine), white fir, Douglas fir, incense cedar and sugar pine. Usually the trees that are not doing so well are the ones that are logged. For example, the priority is to harvest white fir, an abundant species that is very susceptible to insects, diseases and climate change. All the species are harvested at the same time, but the mill has periods of a couple weeks where a single species is processed. Then the mill is cleaned and another species goes in. The interesting thing is that the mill is made to adapt to the different sizes of logs coming in for processing, they don’t all have to be the same age.


The biofuel harvesting is something I thought was very cool. The smaller trees and all the branches and slash from harves are used for bioenergy production in the 12 MW plant that completely powers the whole operation (the mill, the office, etc.) In fact, only half is used for this and the extra half is sold to PGE. Something else I though very interesting where the permanent plots that are scattered throughout the forest. There are 566 of these plots and every year about 10% of these are visited and measured to calculate the growth of the trees and determine the amount of wood that can be cut each year. Plots are about 1 acre (0.4 ha) and all the trees 28 cm in diameter are individually tagged and measured at DBH every 10 years (the “DBH” is quite subjective so these trees have a line marked around so that they are measured on the same spot every year). To avoid bias, these plots are not treated any differently than the surrounding forest, and trees inside the plot are managed and harvested as normal. There is a downed wood inventory too, as well as regen surveys on temporary plots (pretty much what I spent my Vancouver Island summer doing) that were started about 15 years ago.

Wood chips for energy production. They also collect forest waste from people (kind of like a dumping ground)

Not all of the company's forest is FSC certified. To avoid having dual inventories, they can mix the wood (so that it is 50% FSC and 50% non-FSC) as long as only half is sold with the FSC logo.

 

The main product of Collins is softwood lumber, which goes to the US and to China. There is no pulp production because all the pulp mills in California closed. 

AND NOW... HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED HOW PENCILS ARE MADE?

They make the incense cedar slabs here, send them to China where the pencils are made (no pencil factories in California), and then these pencils (and eyeliners) are sold in Europe.