Page 28 - Georgia Forestry - Issue 3 - Summer 2024

AMERICAN FOREST
MANAGEMENT
toward 100. The vast majority were in the Piedmont, while the largest spot measured 40 acres in Cherokee County. The newly released report shows central Georgia with five areas of high probability (>50%) of spots. Greene, Jasper, Jones and Oglethorpe Counties have high probability of having spots, with Putnam County having the greatest possibility. The result predicts SPB activity will be low in the southern region and moderate in the western and north Georgia areas.
When Fences
Aren’t Effective
Amy Rosen’s property is in the southern end of Oconee County and she is not a happy landowner.
“Last year got bad,” she said. “We stand to lose a lot of money here.”
Rosen manages her land for timber and silvipasture and she understands the value of taking preventative measures for the health of her stands. Loggers thinned her pines about three years ago, but that doesn’t mean the beetles have passed her by. A neighbor who “needed to thin 30 years ago” — and didn’t — fostered an infestation that has gone on to infect way more acres than his own.
Rosen said it can be hard to keep rela- tionships neighborly when these problems come up. And it’s equally challenging to nurture connections with loggers, who tend to focus on the bigger jobs.
“Landowners with less than 30 acres and beginning landowners have a hard time finding someone willing to do smaller tracts,” she said. Rosen worries that the SPB-damaged timber on her land is a fire hazard and needs to come down, but her other tracts are not yet ready for thinning.
“It’s a bigger thing than you think by not managing your timber,” she said.
Jason Simmons of Middle Georgia Timber couldn’t agree more. As a tim- ber buyer, landowner and registered for- ester, he understands the tricky balancing act that forest management requires. Between timber age and needs, finan- cial decisions, and equipment and crew readiness, his own strategies resemble moves on a chess board.
26 | GEORGIA FORESTRY
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