Found these PSAs for Colorado Forest Products (TM) in my email this afternoon.
The Colorado State Forest Service is very excited to announce that next week our first series of public service announcements (PSAs) featuring our Colorado Forest Products™ program will begin airing on the networks of 9News (KUSA, KTVD).
The creative process involved with the production of these appealing and informative 15 to 30 second PSAs has been both challenging and rewarding for the Colorado State Forest Service’s Wood Utilization and Marketing team. Please, take the time to view our 3 PSAs here:
Interesting that Andy had just posted below about “worthless” trees in 4FRI.. wonder what makes 4FRI’s “worthless” when some of the same kinds and sizes of trees are worth something in Colorado?
Here’s more stuff from the CSU website here:
Colorado’s Source of Wood Products
Colorado uses tremendous amounts of wood products, but it depends on imports from other states and countries to meet its needs. Key states exporting wood products to Colorado include Oregon, Idaho, Washington, California, Montana, Arkansas, Minnesota and Washington. Canada and Mexico also export large quantities of wood products into Colorado as well.
Purchasing Local Wood ProductsThere are existing businesses in the state of Colorado that produce and supply locally derived wood products. Purchasing products that were grown, harvested and manufactured in the state:
Decreases Fossil Fuel Consumption and EmissionsIn many cases, wood products are being transported great distances to Colorado. This increases the amount fossil fuel used and burned to transport materials.
Retains Consumer Dollars in Colorado Economy
Purchasing local products, keeps consumer dollars in Colorado’s economy and does not flow to other states. It also keeps local people employed whether they are working directly for the company or supply materials to the company or goes to the local grocery store it stays within the community.
Increases Ability and Opportunity to Improve Colorado’s Forest Health Conditions
Supporting local products produced with Colorado wood can help reduce forest management and restoration treatment costs because the wood coming out of the forest has value. When products are generated as a result of these treatments, they generate revenue and create an opportunity to improve Colorado’s forest health.
I am curious what Colorado’s forest industry infrastructure looks like. I goggled Colorado sawmills and it just doesn’t seem like there is hardly any. Of course this doesn’t mean there couldn’t more sawmills and wood products facilities if the right policies giving equal access to the Colorado’s forests resources were in place.
I always like the idea of local use of local products, but we grow a lot more wood in Oregon then we can use, so it is good we can “export wood” and bring capital in. (Maybe trade some for a ski trip or something)
You know someone might pay me for my ability to find things…
Here you go..
http://csfs.colostate.edu/pdfs/sfra09_app-f-forest-industry-profile.pdf
Recently we followed on this blog when the mill in Montrose went into bankruptcy and Neiman (of S. Dakota and Wyoming bought it)…
Here’s a story on the reopening of the Saratoga mill which probably gets some wood from Colorado. http://www.wyomingnews.com/articles/2012/09/23/news/20local_09-23-12.txt
There’s a biomass project with sawmill in Pagosa.
http://www.pagosasun.com/archives/2012/08August/080212/fordsawmill.html and one newer one in Gypsum.
You may grow a lot more wood in Oregon.. but we have a lot more dead trees near houses; and people want to remove them. The calculus is different…1) trees are dead and we want to remove dead trees before they fall on people, and around neighborhoods.. 2) that’s lots of trees, 3) people in the treed areas get angry if counties don’t accept their dead trees that they have removed, 4) since counties don’t want them the choices are to burn or use them. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in forest ecology to rationalize this… they are leaving the stand one way or t’other and much of it (what people are doing around their homes) is not FS land.
I was in Oregon during the MPB epidemic of the 80’s when mills were running but no one wanted that much dead LPP.. I even remember stewardship contracts with Weyerhauser to get rid of some of it. And the idea of building an OSB plant in Chiloquin.
My hypothesis is that politics in Oregon is dominated by the west side, and there was big timber industry there back in the day.. and some even slopped over to the east side like Weyco.. I remember their signs about High Yield Forestry around Bly… (I wonder what on earth they were thinking??). So it wqs easy to talk about the Timber Industry and generate enthusiasm against it.
Didn’t Diamond sell out to some other big firm?
It’s hard (but not impossible, as we see from some folk in Montana) to get excited about Joe’s Family Sawmill, or Sally’s biomass effort.. or see them as outposts of the corporatization of America, as they barely make ends meet and hire local people.
Other hypotheses?
Another potentially interesting graduate student project.
Sharon
The indentation and white on grey theme are great. I don’t think you need to sweat the setup any more.
@Sharon
In your comment above, you seem to be thinking out loud and leaving a lot of things out that are not common knowledge to most of the people here. Let me see if I can address what I think I understand.
Re: “we have a lot more dead trees near houses; and people want to remove them”
–> Who is going to build a mill to run for two to five years and then run out of wood?
–> Who wants to run a mill only on dead wood? Sounds like a looser from the get go.
–> Unfortunately, the Phd in ecology probably doesn’t want the dead trees removed, so why would a company build a mill when there was no guarantee that the Phd in ecology wouldn’t file a lawsuit to stop the cutting of the promised short term supply of undesirable wood?
Re: “some even slopped over to the east side like Weyco.. I remember their signs about High Yield Forestry around Bly… (I wonder what on earth they were thinking??). So it wqs easy to talk about the Timber Industry and generate enthusiasm against it.
Didn’t Diamond sell out to some other big firm?”
–> I can say that if WY owned land on the eastside it was as High Yeild as possible for the east side. Can you be more straightforward as to what you are implying? What are you saying when you “wonder what on earth they were thinking”?
–> If I am not mistaken all that was Diamond, Willamette and Crown Zellerbach is now WY so “back in the day” would appear to be the same as today except that they don’t have to compete with the USFS to market their timber.
@Gil DeHuff
Gil.. it appears to me that we don’t have the big ideological battles about cutting trees in Colorado.
I could be wrong.
I don’t know why they aren’t worried about lawsuits, except perhaps we haven’t had that many except for the DU Law School class project on the Rio Grande.
I have watched, measured and planted trees around Bly. Weyco sometimes precommercially thinned lodgepole plantations (that’s what I am thinking…of all the forests in all the places you might invest, really?) I can’t see that that was a good investment. I don’t think they thought so either, because then they tried to trade it for FS land with big trees.
Weyco was not alone..during this time period “intensive management” was the thing; developed on the west side, marketed on the east side, where it might not fit.
My point was about Oregon.. and it was just a hypothesis for why the “social license” seems to be greater in Colorado.
You could also say, big industry led to big interest by national enviro groups so they remain “bayoneting the wounded” as JWT would say. Whereas the groups in Colorado or Wyoming or South Dakota don’t have the cash for full page ads or other such efforts.
Anyway I don’t know what the answer is, but clearly there are social difference that lead to different conversations about forests in the two states.
Like I said before, other hypotheses are welcome.
@Sharon
Thanks, I think that that clears things up.
Re: “Weyco was not alone..during this time period “intensive management” was the thing; developed on the west side, marketed on the east side, where it might not fit.”
–> I know that Crown Zellerbach was heavy into intensive management for Doug Fir on the west side in both Oregon and Washington in the early ’70s. Weyerhaeuser is generally willing to give things a go on a trial basis, so they may have considered Lodgepole as an opportunity to see if they couldn’t get the same kind of incremental returns as they did with DF especially if the Lodgepole lands were cheap.
–> Fertilization seemed to come a little later to the south and Union Camp carried it too far in the ’90s and ended up being taken over by IP because UC was about to have to go to 12 year old loblolly plantations to keep up with their harvest levels and I suspect that they found out too late that pulp yields went to pot on juvenile wood that young. In a tough year at Plum Creek they wanted to cut out the fert budget in the 500,000 acres that they had at that time in the south. I was able to do an incremental financial analysis using the Woodstock harvest scheduler to convince them that they would loose a great deal of money by doing so.