Today's intersection: old growth forests and the farm bill

Despite what Republican governors say trees growing on public land in the Mountain West are not agriculture any more than wild salmon are aquaculture. 

European settlement and the Industrial Revolution in the New World took hardwoods for charcoal then humans allowed fast-growing conifers to replace lost forests. Desertification driven by agricultural practices, overgrazing, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and urban sprawl have turned much of the United States into concrete heat islands. 

One need look no further than the Black Hills National Forest for how politics has completely altered a landscape but there are plenty other public lands examples that illustrate the red state, blue state divide. Here in New Mexico public comments on the revised forest plan look way different than how they read in my home state of South Dakota and in the Wyoming Black Hills. Ponderosa pine only reached the Black Hills about four thousand years ago and as many readers are aware the first US Forest Service timber sale took place near Nemo but only after nearly all the old growth of every native tree species had already been cleared for mine timbers, railroad ties and construction. 

In June, 2022 US Forest Service Chief Randy Moore told a congressional committee that before widespread settlement in the West populations of ponderosa pine were about forty per acre but are as high as 600 per acre today. Dense stands of water-sucking, heat island-creating ponderosa pine concentrate volatile organic compounds or VOCs that become explosive under hot and dry conditions. The aerosols are like charcoal starter fumes just waiting for a spark. 

Fire managers have climate change guns to their heads so it’s usually damned if you do and damned if you don’t conduct prescriptive burns. But it’s probably a straight line from the previous administration’s Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and crashes in morale within the USFS to current wildfires and conditions on the National Forest System.

Nevertheless, Republican governors who rely on socialism, Kristi Noem, Greg Gianforte, Mark Gordon, Brad Little, Spencer Cox and Joe Lombardo sent a letter to President Biden and US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack opposing an amendment addressing mature and old-growth plans for units of the NFS.

Conservation and forestry groups are also calling for the farm bill to build out the agro-industrial infrastructure that other commodities enjoy. They want funding for public and private seed repositories and tree nurseries; incentives to develop markets for new wood products; and new research and technical assistance into wood products at universities and agricultural extension offices — all initiatives that could make it into the final omnibus. The wood industry wants to use it, but needs farm bill programs to help set up the new production lines and markets it says are needed to help fund that logging long term. Environmentalists have one overriding demand for the farm bill, which crosses out of forestry into the wider debates over the role of climate and carbon policy in agriculture. But environmentalists and climate scientists argue that there are plenty of ways to do forestry that are bad for both ecosystem and climate — and that lawmakers need to be careful before giving farm bill funding and imprimatur to ones without clear climate benefits. [Legislators, lobbyists look to farm bill to save American forests]

These aren't natural forests where wildland fires burn: they're largely second-growth pine monocultures allowed to overrun aquifer recharges after a century of fire suppression. Roads not built for logging because they’re erosion menaces are carved into hillsides willy-nilly to fight wildfires nonetheless.