August 1, 2025
Harvest Completion & Immediate Land Impact
When the logging operation ended, the timber sale was complete but the land transformation was only beginning. The harvest opened roughly 50 acres, leaving the expected stumps, slash and disturbed ground along with roads and working areas that had supported the operation.
At harvest completion, the property had changed dramatically.
Approximately 50 acres had been clearcut. The merchantable timber was gone, but the harvested acreage was not remotely equivalent to finished pasture.
The land retained stumps, tops, limbs and other woody debris. Equipment traffic had disturbed portions of the soil and affected roads and working areas. The open ground also made drainage, slopes and other terrain features much more visible than they had been under timber.
This was an important point in evaluating the timber harvest fairly. If the experiment stopped at the $60,000 timber check, it would miss a large part of the economic story.
The harvested land now had potential for the uses we wanted, but realizing that potential would require additional work and money.
A later reclamation estimate illustrates the scale of that issue. One proposed approach priced intensive east-side pasture reclamation at $2,600 per acre for 25 acres, or $65,000, while a lower-intensity west-side slash-burning approach was priced at $300 per acre for 25 acres, or $7,500.
Those dramatically different post-harvest options eventually became a separate experiment rather than part of the timber harvest itself. But the condition left by the logging operation is what created that experiment.
Observations
• Roughly 50 acres were clearcut.
• Harvest completion produced open land, not finished pasture.
• Stumps, slash, woody debris and disturbed ground remained.
• Post-harvest land condition is a real economic consequence of a timber sale.
• Later reclamation proposals showed how expensive full conversion could become.
• The contrast between intensive reclamation and lower-cost approaches deserved its own experiment.
Actions Taken
We documented the immediate post-harvest condition and began evaluating what would be required to convert different portions of the harvested acreage to productive ground. That conversion work was separated into its own experiment.
Next Step
Financial Results