Pennsylvania Tree Farm News

Written by Susan Benedict, PA Tree Farm Committee Chair

     Things are changing fast for the Pennsylvania Tree Farm Committee. In January, the American Tree Farm System (ATFS) announced a change in strategy to emphasize climate change solutions through forest stewardship. I was excited to see this strategy change, as it aligned perfectly with an idea Nancy Baker, Tree Farmer and Chair of the PA Forest Stewards Steering Committee, and I had been discussing to revamp the PA Tree Farm program to focus on improving and recognizing good forest stewardship, as we take the program from certification to recognition.
     Nancy and I recently “met” with Kyle Brown, our regional ATFS representative and Jasmine Brown of the Family Forest Carbon Project via Zoom to discuss our new PA Tree Farm program ideas and received the enthusiastic encouragement to pursue them.
     By the time you are reading this, we hope to have had a meeting with several key PA forestry leaders in government, academia, and industry to lay out our ideas and seek statewide agency support. Hopefully, we will have had a Tree Farm Committee meeting to discuss it with the whole committee as well. We believe that developing a program as we have envisioned could transform how we engage forest landowners across the entire state of Pennsylvania. Hold on—I heard that eyeroll—yes, we have tried new programs before and failed. What has been missing from past efforts, in our opinion, is asking landowners what they want to improve about their land and then actively connecting them with resources to accomplish these goals. To do as we envision, every single one of us will have a role to play. Landowners will need to identify improvements they would like to make as part of a forest management plan of some sort. Agency partners will need to have their programs ready to go for landowners seeking support, and landowner peers will need to help their friends and neighbors identify programs and resources to accomplish their goals. Industry partners will need to help us identify where and how to implement exceptional harvest practices to achieve landowner goals while producing adequate forest products to market.
     This is truly a program on a scale not imagined before and will take time to design and implement. We ask for patience as we work toward excellence for Pennsylvania’s forests. While waiting for program updates, it is never too late to begin thinking about your forest and how you would like to make it better. Write your ideas down, contact your consulting forester, if you have one, and/or your DCNR Bureau of Forestry service forester and discuss your ideas with these professionals. That way, when we get the new program together, you will be ready to go.

As always, there is information on the PFA website at paforestry.org to help you find forestry professionals—and other cool stuff too. For more information about the PA Tree Farm program, visit their webpage at www.paforestry.org/treefarm.