Yearly Archives: 2010

The Art of Managing Longleaf

The surprising thing is so few people have heard of Leon Neel. Here’s a very interesting biography of this very influential pioneer in southeastern forestry and agriculture, including many interesting stories of south Georgia and north Florida life and politics:
The Art of Managing Longleaf:
A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach,
by Leon Neel, with Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way.
Leon Neel was a atudent, apprentice, and successor of Herbert Stoddard, who was originally hired by quail plantation owners around Thomasville to figure out why their quail populations were decreasing. The answer included a need to thin and especially to burn their longleaf pine tree forests. Stoddard and Neel studied and practiced for almost a century between them on how to preserve and increase the amount of standing timber and species diversity while also selectively harvesting trees to pay for the whole thing. Their Stoddard-Neel Approach is written up in textbooks. In this book we learn how it came about, and how it is basically different from the clearcut-thin-thin-clearcut “efficient” timbering cycle that is the current fad among pine tree growers in the southeast.

It starts back in the old days of Leon Neel’s youth when his daddy taught him to hunt quail: Continue reading →

Suicide in India and How to Stop It

Vandana Shiva writes in Huffington Post about India:
200,000 farmers have ended their lives since 1997.
In just one Indian state:
1593 farmers committed suicide in Chattisgarh in 2007. Before 2000 no farmers suicides are reported in the state.
Why?
In 1998, the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies forced India to open up its seed sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto and Syngenta. The global corporations changed the input economy overnight. Farm saved seeds were replaced by corporate seeds, which need fertilizers and pesticides and cannot be saved.

Corporations prevent seed savings through patents and by engineering seeds with non-renewable traits. As a result, poor peasants have to buy new seeds for every planting season and what was traditionally a free resource, available by putting aside a small portion of the crop, becomes a commodity. This new expense increases poverty and leads to indebtness.

And that’s not all: Continue reading →

Blooming partridge pea

Quail like this:

Blooming

Chamaecrista fasciculata, showy partridge pea, planted as part of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that includes along with longleaf pine trees some Native Warm Season Grasses (NWSG) and partridge pea.

Little bluestem, partridge pea, and longleaf: Continue reading →

Longleaf video by Nature Conservancy

With appearances by Moody Forest and people from there and from the Longleaf Alliance, not to mention gopher tortoises and indigo snakes:

Fire forest, yes! But they forgot to mention Smilax: catbriar, greenbriar, those vines that like to catch you in the woods.

Thanks to Gary Stock for the tip.

-jsq

Clear-cutting led to flood disaster

Alex J. Chepstow-Lusty talks about a tree from Peru, “huarango, a tree that lives in highly arid zones and stabilizes the soil with some of the deepest roots of any tree known-and can live up to 1000 years”:
“At the bottom of the profile, I found lots of huarango pollen. This indicates that large forests were originally growing in that area.

Subsequently, I saw cotton pollen and other weeds, but still a lot of huarango pollen. It seems at this stage farming was in balance with the environment,” Chepstow-Lusty said.

Then, about 400 A.D., the Nazca apparently stopped growing cotton, switching to large crops of maize.

The researchers found a major reduction of huarango pollen, indicating that people started clearing the forests to plant more crops.

But the agricultural gain from clearing forests was short-lived. When a mega El Nino event hit the south coast of Peru in about 500 A.D., there were no huarango roots to anchor the landscape.

The fields and canal systems were washed away, leaving a desert environment. Today, only pollen from plants adapted to salty and arid conditions can be found, Chepstow-Lusty said.

“The bottom line is that the Nazca could have survived the devastating El Nino floods had they kept their forests alive. Basically, the huarango trees would have cushioned that major event,” Beresford-Jones said.

Hm, around here we’ve only seen a 700-year flood last year. When it happens again in a year or so, what will we call it?