The United States Department of Agriculture recently announced $23 million in grants supporting timber production in President Donald Trump’s effort to “unleash domestic production” of the nation’s natural resources.
The aim of the USDA’s grants is reportedly to transport “hazardous fuels” from national forests to processing facilities, supporting timber production, according to the department. A department spokesperson told WildfireToday the effort would specifically be targeting “low-value” wood in the protected forests, like dead trees, fallen branches, and dense undergrowth.
“Eligible material considered hazardous fuels may include logs, roundwood, chips, biomass and other byproducts from authorized existing projects transported to facilities for use in manufacturing wood products and/or wood energy/services,” USDA said in an emailed statement.
News of the grants was released a month after USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced her cooperation with Trump’s “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production Executive Order, which cleared the way for millions of national forest acres to be logged.
Rollins, through a memo sent in April, listed over 112 million acres of National Forest Service land under an “Emergency Situation Determination,” over half of all Forest Service land. The designation allows the service to take immediate action in the designated acreage, including salvage of dead or dying trees, commercial harvesting of trees infected with insects or disease, and harvesting of trees deemed “hazardous” due to their closer proximity to roads or trails.
“The United States has an abundance of timber resources that are more than adequate to meet our domestic timber production needs, but heavy-handed federal policies have prevented full utilization of these resources and made us reliant on foreign producers,” Rollins said in a memo in April. “It is vital that we reverse these policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security. We can manage our forests to better provide domestic timber supply, create jobs and prosperity, reduce wildfire disasters, improve fish and wildlife habitats, and decrease costs of construction and energy.”
The Forest Service is accepting applications for hazardous fuel removal through June 20. Information about upcoming webinars will reportedly be available soon on the Forest Service Timber Transportation website.
5 Comments
It is not just totally just the USFS, it’s just not one thing that diminished timber production. A lot of what has been left were trees that are not suitable to be harvested due to the board length and board diameter as we’ve seen here in the Salmon-Challis National Forest.
The local Prescribed Fuels Manager here in the Forest here would put out bids for harvesting timber and got no bids back. The response was because of board size and length and the expense of harvesting any timber. Neighbors would say, what about aerial harvesting? Is that safe, and cost effective no.
23 million isn’t really enough to get us into domestic tree harvesting let alone clearing bug killed timber. One must have a demand for lumber first and then, there’s the problem of getting mills back up after being shut down. I wonder if the boots on the ground people have been involved in discussions and Professional Foresters. It’s not only Forest Service land, it’s state and private land too. 23 billion would be a proper number to start with then, you have to have the personnel to “rake” the floors of the forests!
Most of our most hazardous fuel locations are non-commercial product or terrain unsuitable for operations. Then all the resource specialists needed to plan the sales were fired or coerced into early retirement. So we shall see how this works.
There was obviously no analysis prior to this proclamation and laughable grant sum. I laid out salvage timber sales in the 1970’s, but you can’t get bidders on garbage. Our successful projects were concentrations of fresh blowdown timber that was on the ground for fewer than two years.
Here in Arizona, two major power companies have committed to buy power from the state’s only biomass generating station. Funding the biomass cleanout from critical watersheds, managing biomass removal on public lands, running the biomass plant, selling the plant output – it all requires multi-organizational activity. Action by the feds is only 1 step in the process.
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