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Georgia’s fast-growing population is using up wood and
wood-fiber
products almost faster than tree farmers can grow trees. But
University
of Georgia scientists say with a little extra attention, growers
can supply wood fiber to keep pace with demand.
“Georgia is the sixth-fastest growing state in the
nation,”
said Doug Bachtel, a housing and consumer economics professor
with the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences.
More People = More Homes, Furniture and
Paper
“As our low unemployment rate attracts people, they’ll
need new homes and the furniture to go in them, as well as paper
goods at their work places,” he said. “So besides what
we export, there is a huge domestic demand for wood and wood
products.”
In the United States, the average person’s use of paper and
paper products has increased by nearly 30 percent since 1980.
Experts say paper use will continue increasing by 1.5 percent
to 2 percent each year to an estimated 1,053 pounds in 2020.
And as the world population keeps rising, so will the demand
for wood products.
Same Trees, Less Growing Time
To help meet this ever-increasing demand, Georgia tree farmers
are growing about 6.1 million acres of planted pines that will
be cut for pulp and sawtimber. And they’re learning how to manage
those trees to produce the same fiber volume in less time.
“Intense pine management for high pulp volume is most
effective on land that’s already well-suited for
agriculture,”
said David Moorhead, a professor of forestry sciences with the
UGA Warnell School of Forest Resources.
“A lot of timber is planted in sensitive areas,”
he said. “But that is managed less intensively, and we don’t
look at that land as our high-volume production areas.”
Moorhead describes intense management as having three main
parts: site preparation, weed management and adequate
fertility.
Weed Control and Fertilizing are
Musts
Site
preparation ensures young trees get a good start. Weed control
keeps other plants from using up the nutrients and water the
trees
need. Fertilizing boosts tree growth, too, particularly in the
first five to seven years.
Using these management practices, farmers can cut a
fiber-production
rotation in half, Moorhead said. Farmers can grow in 12 to 14
years the same amount of fiber that used to take about 25 years
to grow.
It takes a little longer to grow trees for lumber because of
the wood strength needed, Moorhead said. Still, intense
management
has cut the time needed to grow sawtimber by about a third.
Engineered Wood
Many timber and wood product companies are creating
“engineered
woods” out of fiber and flakes from the more quickly grown
trees. Moorhead said in some instances, engineered wood products
are actually stronger or more well-suited for structural use than
solid lumber.
“These products open the market for what was considered
unusable trees, particularly the trees thinned from young
forests,”
he said.
“Our industry structure here includes the land to grow
the trees, the people to manage and cut them and the processing
and refining sites to get products to consumers.”
Georgia Climate Good for Growing
Pines
In Georgia, where the climate is nearly ideal to grow pine
trees, about 18 percent of the timber is planted in pine
plantations.
“We have a real competitive advantage here in that we’ve
got a great climate and good soil to grow pines,” Moorhead
said.
More than half of the wood produced in the United States comes
from the Southeast: Georgia, north Florida, Alabama and South
Carolina.
Georgia farmers planted 360,000 acres of trees in 1996, the
last year for which statistics are available. Economists say the
impact of Georgia forestry is about $19.5 billion, second only
to the poultry industry.
(Photographs by David Moorhead, University of Georgia
Warnell
School of Forest Resources.)
