This story was reported and written by VPM News.
It’s a hot day in Cumberland County. Ash Latimer is in the woods, which is to be expected from a logger.
Latimer and his dad run Conservation Forestry, a forest management and logging business that is taking a slightly unconventional approach to what he sees as an extractive industry.
He’s cutting selectively, which is not an uncommon practice. It’s what he’s leaving behind that’s unusual.
“We’re really looking to leave behind the highest-quality trees, leave the most money — so even if we’re taking out a fair amount of volume, we’re still leaving actually a lot of value,” Latimer said.
Latimer and the landowners he works with are choosing to sacrifice some immediate profits for other benefits down the line. They’re still harvesting good wood, and enough of it to justify the costs of the work. It’s used for veneer, bourbon barrels, pallets, railroad ties and more.
But it’s not just an economic question. Latimer’s driven by a widespread failure of eastern hardwood forest regeneration.
According to data from the U.S. Forest Service, young white oak volumes in Virginia declined by 21% between 2003 and 2022. And those declines aren’t limited to the commonwealth — they’re being seen up and down the eastern U.S. Kentucky posted a 38% decline in the same time period.
Latimer said that’s a lagging indicator — in other words, it tells us about the impacts of forest management done up to 50 years ago. It’s not clear what impact today’s forest management will have, but according to the White Oak Initiative, a coalition dedicated to hardwood forest management, the decline is likely to get more dramatic.
Three-quarters of white oak acres in the United States are classified as mature, but only about 10% of those acres have white oak seedlings. White Oak Initiative attributes this to changes in management and forestry practices.
Other trees are threatened, too, by a variety of stressors. For instance, in recent decades, millions of ash trees have been killed by the emerald ash borer, a beetle whose larvae feed on the trees.
If hardwoods like white oaks go away, Latimer said lots of people would feel it in their pocketbooks.
“You need [high-value white oak] for your veneer markets, you need it for your stave industry. That’s a lot of rural jobs,” Latimer said. “And then you have the jobs that come after that, whether it's distilleries or vineyards.”
The forest products industry is one of Virginia’s largest. According to the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center, it generated $23.5 billion in 2021.
But again, it’s not just about economics. According to Amanda Duren, director of partnerships for the Appalachian Mountains Joint Venture, young forests are important places in our ecosystem.
“Young forest is so valuable for many species of birds and other wildlife because the plant growth that’s there tends to be really dense,” Duren said.
Lots of bird species in the eastern U.S. are declining, but Duren said those who nest or gather food in young forest habitat are particularly hard hit.
“Many of those species are experiencing the steepest declines of eastern forest birds in the U.S.,” Duren said.
Species like the goldenwing warbler have had a 66% population decline over the past 40 years. Others like the eastern towhee and eastern whip-poor-will have declined as well.
Young forest is attractive to these native species for a few reasons — it has to do with the amount of sunlight that can reach the forest floor without a dense overstory of mature trees.
“The dense plant growth in young forests, it offers cover from predators, but it also offers an abundance of food,” Duren said.
Seeds, berries and insects are all abundant in a regenerating forest — and oak trees provide an essential food source in acorns.
Duren said 150 or 200 years ago, the conditions in eastern forests were ideal for oak regeneration. But there’s less natural regeneration now, due to things like unsustainable harvesting and forest management that seeks to avoid any fire. In the past, fires would have left patches of land for new forest to spring up.
Forest managers now have to rely on new tools, like the type of work Latimer does.
“We need to be constantly creating new young forest on the landscape if we’re going to be able to support the populations of young forest birds over time,” Duren said.
Latimer goes to great lengths to leave as healthy a forest behind as possible and create an environment that will encourage certain trees to regrow. He uses cut-to-length equipment, including a harvester that fells, delimbs and cuts trees into logs with ease — which helps reduce transportation damage as the wood is dragged out of the forest.
In the woods he’s working on, there are plenty of oak saplings, which he said need moderate light levels to compete with other species like yellow poplar or sweetgum.
But if Latimer clear cut the forest, he said poplars would probably outcompete any oak seedlings. So Latimer takes down a selection of mature trees, to allow some light in through the top layer of the forest.
This type of forest management is tricky and expensive. Latimer and his dad keep their operation relatively small and find ways to earn extra cash or save at the margins. But in today’s market, the work isn’t really scalable.
“When we talk about how do we actually change the industry — it’s just like, you gotta be able to pay loggers more,” Latimer said.
Virginia has a program that’s starting to get landowners more involved in good management.
Joe Rossetti runs the Virginia Department of Forestry’s Hardwood Initiative, a program that connects landowners with foresters who will help them create a management plan for their properties. It also offers a cost share and tax credit for certain management work — like the type of thinning that Latimer does.
Rossetti said one of the most difficult things in forest management is understanding that it takes time to see the fruits of labor. He likened it to baking: Patience and planning are required.
“If I didn’t put in the yeast and mix it, if I didn't put forth the work in the beginning to develop my regeneration and wait for it to come along, then I’m not gonna get a good result,” Rossetti said.
The hardwood initiative is small, but Rossetti is confident the message will catch on and more people will get involved. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time humans have changed how they manage forests.
Latimer said he’s glad to see people like Rossetti putting in hard work to raise awareness of hardwood declines — but noted more investment is needed — from taxpayers, environmental nonprofits, consumers, or elsewhere.
Duren said she hopes people can see the forest on its own timescale, rather than the comparatively short human one.
“I think one of the hardest things about oak management is that all of this is happening almost in slow motion,” Duren said. “We have so many things now that are making it harder for those young oaks to grow … that the loss of oaks is happening right in front of us, but we can’t even see it because it’s happening so slowly.”
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