The Farm Bureau newspaper this week has an article that tells us Illinois increased its timber area by 303,000 acres between 1982 and 2001. (Why are their statistics ten years old?)The Conservation Reserve and Wetland Reserve programs administered by the USDA are the biggest push behind this forest growth. CRP and WRP plantings come in all shapes and sizes; the one above is an upland 13 acre planting...
and this one is 300 acres of land that never should have been cleared for farming.
Most of the conversion from agricultural to forest land is done by planting one tree at a time with rigs like this one, which has been working almost every day this spring. The people putting the trees in the ground have to look at each one, then put it in the planting slit so that the top of the root system is at the ground line. People new to planting usually ask me how much of the tree goes in the ground. That's easy; just all of the root.
This is a bur oak seedling that has been in the ground for a little over one week. Below is Walt Townsend's rig.
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