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Interview with Bob Kobelia on May 24, 2005
Transcription:
Hello, my name is Bob Kobelia . I am a forester and owner of Northeast Wood Products, here in Pownal, VT. My understanding is that this program is for you folks to understand a little bit about what people do to earn their livelihood from the land. For myself, I have more than one business as many of you will when you are older. I’ve had a real estate brokers license for many years and still handle land sales in southern Vermont. But what I went to college for was forestry. I graduated from the Syracuse forestry school in 1974 and ever since that time, I’ve had the majority of my livelihood doing forestry work for landowners, and still carry that out with manufacturing lumber for the flooring and furniture markets. We are fortunate to have an area to grow some of the finest Northern red oak and the finest hard maple in the world just in our backyard. These trees are wonderful renewable resources and as registered, we try to practice good forestry, in the sense that we practice what we preach. Many of the timber lots that I do work for, we go in and selectively harvest timber in a schedule that’s flexible and at 15-year intervals. The way you do that is, your harvesting some of the mature trees that are in that class of 80-100 years old. Doing a light thinning, this way, you maintain fast growth and it lets you grow trees.
You can have slow growth or you can have fast growth doing what you can do to manage to maximize the forest growth and species today will make you a little more valuable crop 15-20 years from now.
In the mill itself, we do what we call the primary breakdown. And we do it by species, if it is red oak or hard maple or cherry, yellow birch, the majority of hardwood logs, by species and do our sorts of certain lumber too. And we use some ourselves.
But basically, the sorting of the lumber and selling for different customers.
In the northeast, 200 years ago, there was an awful lot of timber that was cleared for farming and after the civil war, a lot of the farms that were cleared right to the mountain top, started to revert back to forest. Of course, ending in 1865, it’s been well over 100 years that these steep mountain site farms grew over. In Vermont, now, over 85% of the land is wooded, in fact, if you were to try to build a house somewhere, you would probably have to clear some trees just because there are very few open spaces anymore and there’s been an increase in the available timber crop that’s growing every year. That trend has continued due to a variety of reasons. One, is less agricultural land, if you do not use it, it will grow.
Over the last 25 years, there’s been more quality forestry work done in this state than ever in its history and the benefits of that has improved the quality of the timber harvesting. It’s better to have good fast growing timber than to have old wood that has a lot of rot and defects in it when you saw it.
Vermont’s landscape has changed in the last 20 years, it’s a maturing timber lot. In early succession, we have these fields that grow over to young timber, you’ll find pine, white birch, poplar, species that are pioneer type trees come in, cherry maybe. These species need full sunlight and they grow in the full sun and develop into a young forest. As this area’s known to be a mature forest now, a mature forest is one that can grow underneath itself in the shade and we’re into an area here that’s heavy to beech, birch, and maple, and if you ever walk into a wood lot and look on the little trees and seedlings, you’d probably find a lot of birch, beech, and maple. When you cut a big tree, you’re going to have a lot of seedlings become the big trees later on. So to get transitional change, species are changing.