Tree Farming began when private forests were being cut down and no one was planting trees to replace them. Check out 15 Forestry facts:
- The phrase “Tree Farming” started in the 1940’s.
- The first tree farm in the United States started in Washington State in 1941.
- Not all tree farms contain Christmas Trees.
- Tree farms don’t only provide wood for construction, paper and other wood products. They provide a valuable habitat for wildlife and birds as well as oxygen and help to improve the environment to clean the air from pollution.
- There are about 750 million acres of forests in the United States; about 60% of those forests (or over 420 million acres) are privately owned, working forest.
- Privately owned forests produce over 90% of the wood harvested for construction and manufacturing.
- Forests provide over 900,000 jobs in the U.S.
- It takes careful planning to develop a sustainable forest, or tree farm.
- More than 2.5 billion trees are planted each year in the States. Over 1.5 billion of those trees are planted by the forest community, which averages 4 million new trees planted each day by the forest community.
- The U.S. is the world’s leading producer of paper and paperboard.
- Georgia is #1 in the Timber Industry with Alabama, Alaska, California, Mississippi, Montana, Oregon, and Washington as other top producing states.
- Georgia is the top exporter of pulp, paper, and paperboard mill products, wood fuel, and wood pellets.
- There are two types of harvesting: commercial clear-cutting and silviculture-based harvesting. Clear-cutting involves removing all the trees down to a small diameter. Silviculture is the science of growing and harvesting trees for sustained yield. One silviculture-based method is shelterwood cutting, which uses partial cuttings over time to remove an entire forest.
- Trees harvested in the United States are used for: Lumber (53%), Pulp and paper products (32%), Wood-based composites, such as plywood and veneer (7%), and Fuelwood (7%).
- No part of the tree is wasted.
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Sources
Mississippi Forestry Association
Tree Farm System
College of Natural Resources News
AgAmerica Lending
Georgia Forestry Association
GardenGuides.com
Learn everything you wanted to know about tree farming!