Page 19 - Portrait 2011.qxd

n a particularly sunny Thursday (for February, at least), Scott Ferguson walks down a dirt road in rural Washington County near North Plains. He navigates a stand of trees that has been thinned five or six times since the mid-1980s. Some of the trees are 80 to 90 years old, and Ferguson has worked this par-ticular property for about 27 years.

“So these trees are about 50 feet taller than when I started,” Ferguson says of the Douglas firs that blanket the property.

And it’s in stands like these that you can find the 6-foot-8 Ferguson most days, traipsing through wooded areas in his job as a partner with Trout Mountain Forestry, a company that spe-cializes in sustainable forest management and planning. The medium-size company focuses on family forest owners — those who have any-where from 20 to 2,000 acres of tree-lined prop-erties.

“What I tell people is we’re a family forester that people can use when they need us,” says the 59-year-old forester from Beaverton.

What the 5-year-old Trout Mountain Forestry does is plant, thin and work on tree stand improvements. They also do loads of work involving loggers and on forest management issues.

“Foresters are kind of generalists,” says Ferguson, who holds a biology degree fromYale and a master’s degree in forestry from Oregon State University. “We do the whole thing.” Trout Mountain Forestry’s main office is a reclaimed brick building near the Pearl District where Ferguson shares quarters with fellow part-ners Barry Sims and Mark Miller, employee Mike Messier and office manager Marla Pallin.

The company counts about 50 different clients, who comprise a total of 25,000 acres of property. Those clients range from Washington County’s property management division (which has five timbered properties), to the Forest Grove Water Shed and the Trappist Monastery near Lafayette.

Ferguson says his company likes to remind potential clients that they’re on the “green side of forestry,” being one of the first forest manage-ment and planning companies in the Northwest to receive a Forest Stewardship Council certifi-cation.

“As a company, we’re the most active in work-ing towards conservation easements on working forest lands,” says Ferguson. With a goal of keep-ing small family forest operations going, Ferguson says the best way to do that is to keep the landowners on the the same property they want harvested and to make trimming their tree

stands economically viable.

Ferguson points out that if owners can make a profit on their timber, they are less likely to sell or subdivide their property.

All the while, Ferguson says his company’s goals is to find a balance between maintaining a forest’s wildlife while providing a profit for their clients. What Ferguson has discovered over the years is that the majority of property owners he deals with aren’t bottom-line individuals, mean-ing that most opt for thinning as opposed to clear-cutting.

While industrial forestry has remained pretty much the same over the last 40 years, complete with heavy cutting in the state’s coastal areas, logging in federal forests has been cut back heav-ily.

Meanwhile, markets for so-called “green” wood — harvested timber that’s more environ-mentally friendly — have been increasing. “Last year, we sold about 2 million board feet of (green) lumber,” Ferguson notes.

Back at the rural Washington County site, Ferguson says one tree taken from the stand was 140 feet tall, a height that produces 500 to 700 board feet of wood. Current market prices pay about $500 to $650 per 1,000 board feet. “That’s pretty good,” he says. “It’s (been) much lower than that.”

Ferguson says roads on most timber proper-ties are about 12 feet wide, just enough to allow logging trucks access going one way.

“The truck drivers don’t like to get their mir-rors knocked off,” he points out.

Still, that can prove to be a tight squeeze con-sidering the trucks have trailers long enough to carry 40-foot-long logs.

While the wood market fluctuates, high-qual-ity Oregon structural wood is usually in demand, and China has had an ongoing interest in Northwest lumber.

Wood also is still the product of choice when it comes to supporting overhead electrical feeder lines, especially at Oregon’s vast wind farms. “There’s a big strong demand for telephone poles,” says Ferguson. “They make telephone poles out of Douglas fir.”

Aluminum telephone poles, which are very energy-intensive to create, have never caught on. What makes the family forest unique is that the owner can provide unique wildlife habitats that industry doesn’t or won’t. Leaving downed logs, some brush, and standing dead trees are all ways to provide homes for birds and an assort-ment of woodland creatures.

“We try to craft our work to our owners’ wish-es,” says Ferguson. “They want to be able to walk and recreate, so that you’re not so much in a tree farm atmosphere as you are in a forest.”