Timber is big business in Indiana. Bolstering that industry is one of Ag Director Bruce Kettler’s new initiatives at the Indiana State Department of Agriculture for 2019. For Chris Parker, the timber industry starts with the landowner’s desire to produce a good product and maintain the woods for the future.

Parker, Morgantown, manages his own timberland and timberland for family members. He’s retired from the Purdue University Extension Service, but he served as Morgan County Extension ag educator for about 30 years. He’s also a forage and cattle producer, and just recently handed off his duties as an Indiana Prairie Farmer Profit Planners columnist.

Typically, if you do timber stand improvement and have a quality woods in the beginning, you can expect a harvest of salable timber every 18 to 20 years, Parker says. It’s a long time to wait for a payday, but the size of the pay often depends on how well you took care of the woods over the long haul.

Responsible people
One important criteria for Parker when choosing whom to work with is how they take care of the land. On a tract of Parker’s timber harvested two years ago, there is minimal evidence that a harvest occurred. There are no ruts in trails and no treetops blocking the trails. 

“That’s extremely important to us,” he says. “We want to make sure the woods will be left in as good of shape as possible after timber is harvested and the logs are removed.”

It’s necessary to have trails to move timber in and out of the woods, Parker acknowledges. Often the land is rolling. A logger who cares about the land will install water bars running across the trail every so often. Basically, these are small diversions that you can drive over but that help slow down the movement of water that would cause soil erosion and cut gullies, Parker notes.

The people he’s typically worked with on logging not only install water bars and maintain trails, but also seed some sort of cover once logging is finished. Two years after harvest, walking through his woods, no signs of soil erosion are evident along the trails, Parker says.

For many years, Parker worked with the late Ron Martin, a local logger based in Morgan County, to harvest timber on his and his siblings’ land. “We really liked the way he cared about the woods,” Parker says. “He always did his best to avoid making ruts and left things in good condition when he finished.”