Timber is processed by Tri Star logging in the 4FRI (The Four Forest Restoration Initiative) Ranch Task Order. 4FRI is a project to thin thousands of acres of overgrown land in the Apache-Sitgreaves, Coconino, Kaibab and Tonto national forest.
Overgrown Arizona forests have fueled unprecedented fires, burning bigger and hotter.
"Forests that once had 40 to 50 trees per acre, now have 500 to a thousand trees per acre," said Patrick Graham, director of the Arizona Nature Conservancy, at a news conference on Thursday.
Thinning trees can reduce fire danger, but such efforts have been slow to produce results so far. The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Forest Service announced plans this week to launch a program called Future Forest to search for ways of thinning forests faster and more profitably.
The program represents a new approach to an old problem, its supporters said. The Nature Conservancy, a non-profit organization, will invest in the program and work with the Forest Service to thin thousands more acres each year.
Part of the goal is to become more efficient, even if it meansrewriting thinning and clearing contracts between the Forest Service and loggers.
Fire suppression and historic overgrazing disrupted natural, low-intensity wildfires that prevented forests from growing too thick with flammable thickets of small trees, underbrush and other fire fuels, according to a Forest Service report.
If Arizona's ponderosa pine forests burn, they might not come back as the climate changes and temperatures warm, Graham said.
Four Forests Initiative started slowly
The Four Forests Restoration Initiative identified 2.4 million acres of northern Arizona forests to be considered for restoration treatments, including forest thinning.
To mechanically thin the initiative's 1 million-acre goal, Graham estimates the federal government would spend upward of $1 billion.
Instead, loggers haul the trees away at a much lower cost to the government, he said. They leave the bigger trees, which are important to forest health, and remove the smaller, less valuable ones.
A company called Good Earth Power assumed the U.S. Forest Service’s largest stewardship contract in 2013 to thin 300,000 acres.
The pace of Good Earth Power’s thinning, however, has been disappointingly slow, U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said at the press conference.
“I think a lot of promises have been made that frankly haven’t been kept,” Flake said.
“At the midpoint of their 10-year contract, I don't even think they've done 10,000 acres yet," said Cal Joyner, the Forest Service's southwestern regional forester. "Good Earth Power has struggled to get the restoration work done."
A group of investors took operational control of Good Earth Power in December 2016 and changed its name to NewLife Forest Products a few months later, said Bill Dyer, the company's new chief operating officer. NewLife has slimmed down by subcontracting to logging and trucking experts.
Dyer said he expects to thin 1,000 acres a month from October through the rest of the year, an increased pace from the past several years. He expects to thin acres at a higher rate come spring.
A new approach
Joyner said he hoped that NewLife would have thinned 150,000 acres by now but the contract was difficult. The Future Forests program will explore why Good Earth Power struggled under the contract and look for ways to draft future contracts differently.
The Nature Conservancy is subcontracting with forestry company Campbell Global to thin 20,000 acres of forest in four years.
“We are going to turn (Campbell Global) loose on our forest-service processes,” Joyner said. The goal is to make thinning contracts more profitable.
Many of the processes are antiquated, he said. The value to the public is no longer in an individual tree, but in a restored acre.
"The contract as it stands is acceptable," Dyer said. He still encourages research to find cheaper, more efficient ways of removing trees and overgrowth because they have virtually no market value.
NewLife Forest Products primarily processes the trees into dry finished boards for trim, doors and furniture manufacturing in Mexico.
Aside from the contract's terms, however, Good Earth Power had its own difficulties. It was taking on too much for one company, Dyer said.
"They were trying to do logging," he said. "They were trying to do trucking. They were trying to run mill operations.
"When you look at something that's the size of this undertaking, the capital investment would be just huge for any one organization to try to take on," Dyer said.
The Future Forest program could increase efficiency by leaving timber on the forest floor for longer to dry it out and lighten truckloads, or by using tablet software to mark trees that loggers shouldn't cut, Graham said.
He wants to see 10,000 to 15,000 acres of thinning per year increase to over 50,000.
If the forests go unmanaged, catastrophic wildfires are not over in Arizona, Flake said. “We just need to move faster.”
Arizona’s largest fires, the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski and the 2011 Wallow, burned more than 1,500 square miles combined. The two were "so-called once in a lifetime fires," Flake said. And they happened about a decade apart.
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