Tree Program Taking Root in State
Lile Real Estate associate, Brandon Stafford, spend the day with the people of Greentrees and Arkansas Democrat Gazette staff to lean how the Greentrees private initiative involving landowners in Arkansas will produce carbon-credit sales.
Lile Real Estate
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE: by Nancy Cole
TUCKER — Planting oak trees is a long-term proposition. No one knows that better than Brandon Stafford, a sales associate and land manager with Little Rock-based Lile Real Estate Inc., which specializes in the brokerage of agricultural, recreational and timberland properties in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee. Stafford recently enrolled 210 acres of marginal farmland that he owns in two reforestation incentive programs.
One, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program, is a cost-share and rental payment program that dates from the 1950s. The goal is to encourage farmers to take highly erodible cropland out of production and plant it in trees or grasses.
The second, GreenTrees, is a private-sector initiative that opened operations last year in Arkansas. GreenTrees offers landowners a $350-per-acre signing incentive in return for interplanting hardwoods with cottonwoods and agreeing to a 70-year timber-harvest schedule. “I just felt like it was the right thing to do,” said Stafford, 28, explaining his motivation for signing up for both programs.
“I’ve got two young children, and it’s something I can give back to them. Hopefully, one day they can see the value of it,” he said. Last month, Stafford visited one of his properties, a 75-acre field near Tucker in Jefferson County that had produced soybeans. Rather than level the land and dig an irrigation well to make the field more productive, Stafford decided to plant trees on the property. His daughters, Olivia, 4, and Addison, 9 months, came to watch a team of tree planters at work.
In accordance with Green-Trees’ requirements, the workers alternately planted 18-inch cottonwood cuttings with five species of oak seedlings — cherrybark, nuttall, shumard, water and willow. Each acre was planted with 604 new trees,half cottonwoods and half oaks.
GREENTREES LEASECottonwoods are a unique aspect of the GreenTrees program, said Andy Johnson, who handles landowner relations for the project. The fast-growing cottonwoods serve as a “nurse species,” helping to train the slowergrowing oaks to grow straighter and with fewer limbs, Johnson said.
To qualify for GreenTrees, a landowner must plant a mini- mum of 50 acres of trees and the soil type must be suitable for growing cottonwoods, he said. Because cottonwoods initially require more care than hardwoods to survive, GreenTrees pays landowners $350 per acre during the first two years of their lease to help cover the extra cost, Johnson said. GreenTrees is focused on the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, from Cairo, Ill., to Baton Rouge, said Page Gravely, senior director of Middleburg, VA based C2I, the for-profit company that developed the GreenTrees program.
During its inaugural year, 2008, GreenTrees enrolled 2,523 acres, all of it in Arkansas, Gravely said. At 604 trees per acre, that equates to 1,523,892 new trees in the state, he said.
GreenTrees’ funding comes from U.S. energy companies with coal-burning power plants that seek “carbon credits” to offset their greenhouse gas emissions, Gravely said. Trees can be a source of such credits because they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change grew out of the concern by many scientists that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere and cause global temperatures to increase. Some scientists dispute that claim.
To date, the United States has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol and the federal government has not mandated any reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
However, several voluntary carbon-reduction programs do exist, such as the Chicago Climate Exchange, a pilot project that runs through 2010. Last summer, 18 forest landowners in Arkansas received a total of $126,000 from the sale of carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Working through the Delta Institute, a Chicago-based broker for the exchange, the landowners received $6.99 for every metric ton of carbon dioxide that their trees had sequestered. Like most markets, the value of carbon credits has dropped since last year, closing Wednesday at $2.20 per metric ton.
Section 1605(b) of the Energy Policy Act of 1992, a Department of Energy greenhouse gas reporting program, is another example of a voluntary carbon-reduction system, said Don Morrow, who manages the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge project for The Trust for Public Land. That bottomland hardwood restoration project in northeast Louisiana has sold carbon credits to such companies as Entergy, Detroit Edison, ConocoPhillips and Volkswagen of America.
Several regional carbon regulatory systems also have developed around the United States, including the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, among 10 Northeastern states; the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative, among seven Western states and four Canadian provinces; and the Midwestern Regional Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord, among 10 states.
“The state of Florida will have carbon regulations starting in 2010 for the utility sector,” Morrow said. “Over the last several years, we’ve been in the wild, wild West, but things are starting to coalesce a bit,” especially in terms of the standards for carbon credits, he said.
LONG-TERM PLANNINGEnergy companies buying carbon credits must ensure that the carbon stored in trees remains sequestered for a meaningful period of time, so Green-Trees’ lease requires a 70-year commitment, roughly the time it takes to grow a mature stand of hardwoods in the Mississippi Delta.
As a result, landowners can harvest timber on their Green-Trees acreage but only in accordance with certain schedules, Gravely said. The cottonwoods can be harvested first, removing one-third of the trees each in years 10, 17 and 25. The hardwoods also can be thinned in years 25, 35, 45 and 55, so long as a minimum stand density is maintained.
Gravely said he is particularly “bullish” about the value of the cottonwoods, either to produce wood pellets, which can be used in combination with other fuels at power plants, or to produce cellulosic biofuels, which could help meet federal renewable fuel mandates.
The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires that at least 100 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels be sold in the United States in 2010. That mandate increases to 16 billion gallons by 2022.
GreenTrees’ 70-year lease makes Matthew Pelkki uneasy. A forest economist at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, Pelkki said he “would advise real caution” for a landowner because of the exceptional length of the contract and the tremendous uncertainty regarding U.S. carbon markets.
“If they own the carbon, [GreenTrees] can basically tell you how you’re going to manage your land. You don’t have the choice to harvest when you want to,” he said. “That would be like someone coming into my house and saying ‘We’ll give you $350, but we’ll tell you when you can use the kitchen and bathroom for 70 years,’” Pelkki said. Others interested in conservation see GreenTrees in a more favorable light. Tree program taking root in state http://epaper.ardemgaz.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=Oli... “The federal government itself just can’t do it all,” said George Rheinhardt, state forester with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, referring to his agency’s reforestation programs.
“This idea of having a market-driven program to help get conservation on the ground with extra incentives. ... It is all good stuff,” Rheinhardt said.
Many GreenTrees requirements complement several hardwood-tree conservation categories in the Conservation Reserve Program, the Department of Agriculture’s program that started in the 1950s. Thus, most GreenTrees clients enroll in both programs.
Many of the federal reforestation programs offer a $100 per-acre signing bonus, reimbursement for up to 90 percent of tree-planting costs and annual rental payments for 15 years, said David Long, private lands coordinator and agricultural liaison with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
Combined with GreenTrees, landowners have tremendous incentives to restore wildlife habitat, Long said. By leasing the land out for hunting, landowners could earn yet another source of income from their property, he said.
GreenTrees gives landowners new options, said Bob Zielinske, a district forester with the Arkansas Forestry Commission and based in Forrest City. “I’m sure that the program would not fit everybody,” but for some it probably makes good sense, Zielinske said. More information about GreenTrees is available at: www.green-trees.com
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