Tips & Tactics: Hiring a Forester

I encourage landowners to really consider, you know, hiring a forester or a consulting forester. And that may sound counterintuitive. I'm running a little sales pitch here, but I think it's really true that there's good foresters and there's good consultants and there's maybe some that's not so good. But generally speaking, I think a forester is very beneficial to a landowner because he's a neutral party and he is a forester, especially when it comes down to managing timber and cutting timber and thinning timber. I see it every day where landowners hire timber companies or loggers to do a thinning operation. Nothing against the logger, nothing against the timber company. There's some great ones out there and they do the best they can. But we as a company really recommend, in 98% of our jobs, we recommend that our foresters mark the sale. So we select the trees to be cut. First of all, back up a little bit. I want to know what the landowner's goals are. That's number one. Number two, when he asked me to look at a particular stand of trees with a goal in mind, I want to advise him what's best for that stand. Never mind what the market is, never mind, you know, what price per ton we're getting. Let's look at what that stand needs as a timber stand, whether it needs a thinning now, whether it needs to. You need to wait. Whether it should have been thin three years ago. I want to look at the health of that stand and what the landowner's goals and objectives are. And then I want to make a recommendation. Yes, I.