Sunday, 6 Oct 2002

ABINGDON, Va.

I was out the door at 5:00 a.m. to meet the folks from “Good Morning America” in Duffield. They called yesterday and arrived this morning to film a segment on tobacco farmers growing alternative crops. Two of our growers will be featured. Wow! The show will air next Monday, Nov. 11, around 7:00 a.m. In the span of a week, I find myself and ASD featured in two places where I never thought we’d appear: an online magazine and the network news. Maybe “Oprah” really is next.

Log on: a load of Sustainable Harvest lumber.

ASD.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the meeting with Tracy Swann, a local building contractor, went well. Jeff Coffey, manager of the Sustainable Woods processing center, brought samples of flooring, wainscoting, molding, and rough sawn boards. Tracy and her husband, Marty, build high-quality homes, ranging from the modest to the grand. She is considering utilizing our Sustainable Woods regularly, particularly since we’ll soon be able to provide her with a wide diversity of wood species and a range of grades, from “clear” boards (knot and blemish free) to “character woods” (wood with unusual grain patterns, occasional small knots, and other distinct features). Tracy’s main concerns are product quality, convenience, availability, and price, but she’s willing to pay a bit more for our products — 5 to 7 percent — if we prove reliable on the other points.

We started off yesterday by selling wood products to a contractor and ended it with a meeting to further develop a “good logger list” for our region. This project was initiated by Steve Brooks of Virginia Forest Watch, with ASD and the Nature Conservancy as partners. It follows an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to develop a “bad logger list.” The good logger list (better suited to our “win-win” culture) is intended to be a resource for individuals who want to have logging done, but want to be sure they contract with an exceptionally skilled and responsible logger. ASD will be able to use this list to recommend responsible operators to the landowners we work with.

These two meetings exemplify ASD’s “field to table” strategy for sustainable forestry. Our approach begins with the forest and the small, mostly moderate-income landowners who own over 70 percent of the woods in our region. Three years ago, ASD developed an ecologically rigorous set of “Standards for Sustainable Forest Management.” The Nature Conservancy, local environmental groups, and professional foresters worked with us for over a year to create these standards. Emily, our forester, uses these standards to develop long-term sustainable management plans and to guide timber harvests when they occur. The essential function of our management approach is to help restore degraded forests, while providing a long-term stream of revenue from periodic harvests. Right now, we work with landowners with 10 to 200 acres of forestland, though most have 50 acres or less.

On board: the solar-powered dry kiln.

ASD.

Once Emily completes a management plan and it is approved by the landowner, careful harvesting of logs can begin. Recently, we completed a timber harvest on a 15-acre parcel near Abingdon that yielded approximately 40,000 board feet of logs, which were trucked to ASD’s Sustainable Woods processing center, located 30 miles west of Abingdon. The logs are being sawed into boards at the center by a private entrepreneur, Charles Fugate. Once the boards have air dried for two to three months, they go into our dry kiln, where the drying process is completed over a three- to four-week period. The dry kiln is solar-powered, with additional heat supplied by a wood-fired boiler unit (the slab wood from the sawmill supplies the needed wood for the boiler).

The next step in this process takes place when our boards are manufactured into hardwood flooring, trim, cabinets, and other home-building materials. A small group of local manufacturers works with us to produce the finished goods. The final step takes place when the consumer — a homebuyer, a church expanding its facility, a public library adding a wing — chooses Sustainable Woods. This has begun to happen in southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee, with contractors like Tracy playing a critical part in the process.

More tomorrow. Let’s hope we don’t get a big head after our network debut.