29. The Biggest Mistakes People Make in the Woods with Troy Clymer and Jeff Kastle

So Jeff, with your 32

years working with Georgia landowners, what does a management forester actually do for those landowners?

That's a great question, and it really depends on what part of the state you're working in.

In South Georgia, it's going to be primarily dealing with cost share, whether it's working with the Natural Resources Conservation Service or the Farm Service Agency.

Foresters in the northern part of the state, we have less cost share, and primarily we're handling a lot of general advice cases.

That would be harvesting advice, water quality advice, and forest health questions.

Yeah, so we run the gamut.

We can do anything from stewardship plans, forest health issues, dealing with insects and disease, water quality issues you may run into, how to set up your SMZs or your future logging decks or harvesting operations.

A lot of good things that foresters do to help you accomplish your objectives on your property.

So what kind of questions do landowners call you most often about?

This is going to be different from north to south, but the most common question I get just by number of volume is people trying to sell trees off small lots.

I get three or four of those a week.

The second would probably be forest health and timber advice questions.

I have a very large population in my area.

I have two counties that probably have about a million people each.

As the lot sizes have gotten smaller, that tends to be the most common question I get

Oh yeah, and this is the Athens area.

We see a lot of fragmentation of the landscape.

These tracks that used to be hundreds of acres are now five, 10, 15 acre tracks.

So it creates really unique challenges and you really have to develop a good plan to be able to accomplish your objectives on those small properties.

When you talk about what has changed over the years, that's probably the biggest thing that we've had to deal with.

The parcel sizes have gotten smaller.

I have to work with the landowners to kind of coach them how to work around those issues.

And the markets have definitely changed through the years as well.