BRATTLEBORO — Cows might be the central attraction of the annual Strolling of the Heifers, but a group of local businesses and agencies are teaming up with the parade's organizers to draw attention to another ubiquitous aspect of Vermont life - the forest.
“I grew up in Vermont and I've watched the farming industry do such an amazing job of promoting itself,” said Wim van Loon of East Mountain Forestry in Guilford, who approached the Stroll organizers on behalf of his colleagues in the forest industry.
As a result, this Saturday's celebration will mark the first time that a major forestry exhibition will be a part of the Strolling of the Heifers weekend.
“The forest industry should be doing something similar. There isn't one sort of venue where we can all get together and sell to the public what we do,” van Loon said.
Forestry has been a part of Vermont's history since the construction of the state's first sawmill in Westminster in 1738. The state is roughly 78 percent forested, with a total of 4.46 million acres of woodlands.
Forest-based manufacturing and forest-related recreation and tourism contributed $1.5 billion to the Vermont economy in 2005 alone.
About 80 percent of woodland in Vermont is privately owned. Based on a 2004 U.S. Forest Service survey in New England, owners maintain and use their forests for (in order of priority) aesthetics, privacy, nature protection, family legacy, other recreation, land investment, hunting and fishing, and timber production.
Van Loon said that this is an appropriate year for foresters to join the Stroll, as the United Nations has declared 2011 as the International Year of the Forest. This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the Weeks Act, which was signed into law by President Taft in 1911 to protect and preserve forestland in the eastern United States.
Forestry = farming
Martin Langeveld, marketing director for the Stroll, said that the pairing of cows and trees is not as strange as it first appears.
“The Strolling of the Heifers isn't really about cows; it's about farms and farmers and, more broadly, about sustaining a local food economy,” he said. “A pretty good chunk of our region is forested, and most farms have some amount of woodland. Forestry is also farming.”
Forestry is also essential for a heavily forested state such as Vermont, because it maintains the health and stability of the woodland ecosystem.
“Forestry enables you to enhance certain ecological forest elements, improving the spacing of trees and the diversity of the forest. Foresters can salvage damaged trees and fight pests,” said van Loon.
Van Loon added that foresters also play an important role in protecting the local business opportunities offered by the woodlands by keeping working woodlands productive.
“And keeping them productive involves periodically selecting and harvesting diseased trees and concentrating growth in the best trees,” van Loon said.
He said that sylviculture (the cultivation of forests) is as much an art as it is a science.
“It's like gardening on a very large scale,” said van Loon.
According to van Loon, many of Vermont's forests have been devalued by the prior use of unsustainable forestry practices.
High grading, for example, involves harvesting only the best trees in a forest without also removing the worst. This practice leads to unhealthy forests that have to be carefully nurtured by van Loon and his colleagues so the landscape can recover.
“Good forestry involves not just taking the best trees but also the undesirable growing stock,” he said. “Forest management allows us to manage degraded forests and turn them into something better.”
Representatives from Northern Woodlands magazine, the Woodland Owners Association; the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation; Vermont Woodlands Association; the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service; and Audubon Vermont will participate in an exhibit at Live Green Expo on Saturday, June 4.
For more information, visit www.strollingoftheheifers.com.