Photos courtesy Linda Mulliniks
{Opposite page} Joseph Mulliniks takes after his father, pulling his own weight on the family tree farm. His cousin, Colleen King and his sister, Annabelle,
also pitch in by installing tree tube protectors. {Above} Three generations of Mulliniks men, Joseph, Matthew and little Joseph, spend a frosty fall morning
checking on their tree crop.
crops, which isn’t true.
“We’re here to work with the landowner who wants technical expertise and ideas for solving a problem,” said Cash.
The Natural Conservation Resource Service helps with the technical issues and the financial dealings go through the Farm Service
Agency (FSA.) Usually, there is an opportunity to sign up for programs annually, said Will Barnes, district coordinator with the FSA.
Financial incentive programs for the planting of hardwoods typically
involves a period of at lest 15 years before harvesting, he said, but each
plan is different depending on the type of land, amount and type of
trees.
“It’s hard to place a value on timber that will be harvested in 15 or
20 or 30 years,” he said, “but generally we talk about investment return per acre.”
Under certain programs, farmers are paid for planting the trees
and maintaining them until they are harvestable. He said right now,
payment for maintaining hardwoods is about about $65 an acre annually.
As it turns out, paying for trees is just one part of the puzzle. You
need to know which trees grow best where and which trees yield harvestable wood. You need to know how far apart to plant and how to
control undergrowth and pesky rabbits and deer that love the sapplings. You have to know when to thin out the trees. Each baby tree
lost was personal to Mulliniks.
“I’m telling you, it’s just perserverence,” said Mulliniks. “I said to
myself, ‘I am going to figure this out.’”
At one point early on, he applied for funding that helped him plant
native grasses in a pasture rather than putting out cattle or planting a
crop. It was such a success that it attracted wildlife that promptly ate
his trees. Then he had cicadas.
“I was just about to give up when this guy said, ‘you are doing this
the hard way,’” recalls Mulliniks. “He told me about tree tubes.”
Something as simple as tree tube protectors has turned his hardwood heartache into a hardwood haven.
“It was like magic,” said Mulliniks.
As you drive down Fishing Ford Road in Belfast, you will see what
looks like a winery operation at the corner of Talley Road. Hundreds
of tiny trees are peeking over the top of white plastic tubes. The tubes
create a miniature greenhouse environment, said Mulliniks, that controls heat and cold and moisture. A grant also paid for the protectors.
Now that he has the protection issue under control, Mulliniks is
experimenting with alternating species so the trees can grow tall with
fewer limbs, making them more marketable down the road.
Chris Carney, a forester with the Forest Service, said the most desireable hardwood is red oak and it is graded from one to three, but the
best category is veneer. If you achieve the growth of a tree with veneer
quality wood, a tree can bring as much as $500,00. It’s rare, he said, but
it can happen. To raise such a tree, it has to grow tall without limbs so
there is more flat surface to harvest. Generally speaking, on average a
veneer quality tree is worth about $1,000 to $2,000 in 40-50 years. By
that time, if the trees have survived and reached veneer quality, those
trees could fetch upwards of $2 million dollars.
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