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Massachusetts Forest Alliance members will soon receive our Annual Fund donation request in the mail.
MFA relies on contributions to the Annual Fund to help support our critically important advocacy and educational work, as our membership dues cannot fund the full scope of our efforts. We know that this year has been challenging for everyone. But we're hoping we can still count on you to join with us and lend your support to MFA or our 501(c)(3) affiliate, the Massachusetts Forest Trust (MFT).
Note that this year as part of COVID-19 relief (as they did last year), Congress made donations to nonprofits (of up to $300 total) tax-deductible for all taxpayers - even those that don't itemize their tax returns!
If you would prefer an invoice for your business, or have any questions, please contact Chris Egan at cegan@massforestalliance.org or 617-645-1191. Thank you for your support!
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This month's issue of the Forest Update is brought to you by:
North Country Procurement (NCP) provides wood fuel procurement services to large industrial and commercial customers, working with hundreds of suppliers across New England.
Thanks to NCP for their generous support!
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 The 2021 MFA Annual Meeting took place on Saturday, October 23 in a virtual format. The meeting was free to attend, thanks to the generous sponsorship of Farm Credit East.
The meeting focused on forest carbon and the opportunities for landowners, and featured a number of distinguished speakers:
 Eric Kingsley from Innovative Natural Resource Solutions (INRS) gave an overview of forest carbon and how large national carbon markets function. His intriguing presentation looked into the future and found that carbon credits are working their way beyond landowners and into wood product sales and other links in the forest economy.
 Dr. Laura Marx from The Nature Conservancy (TNC) focused her presentation on state and regional forest carbon programs accessible to smaller forest landowners. One such program is the Family Forest Carbon Program (FFCP), a partnership between the American Forest Foundation (which also coordinates the Tree Farm program) and The Nature Conservancy, which is coming to central and western Massachusetts early next year. Laura also discussed a new booklet on climate-focused forest management which is now available - see article below.
 Kathryn Morse from NCX gave an overview of their carbon credit program, which uses remote sensing to strip out the up-front cost of selling carbon credits, and has just a one-year term, instead of the 40-100 years of large carbon credit markets or the 20-year term of the Family Forest Carbon Program. Massachusetts forest landowners are eligible to submit their properties for consideration - visit NCX.com for more information. NCX has a special program for consulting foresters to work with their clients as well.
MFA's annual business meeting was held as part of the Annual Meeting as usual. This year, members voted to approve amended bylaws that a) changed our complicated leadership structure to a more typical President and Vice President; b) expanded the board in size to allow for some new and younger voices to join; and c) cleaned up some outdated language. You can read the newly amended bylaws by clicking here.
During the business meeting, we re-elected four board members and added four brand-new board members to the board:
- Kyle Anderson from Anderson Timber Harvesting
- Evan Dell'Olio from Roberts Energy Renewables/Roberts Bros. Lumber
- Kate Marquis from Lilac & Oak Forestry Services
- Jaime Wagner from Wagner Wood
You can download the Program Book from the Annual Meeting by clicking here. The book contains the agenda, speaker and award winner bios, donor acknowledgements, a financial report, and more.
Did you miss the Annual Meeting? You can now watch it on our YouTube channel.
Credit certificates were emailed to attendees who requested them when they registered for the meeting. For any problems with credits, please contact Chris Egan at cegan@massforestalliance.org.
Thanks to all of you who joined us for the Annual Meeting!
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At the Annual Meeting, MFA also presented its annual awards. Here's a recap.
The Howard F. Mason Forester of the Year Award is named in memory of Howard Mason, a well-known forester who worked for the Peck Lumber Company for many years. The award recognizes an individual forester who is a member of MFA and who exemplifies Howard’s skills, knowledge, integrity, and dedication to helping the industry grow and prosper by mentoring and encouraging younger foresters. The award winner is selected by the members of MFA's Foresters Council.
 This year, the Mason Award went to Rex Baker. Rex has been a consulting forester for 40 years helping hundreds of landowners manage their woodlands to grow trees and provide wildlife habitat. He was also instrumental in helping create woodland owner organizations to encourage and educate landowners in Massachusetts (MFA) and Rhode Island (RIFCO) how to better care for their woodlands.
Rex has had a fascinating life, including working as a forester in Sweden, teaching forest management as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa (making him one of the few people to practice forestry on three continents), and as a nationally-ranked champion pistol shooter. You can read more about Rex by clicking here. Congrats to Rex!
The Douglas B. Cook Wood Producer of the Year Award is named for Doug Cook, an MFA Board member and the owner of Cook Forest Products who passed away unexpectedly in 2018. The award recognizes an individual - a timber harvester, sawmill operator, or forest products industry professional - who is a member of MFA and who exemplifies Doug’s hard work and excellence, spirit of innovation, and dedication to helping the industry grow and prosper by demonstrating leadership in industry-wide efforts. The award winner is selected by the members of MFA's Wood Producer Council.
 This year, the Cook Award went to Chris Pirner at Pirner Logging & Land Clearing, Inc. While designed to be an individual award, Chris insisted that his company name appear on the award, saying that his employees (including members of his family) deserved the recognition as much as he did.
Chris has been a licensed timber harvester for more than 25 years, and is known for careful, professional work. Starting small, Pirner Logging & Land Clearing is now a fully-mechanized operation with a number of employees, able to handle jobs of all sizes. Besides timber harvesting, they also have a thriving firewood business at their home base in Hubbardston. Click here to learn more about Pirner Logging & Land Clearing.
Chris has stood up for the industry at hearings and elsewhere, making the case for sustainable forest management. He also brings a strong sense of humor to the job, and is very deserving of this award. Congrats to Chris!
MFA introduced a new award in 2019 - the Friend of Forestry Award. This award goes to another organization engaged in sustainable forest management to recognize them for their efforts. The initial award was presented to the New England Forestry Foundation in recognition of their 75th anniversary.
 This year, the award was presented to MassWildlife, with Habitat Program Manager Brian Hawthorne accepting the award for the agency. MassWildlife has been engaged in sustainable forest management focused on wildlife habitat on their Wildlife Management Areas. Many threatened or endangered species rely on early successional forest habitat (young forest), which there isn't enough of in Massachusetts. MassWildlife creates this habitat on some of their lands, and also on private forestland - in fact, MFA and MassWildlife joined together for a federally-funded Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) called the Massachusetts Collaborative for Private Forestland.
For those concerned about carbon on MassWildlife lands, you can check out their webpage discussing the issue, or an article from their magazine that explores it in depth.
Finally, the John H. Lambert, Jr. Forest Stewardship Award was presented. This award is named for former state forester Jack Lambert, who was the first recipient of the award in 1993. It is MFA's highest honor, and it recognizes a lifetime of achievement in forest stewardship in Massachusetts.
 This year the award went to John Scanlon, who recently retired after 35 years at MassWildlife, where he served as Habitat Program Manager (Brian Hawthorne stepped into John's large shoes). A licensed forester and wildlife biologist, he oversaw efforts to create and enhance suitable habitats for threatened, endangered & declining species of wildlife and plants on Mass Wildlife’s 226,000 acres of wildlife lands.
John has used an ecosystem approach to managing habitats, seeking to find ways to benefit multiple species with careful, science-based management. He used harvesting as a tool to create the young forest habitats which have become rare in Massachusetts to benefit many declining species, and worked with other agencies to increase the use of prescribed burning to restore rare pine barrens that are important to species such as whippoorwills and butterflies. In other areas, large acreages of forest are being left to grow undisturbed to provide old forest habitats.
John began a series of habitat tours on wildlife management areas to show landowners and the public how different practices could be used to enhance different types of habitats. And he and others at Mass Wildlife helped create a grant program for towns, land trusts, and private landowners to help them create more diverse habitats on the lands they manage.
John has been a tremendous steward of the state’s wildlife lands and current and future birders, hunters and wildlife lovers have and will benefit from his efforts. Read more about John's award by clicking here. Congrats to John for this richly-deserved honor!
John had to truncate his acceptance speech during the meeting, as he was traveling. He asked us to share this message with you.
I want to formally thank MFA for presenting me with the 2021 John H. Lambert, Jr. Forest Stewardship Award. This was unexpected, to say the least, and I am grateful for the recognition.
I'd like to acknowledge the great folks I was privileged to associate with during my early private sector work (including an invaluable summer position with New England Forestry Foundation in 1976, and two formative years with Bay State Forestry Service from 1978-1979) and during my public sector work with MassWildlife from 1985-2020, which included lots of interaction with good folks from DCR Forests & Parks, DCR Watershed Forestry, and multiple private sector conservation groups such as the Massachusetts Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, New England Forestry Foundation, The Trustees of Reservations, Mt. Grace Land Trust and numerous others. There were also key people at the U.S. Forest Service, including Dick DeGraaf, Mariko Yamasaki and Bill Leak (who published the incredibly important "Landowner's Guide to Wildlife Habitat: Forest Management for the New England Region"), and also Bill Healy who worked with Dick Degraaf at the USFS Northeast Research Station at UMass Amherst.
Also, I want to recognize the dozens of private sector forestry vendors that I worked with - these are the people that truly made good quality wildlife habitat happen. I was always impressed by their hard work, often under difficult conditions. The best part of my job was working with these foresters, timber harvesters, and others. The great work they do goes largely unrecognized by the general public, so I wanted to give them a shout-out here. Keep up all the good work!!
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Mass(ive) Timber is a set of structural building materials that assembles smaller wood sections (often commodity lumber such as 2x4s and 2x6s) into large, multi-layered panels, beams, and columns used to build multi-story buildings for commercial, housing and institutional use that can reach up to 18 stories or beyond. It has many advantages. The biggest is that it offers significant carbon savings vs concrete and steel - materials which require extractive mining followed by high-temperature manufacturing, all of which release a lot of carbon emissions. Mass timber also continues to store the carbon the tree sequestered, locking it out of the atmosphere.
There is even research showing health advantages - reduced stress, lowered blood pressure, and mental health benefits - for those who spend time in mass timber buildings. It's no wonder that it's taking off in Massachusetts and around the world.
 MFA was part of the Mass Timber Regional Dialogue that discussed how to increase mass timber use in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. You can read the resulting report at masstimberregionaldialogue.com. A webinar was recently held by members of the Dialogue and guests. You can watch the recording by clicking here.
 The Boston Mass Timber Accelerator is an exciting new collaboration in Boston, led by the Boston Society for Architecture and including the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA), the US Forest Service, ClimateWorks, and others. The Accelerator is designed to increase the construction of mass timber buildings in Boston by promoting the benefits to the public, educating architects and developers about this exciting material, and offering grants for developers to plan and execute mass timber construction. Look for more mass timber buildings in Boston in the near future! Read more about this program here.
PBS NewsHour also devoted a recent segment to covering mass timber, focusing on a large building under construction in Milwaukee. Click here to view the segment.
This exciting building material is definitely on the upswing!
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New Landowner Booklet on
Climate-Focused Forest Management
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 As mentioned above, The Nature Conservancy and the Northern Institute for Applied Climate Science (NIACS) have introduced a new booklet for forest landowners about climate-smart forest management. Called Healthy Forests For Our Future: A Management Guide To Increase Carbon Storage in Northeast Forests, the booklet explores some strategies landowners can use to increase carbon sequestration and storage on their lands. It also contains suggestions for funding and other resources forest landowners can use to implement the strategies.
The booklet is free to download - click here to download it.
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3rd Quarter Stumpage Reports -
We Need Your Help!
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 The third quarter Southern New England Stumpage Report has been released. Click here to read the report, or here to read the associated comments. You can see historical stumpage data here.
Here's the problem - only 12 sales reports were submitted this quarter. That's far too few.
Collection of this stumpage data is important because it is used to calculate Chapter 61 values. Without an accurate picture of stumpage values, Chapter 61 values may not be correctly calculated. These reports can be filed by timber harvesters, foresters, or sawmills, and there is an easy online form to fill out. Please do your part and file your stumpage reports as you conduct harvests!
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Expanding Gap Silviculture
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Our friends at Northern Logger magazine recently published their "Silviculture Issue." In it, there is an article by forester Jim Frohn outlining what he calls "Expanding Gap Silviculture" - a type of uneven-aged forest management. The article is free for all to read, and can be downloaded here.
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Here's a list of some upcoming events - both MFA events and those hosted by our friends. Click the links to learn more.
December 1 Mass Timber and Modular Construction - webinar
December 9 Economics of Biochar Production & Use - webinar
December 9 What's My Land Worth? - webinar
December 11 Oaks in New England Forests - webinar
Additional information about these and other events will be posted at www.massforestalliance.net/calendar as information becomes available. Have an event you'd like us to promote? Email Greg Cox at gcox@crocker.com.
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