By Jessica Domel
Field Editor

An important crop for East Texas

Prep the soil. Plant the seed. Care for it. Wait to harvest.

While all row crops require differing degrees of care and attention, those few key steps remain the same. For Texas timber growers, it’s the time between steps three and four that really sets them apart.

Instead of a matter of weeks, it’s a matter of years, and sometimes decades, before they can harvest their crop.

For Texas timber grower John Bradley, the wait is nothing out of the ordinary. Growing trees and logging is in his blood. Both his father and grandfather worked in the same industry.

“It’s a great business,” Bradley said. “It’s a way of life, and it’s not a bad way of life.”

The timber industry is largely market-driven. When the housing market does well, the demand for timber rises. When it falls like it did in the ’90s, so does the East Texas economy.

The industry is doing better now. Timber farmers plant trees, thin them out every few years to allow the better trees to grow and then harvest when trees are around 25-35 years old. They then harvest, replant and start the process all over.

“It’s what we do,” Bradley said. “There are advantages. It’s not like it’s October, and you’ve got to get it in. If you’ve got a wet year and you can’t get it in, you can cut the tree next year.”

That doesn’t mean timber farmers like Bradley just plant trees and leave them. They have to fertilize and protect their crop from disease and insects.

“You can take a tomato seedling, stick it in the ground and leave it, and it probably is not going to do much,” Bradley said. “If you clean up around it, use a little fertilizer, get it ready and keep the bugs off, it will grow and make tomatoes. It’s the same thing with trees.”

Timber growers also have to deal with management costs and the uncertainty of not knowing what a crop will be worth in two decades. Some farmers, like Bradley, help alleviate costs by leasing their timber tracts to hunters who also help them watch the land.

There’s an art to growing and cutting timber, and there are many steps in the process.

When a group of trees is finally ready to be cut, a crew sets up nearby ready to take them to a mill to be processed into construction materials like oriented strand board (OSB) or into lumber.

A machine called a feller buncher with a 2,000-pound blade at the bottom is used to cut the base of the tree. The machine’s arms are used to hold the tree and then lay it down to be picked up by another machine and taken to a delimber where its limbs and leaves are removed. The remaining log is then stacked onto a truck where it awaits transport.

“It really is a magnificent operation,” Bradley said. There are some trees that the crews just don’t cut. Trees that are already mature and now have smooth trunks are often left standing, as are trees in streamside management zones.

“We try to keep a corridor on the streams that keeps the water clean,” Bradley said. “It keeps the water cooler. We can pull trees out of it, but we’ve got to leave the corridor there. It’s just common sense.”

The pine trees make for more than a scenic area. They provide a home to wildlife and a shaded area for humans and livestock.

“I think the logging industry is doing a great job. Sometimes they’re out there, and you just don’t know they’re out there,” Bradley said.

Bradley has timber tracts in seven counties. He, like other timber growers, has trees of varying ages, which allows him to harvest one tract while planting another. It’s a cycle that ensures Texas paper and lumber mills have what they need while also ensuring there are plenty of trees for generations to come.

“I just love the woods. There’s a lot of pride to lean on a tree and realize at the end of the day this piece of property is better because you owned it or you were able to work on this thing,” Bradley said.

These machines cut trees on the ground to meet the mills’ desired length.

After the logs are delimbed, they’re loaded onto a truck to head to the mill.

Wood chips are used to create construction materials like particle board and oriented
strand board, OSB.

Fields of young pines grow across East Texas. Timber farmers don’t just cut trees–
they plant and care for them, too.