This past October, when Hurricane Michael struck his 1,500-acre property outside of Camilla, Joe Butler was supervising a logging operation. A fifth-generation Georgia land and forest owner, Butler took over as manager of the farm in 2007 and had chosen to plant 350 acres of longleaf pine, in the hope that a switch over from slash pine would improve the forest’s resistance to fire, disease and blowdown. It also helped the family to reproduce the landscape that European settlers encountered when they first arrived in the region, over 300 years ago.
 
By thinning 175 acres of longleaf in the fall of 2018, Butler was following a five-year plant-and-harvest cycle that allowed his business to make money, maintain the forest’s ecological balance, and receive income tax benefits through a conservation easement that had been granted to the farm by the state in 2007. It was a well-timed harvest — or would have been, had it not exposed the tree stand to southerly winds, which started to pick up just as the thinning project neared completion.

“They were finishing up cutting and dragging the last few trees,” Butler said in January, pointing to a hedge grove where the harvest had taken place. “That opened it up, wide open, for these trees to catch the full brunt of the heavy wind coming through. This is probably some of the worst damage we have.”

Overall, Butler calculated that about 13 percent of his timber was either blown down, snapped off or totally destroyed by the fall 2018 storms. This was in addition to mature trees — between 15 and 50 years old — whose market value was significantly diminished due to scarring or bending, and which are likely to be sold as chip-n-saw or pulpwood. A few months later, the logging crew was able to quickly cut damaged hardwoods, which they later broke down into chips and sold to a nearby fuel plant, but most of the downed longleafs were worth too little — and were too tricky to extract — to be worth their time.

If a given tree stand had less than 30 percent damage, Butler has mostly left it alone, instead directing his attention to the pest, wildlife and fire management issues he can still address. In the ensuing three months, the work of clearing wood has pushed his burn schedule back by almost a year, and 53 acres were damaged so severely that he will have to clear-cut them and apply for a partial reimbursement through the Emergency Forest Restoration Program (EFRP).

Photo Credit: Joe Butler

Harsh But Valuable Lessons

In a way, Butler’s farm encapsulates most of the problems faced by the 7,000 forest landowners in Southwest Georgia affected by Hurricane Michael. Though those problems are considerable, there is also plenty of cause for optimism and, overall, the forestry community has gleaned some valuable economic and environmental lessons from 2018’s eventful storm season.

Some of these lessons were admittedly harsh. A Timber Damage Assessment survey, conducted by the Georgia Forestry Commission (GFC) shortly after Hurricane Michael, indicated that 20,510,889 tons of pine and 17,178,721 tons of hardwood were affected, at a total estimated value of $762,683,909. The authors found that of the 2,368,226 acres of forestland with some level of impact, nearly two-thirds fit into the “moderate” damage category seen on Butler’s farm. These were tracts of land on which more than 25 percent of the stems had been broken, and they presented the owner with a difficult decision: either pursue some kind of salvage operation to reduce fire hazards, and recoup the value of the timber that was lost, or leave the tract alone, and allow it to recover over time.

In most cases, this decision was made after talking to a specialist, who could visit the property and make an objective analysis. Not surprisingly, the past few months have been especially busy for people like Wayne Worsham, a forestry consultant, who has operated in Southwest Georgia and the Florida panhandle since the 1980s. Two days after Hurricane Michael, Worsham hit the road, visiting at least 30 non-industrial clients around the region and giving advice on whether to clear-cut, retrieve downed trees or pursue passive maintenance in the areas that were affected.

“I live in a small county, and it would have been ground zero,” Worsham said. “Almost every timber stand had damage, and over half had 50 percent damage.” 

Damage done to Joe Butler's property by Hurricane Michael.

Weighing Costs and Benefits

For tree farms where the impact was the most severe, a clear-cut and replanting was in order, but more moderate cases were a tough call. Often, logging companies were held back from salvage operations because the conditions were too wet. (On the bright side, water has the potential to help preserve the timber and make it saleable, provided it’s harvested before March or April.) More importantly, though, it could be extremely difficult to turn a profit on the wood, especially if a logger had to travel long distances to pick it up.

“We’ve got to be within a reasonable range of one of our markets to make it work financially,” said Clay Crosby, CEO of Twin Rivers Land and Timber, a Perry-based company that specializes in raw biomass procurement. “The main thing is to make sure there’s enough volume of wood to justify bringing all of our equipment in there.”

The cost of carrying chippers, grinders, loaders and strainers for a given project would have to be weighed against the potential benefit of bringing the wood to a mill that was close by and wasn’t overwhelmed, or past its quota. Moreover, prices were severely depressed: trees that would have brought in $14 per ton of pulpwood via conventional practices were only bringing in about $2 per ton if they’d fallen during the storm. Similarly, the price for chip-n-saw was likely to go from around $21 per ton to $5 per ton, and saw timber from $30 per ton to $12 per ton.

The cost of replanting is also considerable. To regrow marketable pine, Worsham estimated that most landowners would have to spend about $90 per acre on chemical spraying, to prevent hardwoods from getting a foothold. This is in addition to fertilizing and weed control over the next year, which run at about $40 per acre. Seedlings could cost anywhere between $60 and $200 per acre — depending on whether the trees are open-pollinated, mass-control pollinated, or varietal planting stock — and planting could cost $85 per acre if done with a v-blade bulldozer. And while many clients were eligible to classify damaged trees as a “casualty loss,” entitling them to a deduction on their federal income taxes, this deduction was subject to some restrictions, and was largely based on the current market value of the timber, or the size of their investment, which could be pretty small.

The State Steps in to Help

In November, the state legislature passed two measures to make decisions less difficult for foresters and their clients. One of these was House Bill 1EX, which provided $270 million for immediate and direct relief for those who had suffered from the storm, including $20 million in emergency funding for forest debris cleanup efforts, and $7 million in funding for new heavy firefighting equipment, to be administered through the GFC and the Georgia Development Authority (GDA). The other measure, House Bill 4EX, created a $200 million income tax refund or tradeable tax credit for forest landowners attempting to recoup the value of their timber loss, with a cap at $400 per acre. So long as they planned to reforest their property, any tree farmers who owned land within the 28 counties touched by the hurricane could apply.

Shortly after these measures were passed, GFC Forest Management Chief Scott Griffin attended a meeting in Miller County — where the effects of the hurricane were severe — answering questions about who was eligible, how to sign up, and encouraging people to get in touch with a licensed consulting forester. Some landowners had been on the fence about intervening in areas with moderate storm damage, but after hearing Griffin speak, they were persuaded to take advantage of the state’s programs, given the resources that were available, and the risk they would assume if fire breaks were overwhelmed with fuel. The people Griffin spoke with were generally grateful for the help, and many took the hurricanes as a sign to be more proactive with trees that were still standing. Sometimes, by leaving a full-grown stand of timber uncut, landowners could expose themselves to a possible loss.

“A lot of people, they’re waiting on better markets. Or people fall in love with the trees,” Griffin said later. “That’s fine. But if you’re in it for revenue, or if it’s any part of your equation, you’ve got to give serious thought to the risk you take by leaving the [trees] beyond their economic maturity. It can become a liability at some point if you can’t salvage it, and you have to pay somebody to clean it up. It’s just one of the deals that we, as foresters, will try to communicate to landowners.”

Approximately 500,000 acres of forestland are likely to be affected by the state measures, and many landowners were ready to invest in a clear-cut and replanting. But as Worsham pointed out, rushing in to sell salvage wood from a moderately-damaged stand could be a frustrating ordeal. And sometimes it might be prohibitively expensive.

“It’s not like we can do a systematic, conventional way of thinning timber. It’s hard to do without a row or pattern,” he said, describing the conversations he’d had with clients in the weeks following the hurricane. “So my advice is to do nothing. You don’t need to have a fire sale. Just sit tight. And we’ll get what your timber stand is worth in six months. If you lost your stand of timber, it’s devastating, but region-wide, I think we’re going to be ok.”

Non-Commercial Operations Feel Impact

​Logging and mill operations will continue to be busy until the spring, and many landowners have already turned their attention to other priorities. This includes non-commercial operations, such as the Jones Ecological Research Center at Itchuway, a 30,000-acre forested area that endured severe winds during Hurricane Michael, with recorded gusts hitting 130 mph. After spending the night in the Jones Center laboratory with Director Dr. Kier Klepzig, staff spent the initial phase following the storm clearing the 300 miles of roads that run through the property, and began to assess the hurricane’s effect on the environment.

“We crawled out from under the wreckage, and you couldn’t walk more than 10 feet without running into a tree across the road,” Klepzig said. “Now, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to try and learn from this tragedy as much as we can, to share those results with other people — and hopefully, to help them with strategies to restore and maintain the structure of the forest.”

Clearing enough timber to catch up with the year’s planned fires is crucial. If too much time passes, the Center’s 900-or-so understory plants are likely to proliferate, crowding the bare soil and blocking out sunlight, so that seedlings from larger trees will have a harder time germinating. Wiregrass, woody shrubs and oak saplings grow quickly, and can contribute to smoke and air quality problems when a fire finally catches. On the other hand, if they’re left alone, they can grow beyond knee-height, which makes them harder for small herbivorous animals to reach: gopher tortoises, for example, rely on regular burns to improve access to food, and though the trees blown over may provide some edible seed crops, these conditions are temporary. Of the 30 different species of amphibians, 40 mammals, 50 or more reptiles, 60 or more fish, 100 or more birds and countless species of insects identified at the Jones Center, not a single one will benefit from delays in the burn schedule. 

Consequences for Wildlife, Recreation

​It remains to be seen how other aspects of South Georgia’s longleaf pine ecosystems will adjust to post-hurricane conditions. Puneet Dwivedi, an associate professor of sustainability sciences at the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, added that habitat destruction was not the only issue for the forestry community to think about. The potential for Georgia’s forest to sequester carbon and abate the process of climate change was also significantly diminished.
 
“Forests are natural machines to suck up carbon from the atmosphere,” he said. “So, if we have lost 2 million acres, which is a sizeable amount, then our capacity to use forestry as a tool for climate change has definitely gone down, for the next 20 to 30 years.”
 
Though not a lot of data has been collected, Dwivedi added that water and air quality were also likely to be affected. This, in turn, will have consequences for wildlife, though for anyone who cares about recreation in the region, the prognosis is looking surprisingly good for game birds. Most experts predict that the state will retain most of its value as an outdoor destination, providing landowners with an additional source of revenue: turkey, for example, may move off to areas that opened up during the storms, but there is still adequate habitat in thicker forests for nesting. Theron Terhune, a program director at Tall Timbers Research Station, a non-profit dedicated to preserving traditional land use in Florida and South Georgia, examined radio tags in three different properties in the wake of the hurricanes, and found that changes in quail populations were negligible, or even positive. Many birds, as it turned out, were likely to use downed trees as a refuge.

“The one place where we have seen a negative impact is where people get in too quickly to clean up,” he said. “Since the cover is not there, and the quail don’t have protection from predators. A lot of people have called me and asked what they needed to do, and I tell most of them to hold off on any major cleanup until February or March. By then, you’re into the growing season, so you’ll have that cover respond a little faster.” 

Moving Forward

Of course, all of this echoed the advice of foresters and other experts outside the recreation community, whether in reference to fire management, wildlife or pests. In February, Butler said his biggest concern was the possibility of a dry spring, which, combined with a prescribed burn, could stress the trees and attract IPS or southern pine beetles, which can be destructive. Landowners have been urged to remain vigilant, and look for change in the needle color of the trees: as a beetle begins to work, needles change from dark green to light green, and then to yellow and red. This, along with signs of blue stain fungi, will be the top issue for landowners like Butler to look out for.
 
In the meantime, he continues to do as much work as he can on fire breaks, and has accepted help from the GFC to clear and harrow them, and start to burn. Operating on a five-year income and investment cycle — with consistent harvests, and different tracts planted at different times — had made times like these a little less stressful, though he was aware that some landowners didn’t have as much wiggle room.

“I hope they’re able to just hold tight and wait for the markets to recover, which they should in a few years,” he said. “If something like this happens, it has severe impact on people’s finances. Hopefully they’ll survive, and learn from this, and try to keep their forest in the best possible condition.”

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Reid Singer is a journalist based in Atlanta. He has written for Smithsonian, Outside and The New Yorker.