Forestry & Wildlife Program Team Impacts

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- In addition to the economic and the stewardship benefits, it's really nice when you feel confident in what you're doing.

- 20 years ago I didn't see many forests around here getting managed.

Now, I can take you to a lot of forests right here that are being managed.

- So proper forest management can really pay big dividends I found, it has for me.

- The extension programs have given me a reference, I believe becoming a much better steward of our property and understanding of how the ecosystem fits together.

Since I've been managing it we've seen a return to our forest of fishers, beavers have recently returned to our stream.

So we're getting back pieces of the ecosystem I've been missing.

- Well it's a Pennsylvania forest stewards they call it now, Jim Finley, extension forester out of Penn State and he had this private forest land owners training program going on and I went up, went through his training program.

I got my son later on to go through it and when my grandson got 18 year old, I got him to go through it.

That's we taught up at Penn State, how to grow trees, how to go in there and do crop releases and things like that, how to grow better trees, that was the difference.

- Management of forest invasives has been a very large problem for me, and I've always managed to keep on top of it, but I found that the resources offered by the extension service, been very valuable in that it is very helpful because if you talk to the professionals that do it, you get a different viewpoint, and in many cases, you could be wasting thousands of dollars by doing the wrong thing, or even the right thing at the wrong time.

And I found that having the resources from the extension service has aided me in many ways.

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- We recently had the opportunity to work with a logger who does chipping.

And I was always concerned about chipping because I didn't wanna remove minerals and so forth from our property.

After I spoke with Dave Jackson, our extension forester and we were able to move forward with that project.

And just this winter that netted us about $30,000.

- We're teaching people here how to build a forest, and last year for the first time I've seen in Pennsylvania, right underneath your feet around here you'll see some little seedlings coming up.

I've never seen seedlings come up in a chestnut orchard, in Pennsylvania any place, they come from adult trees in the forest.

Now they're starting to come up, we're gonna have to try to find out why they're coming up and where are they coming up and how do we manage it to make them come up.

- Really extension touches pretty much everything I do.

I was in 4H when I was a kid and it's helped me as a mom.

The forest education that I received really helped me to be confident in the management decisions I was making.

Learned some things that we had been doing incorrectly that we were able to change and helped me protect the forest that we have.

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