Forestland Dream Business

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- I'm Dave Trimpey.

I'm a retired forester.

I have a forester degree from Penn State.

In 1992, we bought this property.

We call it Chapel Hill Tree Farm.

And it kind of achieved, one of my dreams in life was to own a piece of property where I could take it, manage it for forestry over a long period of time and see what we could do with it.

Some of the objectives also are to, of course, produce some income over time and to grow it as an investment, so it increased in value.

Another objective and kind of a strong feeling that we have about it is it was a place, as our kids grew up, to work, as we did Christmas trees, we worked together as a family, and just all the other objectives of teaching the kids how to care for the land and to pass that on to them and into the future.

One of the ways we did this was by creating it as a trust, and that was more recently we did that, so that we could more easily pass it on to them.

This originally was a agricultural farm, and behind me, you can see some of the foundations from a barn that was built here, and most of what was around here was originally farm fields; however, some of it was also a natural forest.

So this stand was a agricultural field until the mid 1950s and the forest has obviously grown back since then.

When I looked at the stand, I decided that a good management system would be crop tree release.

This is where we go through and identify trees that we wanna save for long term as crop trees, and they could be either for timber or for wildlife or some other purpose, but we identify those trees first.

In this case, I made a green paint ring around them.

And then we come back in and we remove trees around them that are crowding the tree top up, in the canopy, up in the crown level, that we wanna get more light to that crown of that crop tree that we wanna save, and that would help it to grow bigger and faster over the years.

The stand inside the fence was always a forest and had some very large maple trees in it.

About 20 years ago, I decided to do a regeneration harvest.

At that time, there was adequate seedlings on the ground and I thought it would regenerate itself back into a nice forest.

However, after about 10 years, it was obviously not going to work.

The deer were eating all the seedlings that were starting to grow.

So about 10 years ago, I was able to put up a deer exclosure fence around the 13-acre stand, and now what you're seeing inside the fence is gonna be a very diverse plant community with not only various tree species, but also shrubs and herbaceous plants that is hard to find outside of the fence where the deer can get at them.

This stand is another example of what was formerly an agricultural field that is now a forest.

Something that's a little bit different about this is that the forest is actually planted red oak.

It was planted back in the mid 1950s by a farmer by the name of John Machowicz, and for whatever reason, he decided to plant acorns, and this is the results of his efforts many years later.

The red oak trees are in rows.

Another interesting thing about this forest is that we know now that they are planted oaks.

They're probably all planted the same day, yet there's a big difference in sizes of the trees.

There are some that are approaching 20 inches in diameter and there are some that are still only 8 or 10 inches in diameter.

The fields that surround the old homestead, we had planted with Christmas trees after we bought the property.

And we did the Christmas tree operation for about 20 years.

After that, we've let the fields go back to fallow and decided that we would like to have them back in a forested condition again because we have no future plans of ever doing Christmas trees again.

So we've gone in.

In some cases, we've purchased seedlings, some hardwood and some soft wood like spruce, and planted those and put tubes on them.

But then in, in addition to that, we go around and we look for native seedlings that are started to come in that the deer haven't found yet, and we try to put a tube on those ones to protect them also.

And they tend to grow very quickly.

They'll even outgrow the nursery stock seedlings that we plant.

From the very beginning, we intended to operate this property as a business as opposed to investment.

In order to do that, we had to have relatively consistent forms of income.

One of the ones we have is oil and gas.

We own the oil and gas rights under this property.

There are two gas wells on the property and we get a royalty payment from those.

Another one we have is Christmas trees that we've produced over the years, and for about 20 years, that produced a steady stream of income, of course seasonally.

Another income source we found was a cell tower.

We were able to be in the right place at the right time, and a cell tower company approached us about having a tower on our property, which we gladly accepted.

A couple other ones besides timber income that we've had some timber sales over the years would be the carbon sequestration program.

The one we are involved with is a family forest carbon program, which is kind of designed for smaller landowners.

And we also do some cost share type programs with NRCS that helps to pay for the seedlings that we plant and protect out in the fields to get the fields back into a forest condition.

And the final type of income that we've also just got into in the last four or five years now has been something called Hipcamp, with camping.

Hipcamp is the name of the platform, the company that does the advertising and so on.

We provide a space.

It works sort of like an Airbnb for camping.

And so we have campers come here.

They make reservations through Hipcamp and stay for periods of time on the property.

My advice to other folks that maybe have forest land or wanna acquire forest land, the first thing you really need to do is have a forest management plan.

And you could either try to do this yourself through various means, or better yet, hire a consulting forester.

But it really starts with a good inventory and then a good plan which mixes in your goals and objectives over a longer period of time and what you wanna accomplish with your property.