Post #9682

A lot of paper mills have closed and there's a glut of pulpwood on the market now. I just can't see any company investing large capital into a mill in the foreseeable future here in the US. Each time we get a new president, the executive orders come out undoing a pipe line, reenabling a oil.... back and forth every 4 years. In this area we have two EV batteries factories that are half finished and abandoned in situ. I think one of them has $1B USD tied up that they are walking away from. Prior to this we had planted long leaf pine and it's a fickle species. It was over run by loblolly pines which we didn't want. So the NRCS paid to have it drum rolled and replanted. Now, on the 2nd planting, I've only got a "take" rate of about 30% of the long leaf pines. We still have some loblollies that are growing here and there. So in light of paper mills closing, we're trying to come up with what to do with this land. I can't till the soil because of the underlying root structures that haven't rotted away yet. Enter "silvopasture". It is a mix of sparsely planted trees to provide about 50% canopy coverage. Maybe one large tree every 50-80ft. The rest is no till grasses for grazing. Wife and I were looking at this last night and have a preliminary plan to take an 85 acre parcel and make it into twelve 7 acre (3ha) paddocks. That way we can rotate livestock between paddocks. We're looking at optimizing for fences that are multiples of 330' because the fence fabric comes in 100m 330ft rolls.