As the harvest of 8,800 trees in two management units at the Poplar Tree Farm in Chehalis along state Route 6 enters its second week, the chipping process has begun, as of Monday, with soil amendment and reforestation to follow.
Justin Phelps, the Chehalis wastewater superintendent, provided the Chehalis City Council with an update on the harvest of the city-owned farm during Monday’s council meeting. He began with a brief background of the farm before diving into the project, which began July 7.
Two of the 11 units, or 40 acres, have been harvested and all trees are down and in the process of being chipped. Phelps said the trees were planted in 2003, long past their typical lifespan of six to 15 years.
The project will be broken down into three phases: harvesting, soil amendment and reforestation. Site preparations were done in house by operations staff, and Phelps said staff have been taking cost-effective measures during the harvesting process as he admitted “there is not much money involved” in terms of revenue and contractor work costs about $15,000 to harvest.
“We were originally going to get a dumpster out there to just cut them and throw them in, and they came up with a very cost-alternative [way] to save about $2,500 to $3,000 with that,” he said. “There is not much money involved. It’s $22 a ton. Three years ago, the mark was about $50 a ton. We did not maximize on that or take advantage of that opportunity, but it’s very expensive and there’s really not much return.”
The next phase will be soil amendment, which will involve rotovating and subsoiling. Stumps will be ground between four to 10 inches below ground to provide a flat and level surface after grinding for replanting. Phelps said the grounding of the stumps will prevent future maintenance and labor despite a higher cost.
“To be able to plant with poplars again, we need to make sure that we have a proper soil amendment or preparation to plant and have successful growth rates,” Phelps said. “If you do not prep the soil well enough, you have a lot of mortality rate in those poplar trees. The idea is that, yes, the contractor pricing is roughly $60,000, but that just provides a clean slate to be able to plant again. The idea is that we will pay an upfront cost at first but minimize the amount of labor that actually goes into it.”
For the reforestation phase, the replanting of poplars will be done with planting whips rather than saplings or stems. Similarly to the soil amendment process, this was chosen to avoid more maintenance in the future. Whips are about 4 feet to 6 feet in length and cost about $1.50 per tree for a total of $13,200 for 8,800 trees.
“You can a plant sapling, which is anywhere between 6 inches to a foot. It’s a little outgrown, but weeds have a tendency to outgrow those and, again, cause a lot of maintenance nightmares. For staff, it’s very difficult to be able to see the difference between what a weed would be and a sapling,” Phelps said. “Really what that’s going to provide is less maintenance in the future, staff will be able to see the trees, they will be able to mow around the trees, so we’ll be able to flood those units out, which is going to mitigate a lot of weed control.”
Phelps said a contractor will use a tractor with GPS to keep the planting of trees uniform and in straight lines in a 14-by-14 grid. The per-tree cost to plant is $4 for a total of $35,200. This phase will also involve the replacement of the irrigation system with about 60,000 lineal feet of pipe that needs to be replaced, which will cost about $60,000.
