The Poplar Tree Farm located along state Route 6, owned and operated by the City of Chehalis, is preparing for its first ever replanting since the first planting just over 20 years ago.
The city plans to replant the sections that were recently clear cut by next summer.
The Chehalis City Council voted to award a contract to Advanced Land Management for site preparation work at the city’s Poplar Tree Farm during its Monday evening meeting.
The contract, awarded for the low bid amount of $92,400, will pay for the contractors to grind thousands of tree stumps and mix the material into the subsoil to prepare it for replanting.
Chehalis Wastewater Superintendent Justin Phelps said he expects the work to be done over the next two months.
He added that he has elected to bid out the replanting work separately in hopes of finding a contractor with specific expertise in tree planting.
“I wanted to make sure that it was done the best way possible,” Phelps said. “Maybe find some of those niche contractors that wouldn't just be like a jack of all trades.”
The city previously cut two of the 11 sections of the poplar tree farm last summer, which, according to previous reporting by The Chronicle, meant cutting down roughly 8,800 poplar trees. As such, the trees at the more than 200-acre tree farm are long overdue to be cut.
When they were planted in 2003, they were expected to have an 11- to 15-year lifespan.
According to Phelps, the city plans to begin cutting one to two sections of the tree farm roughly every year for the foreseeable future.
Part of that approach, Phelps said, is giving the city time to consider alternatives to the poplar tree farm.
The tree farm was originally planted by the city as an alternative to dumping treated wastewater into the Chehalis River. In the early 2000s, as the city was constructing a new wastewater treatment plant, it was told by the state that it needed to stop its dumping practices.
The Poplar Tree Farm provides a place to dump that water and still put it back into the water cycle, as it either evaporates into the air or is filtered through roots and earth into the local aquifer.
When the farm was originally planted, the trees were intended to be raised and eventually sold for profit either as sawn timber or for paper. However, with the decline of lumber mills across the Pacific Northwest, those trees don't have near the value they once did.
According to Phelps, the city has considered cultivating some other crop on the farm that could still be used for reclaimed water discharge and not cost so much to maintain, but a viable solution has yet to appear.
In a previous article about the recent harvest, Phelps said the harvest cost the city around $15,000 and that his team had found a buyer at $22 a ton, which saved the city between $2,000 and $3,000 compared to its initial approach.
He added then that, three years earlier, the price had been more than double at $50 a ton, but the city was unable to capitalize on the price. While poplar trees are often sold to pulp mills to be made into paper, the industry has had a particularly bad run in recent years as paper mills have closed, most recently culminating in the tragic accident at the Nippon Paper Mill in Longview.
If there was ever an idea that the farm would operate at a cost-neutral level, it is long gone today. The reality is that the farm is a necessary part of the city’s approach to processing treated wastewater that is not fit for human consumption and cannot be sent back into the Chehalis River.
“That's really kind of the reason why the poplar farm existed is because the state had come down and said, ‘Hey, you're going to impact the river too much with your effluent discharge. You need to find an alternative solution than the river,’” Phelps said.
According to Phelps, the city will look to replant the two sections of the tree farm during the trees’ dormant season, sometime between mid-November and early April. As previously reported, the city plans to replant using whips, which are small twigs of poplar 4 to 6 feet in length that will take root and grow into full-size trees.
Phelps expects the replanting to cost upward of $13,000.
For previous reporting by the Chronicle of the recent Poplar Tree Farm, visit https://tinyurl.com/3vzm36v5.
