{"id":425,"date":"2010-06-20T18:14:56","date_gmt":"2010-06-20T22:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/the-art-of-managing-longleaf.html"},"modified":"2010-06-20T18:14:56","modified_gmt":"2010-06-20T22:14:56","slug":"the-art-of-managing-longleaf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/the-art-of-managing-longleaf.html","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Managing Longleaf"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/a>
\nThe surprising thing is so few people have heard of Leon Neel.
\nHere’s a very interesting biography of this very influential
\npioneer in southeastern forestry and agriculture, including
\nmany interesting stories of south Georgia and north Florida
\nlife and politics:<\/p>\n

\nThe Art of Managing Longleaf:
\n
\nA Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
\n
\nby Leon Neel, with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Leon Neel was a atudent, apprentice, and successor of Herbert Stoddard,
\nwho was originally hired by quail plantation owners around
\nThomasville to figure out why their quail populations were
\ndecreasing.
\nThe answer included a need to thin and especially to burn
\ntheir longleaf pine tree forests.
\nStoddard and Neel studied and practiced for almost a century
\nbetween them on how to preserve and increase the amount of standing
\ntimber and species diversity while also selectively harvesting trees
\nto pay for the whole thing.
\nTheir Stoddard-Neel Approach is written up in textbooks.
\nIn this book we learn how it came about, and how it is basically
\ndifferent from the clearcut-thin-thin-clearcut “efficient” timbering
\ncycle that is the current fad among pine tree growers in the southeast.<\/p>\n

\nIt starts back in the old days of Leon Neel’s youth when his daddy taught
\nhim to hunt quail:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nBut the larger lesson I want to convey concerns the doves and the fields
\nand the way we learned about nature and land use through the experience of
\nhunting.
\nThis was multiple-use land.
\nWe raised crops and livestock on it, but it also supported good wildlife
\npopulations, and that lesson stuck with me. Back then farm land was also
\nwild land.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That was before the days of massive agrochemical spraying.
\nPesticides kill off weeds (well, except the mutant pigweed)
\nbut they also kill birds.
\n(My father used to say that he didn’t like to spray pesticides
\nbecause by the time he left the field every bird
\nin the field was dead.
\nSo he kept his spraying to a minimum.
\nI remember blackbirds so thick in the cornfields after he combined
\nthat you couldn’t see the sky.
\nNo more.)<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/a>
\nBut this isn’t just a nostalgia-fest.<\/p>\n

\nLeon has taught us many things, but one of the most important is that
\nif you do not have stories to tell about the lands you work and love,
\nhow can you hope to protect them?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For example, when Leon Neel went to the University of Georgia
\nSchool of Forestry in 1947:<\/p>\n

\nThere was a course on forest fires, but it did not have anything
\nto do with fire ecology or controlled burning.
\nIt was all propaganda about how destructive fire was.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How could he be so sure he was right when he had only just gotten
\nto college?
\nBecause he’d already spent a lifetime growing up in the piney woods.
\n(Ironically, his book is published by University of Georgia Press.)<\/p>\n

\nThe stories extend outside the woods to the pulp and paper industries
\nand related university and state and local politics: when those companies
\ngrew in influence, how he headed them off the Red Hills, and the effects
\nthey had elsewhere:<\/p>\n

\n…when the paper companies moved south and started buying land and
\ndestroying thousands and thousands of acres of longleaf land
\nwith native groundcover. They replaced these lands with monocultures
\nof planted pine. Their process of site preparation was particularly
\ndestructive. They would broadcast spray herbicides to kill all the vegetation,
\nand then plant the pines in bedded rows. That process destroyed an
\nunknown number of rare and desirable plant species, and it made the land
\nunlivable for many animal species. That was shameful, and it required
\na defensive response.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a forestry episode that may be relevant to the proposed
\n
\nbiomass industry.<\/a><\/p>\n

\nWho better to write about Herbert Stoddard than Leon Neel?<\/p>\n

\nEd Komarek once wrote, aboout Mr. Stoddard, that “time and hours
\nwere of no consequence, and anyone that worked with him had to realize
\nthis or lose his respect.” Ed was right about that. Time meant absolutely
\nnothing to him when he was on a project. It did not matter what time
\nof the day or night it was, or what the weather was like, or anything else.
\nIf he had something in mind to do, we were going to do it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\n<\/a>
\nThis is how Stoddard and Neel gained deep understanding of the fire forest
\necology. Not by carefully allocated fixed-length time blocks; rather by
\ntaking the time a subject needed.<\/p>\n

\nAnd by being adaptable.<\/p>\n

\nIt was not black and white, wrong and right, but he knew something
\nwas not working right, and at some point he gained enough insight to say,
\n“Well maybe if I do this, it will be better.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nIf Mr. Stoddard knew he was right, he would hold his ground against
\nthe U.S. Forestry Service.
\nThis is my favorite story from the book about that:<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/a>
\nOn the day the Forest Service official visited, they drove by,
\nand Miss Sally was out in her yard. Not only that, but she had
\njust burned around her housee, as the plantations generally let the people
\ncontrol a certain parcel of land around their houses.
\nMr. Stoddard stopped, they got out, Mr. Stoddard introduced this man
\nto Miss Sally, and they talked for a while. Then the Forest Service official
\nsaid,
\n“Somebody’s been burning around your house here,” and she said “Yes, sir.”
\nHe asked, “Did the plantation do that?” And she said, “No sir, I did it.
\nThey let me do that, so I burned a couple of days ago.” He said,
\n“Well, look at it. You burned up everything out there. Just look at it.
\nThat land that you burned, it’s just as black as you are.”
\nMiss Sally paused for a minute and then politely replied,
\n“Yes sir, and in about three weeks it’ll be just as green as you are!”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nThere is a chapter specifically about the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
\nand of course there are textbooks that describe it in more algorithmic
\nterms. But here’s the bottom line:<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/a>
\nSome people say the Stoddard-Neel Approach cannot work for
\nthe majority of landowners in the longleaf belt, but I believe it can.
\nThere are landowners out there who have a conservation ethic and do not want
\nto liquidate their timber, and I am hopeful that their ranks will grow.
\nOur system can help them. Our philosophy works the same on a
\nsmall tract as it does on a large one. We want to leave some for the future.
\nThas is the whole point of the Stoddard-Neel system: our historic longleaf
\nforests took hundreds of generations to develop, and the values that inhere
\nin the best remnants of those forests will last more than one generation.
\nIndeed, effective longleaf restoration, which more and more people have
\nbegun to embrace, will also be a multigenerational process.
\nOur forestry must look beyond one generation as well.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All that and
\n
\nreforestation produces twice as many jobs as biomass and nine times as many
\nas nuclear.<\/a><\/p>\n

\nAnd the notes at the end of the book are a goldmine of other longleaf references.<\/p>\n

\nBuy this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The surprising thing is so few people have heard of Leon Neel. Here’s a very interesting biography of this very influential pioneer in southeastern forestry and agriculture, including many interesting stories of south Georgia and north Florida life and politics: The Art of Managing Longleaf: A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach, by Leon Neel, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,65,66,40,54,10,70,60,572,73,36],"tags":[1386,1378,1383,295,2774,1380,2779,1384,1098,1373,3,1369,1280,1368,2787,1382,1374,1377,1385,426,502,1376,321,1371,1379,1370,1375,1372,1381,1014],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds","category-books","category-botany","category-economy","category-fire","category-history","category-longleaf","category-plants","category-renewable-energy","category-science","category-silviculture","tag-albert-g-way","tag-biomass","tag-burned","tag-ecology","tag-economy","tag-ed-komarek","tag-fire","tag-fire-forest","tag-florida","tag-generations","tag-georgia","tag-herbert-stoddard","tag-jobs","tag-leon-neel","tag-longleaf","tag-miss-sally","tag-multigenerational","tag-paper","tag-paul-s-sutter","tag-pine","tag-pinus-palustris","tag-pulpwood","tag-quail","tag-red-hills","tag-school-of-forestry","tag-stoddard-neel-approach","tag-sustainability","tag-thomasville","tag-u-s-forestry-service","tag-university-of-georgia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}