How wildfires affected Oregon tree nurseries

Wildfires and last summer’s heat dome in Oregon have not only changed the demand for seedlings, but have shifted the way some nurseries think about what to plant. We’ll hear from Glenn Ahrens, an OSU Extension Forester, and George Kral, owner of Scholls Valley Native Nursery, on the future of seedlings and forestry.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 2020 wildfires burned more than a million acres of forest land in Oregon. The Oregon Department of Forestry estimated that replanting that acreage could require as many as 140 million seedlings, a huge increase from an average year. Meanwhile the heat dome was a challenge for nurseries and climate change has begun to affect what consumers want in terms of trees. So we thought we’d check in right now on the forestry and nursery industries. Glenn Ahrens is an OSU Extension Forester. George Kral is the owner of Scholls Valley Native Nursery. Welcome to you both.

Glenn Ahrens: Hello, good to be here.

Miller: George Kral, how was your nursery affected by, first of all, by the heat dome last summer?

George Kral: It’s kind of funny to think about that. We had six inches of snow here two days ago. So, yeah it was hot, we hit 114 degrees here at the farm and we were working real hard to try to keep water on everything and just keep stuff alive.

Miller: What I remember hearing at that time and in the months that followed was it was the youngest trees or the youngest plants in general that were most at risk. Did you lose seedlings?

Kral: We did. Yeah, there’s some things that are more sensitive than others and some things that are adapted to cooler climates, more coastal things, you know they’re going to be a little more tender: Hemlock, Western Red Cedar, they don’t, they don’t really like the heat.

Miller: You started by saying that you just had 6″ of snow on the ground. What did that mean?

Kral: Well we’re still, I mean the snow itself isn’t a problem, it just feels like whiplash, between 114° last June which was every day last June was, and it was a dawning kind of a nightmare. I mean we hit 107 and then 109 and then 114 and it just kept coming. But the snow is not a problem and it covers things up. It’s these, the freezes that we had a pretty pretty solid frost last night, so we’ve got some damage control to work on now.

Miller: Glenn Ahrens, broadly, what did you hear in terms of how nurseries across the state were affected by last summer’s heat?

Ahrens: I have mostly worked with the field plantings and the small trees once they’re out in the field. From the nurseries, I did talk to a few different nursery managers that they were pretty busy doing whatever they could with water and other cultural techniques to reduce the impacts of the heat. But there was far less damage in the nurseries where they have those control options or treatments that they can do compared to all of the seedlings that are planted out in the wild where we really can’t do anything to help them during a heatwave.

Miller: Because they’re just, they’re out there all over the place. How is it at this point? Do you have a sense for the scale of the damage to those relatively newly planted trees?

Ahrens: We don’t have really good data across the board, but just from anecdotal stories and my own experience with the, maybe 100 different families I worked with that planted trees, I’d say lower elevations, where the damage was the worst, below 1000 ft, it’s probably over half of the trees planted. In my example, we planted about 3000 trees in one particular area in our demonstration forest and I think we lost about 80% of those and the remaining 20 were injured.

Miller: And is that 80% for some elevations or some smaller landowners, you think that could be representative?

Ahrens: It’s hard to say. Much of it depends on whether it was a south facing slope or the local environment. The north slopes and things that had more shape, were more protected, but it seems to me that well over half of the seedlings planted in lower elevations were seriously damaged or died, but we don’t really have a good data yet, I think that’ll take a little while for that to come in from actual more scientific surveys.

Miller: What could that mean in terms of the economic hit for various landowners?

Ahrens: Well, it is really big because it’s compounded by the fact that many of the folks were planting after the fire, sort of unexpected, needs to plant trees and they did everything they could to get trees planted and then to have the trees they planted die just compounds the challenge, as well as the people that aren’t affected by fires, across the whole western side of the state where the heat dome had that impact. If we think about the average planting in Oregon might be 40 million trees, 40 or 50 million trees a year out in the forestry world and a lot of that was at risk. A lot of that is on the west side. So I’m sure there’s tens of millions of trees that need to be replaced and replanted, areas that need to be replanted.

Miller: Glenn, the Register Guard had a fascinating article back in February about some of the unexpected bottlenecks in replanting and the gist was that it’s not necessarily only about or about a lack of seedlings. One issue is that if folks didn’t replant soon after the fire, or a fire, that weeds could have taken hold on their land. What does that mean in terms of replanting?

Ahrens: Well, the competition from grasses and other plants that are coming up in the first couple of years can be really serious for trees because the little trees are just rooting in about six inches of soil and if the other plants are well established, their roots basically use all the water before the little trees get to grow out into that. So it really can delay establishment or even cause trees to die from lack of water. And so if you are having to wait one or two or even three years, there’s gonna be a lot of regrowth of other vegetation. And so if you’re planting new seedlings out into that, it’s a really standard practice in more intensive forestry that you control the weeds around the trees that you plant, either by a spot treatment or as a broadcast treatment to make sure that they start with a pretty clean site without a lot of weeds in that first year. So we may have to be doing remedial treatments to really expect good success with plantings after a couple of years without planning.

Miller: What are the reasons that landowners might have waited and not replanted for one or 2 or even more years?

Ahrens: Well in particular with people affected by the wildfires, which is just an astounding amount, we’re looking at over 5000 family forest owners, those kind of non industrial private owners that owned a lot of forest land in western Oregon in particular, and they weren’t expecting the fire in most cases. And so they’re not in the forestry business in many cases and they’re not in the pipeline, so to speak. And there are many steps for success. You have to decide what is really needed on a site, decide what species of trees you are going to plant. You have to order the seedlings generally, preferably two years in advance. You can’t count on getting them on the open market in a given year, but even one year for a short turn around, you have to have that preparation of the site so that there aren’t a lot of weeds where you’re planting into and then finding a tree planter is a big challenge. Getting all that lined up in addition to perhaps you lost your home, all the other aspects of this disaster that affected these families. So trees are kind of maybe on the bottom of the list and they’re also not in a position to take care of all these essential steps to succeed with planting. So it takes a couple of years.

Miller: That last part you mentioned is the labor part. How serious are labor issues in terms of tree planting right now?

Ahrens: They’re very serious across the board, I think in agriculture, and you could get George’s opinion about that for the nursery side. So the workers that help in the nurseries and that help with tree planting in the forest, and with other, the site preparation and weed control that needs to be done. That’s an extremely important issue and a challenge and again people who aren’t planning on it and they’re not in the business and let’s say they have 5000 trees to plant, which seems like a lot but it’s a small amount compared to the big operators that are using all of the available labor to plant literally tens of millions of trees. So get in line and try to find that labor workforce or the tree planting contractor.

Miller: If you’re just tuning in. we’re talking right now about forestry and nurseries. Glenn Ahrens is an OSU Extension Forester. George Kral is the owner of Scholls Valley Native Nursery. George, what do the labor issues look like in the wholesale plant world?

Kral: Well it’s always tight. We try to make the most of the labor that we have and just try to focus on site prep and other cultural treatments that minimize our need for hands-on labor as much as possible. But we’re a nursery so you know there’s a lot here and we’ve got weeding to do and just the process of getting seeds planted and and sites ground prepared and and maintaining weeds and then getting those plants out of the ground and packaged into bags so that we can send send them the to customers, it takes a lot of, a lot of labor. So it is tough. We’re shorthanded a lot of the time.

Miller: What has your own customer’s demand looked like over the last couple of years?

Kral: Yeah, well, from our point of view, it’s been good. I hate to say that, I don’t, we don’t want to profit off of someone else’s misery, but certainly, some of the fire rehab work that’s happening is adding to the demand for plants.

Miller: And you’ve been able to satisfy that demand? I mean, you’ve had, say, the seeds you need or the ability to provide the trees or plants that people want in greater numbers?

Kral: Well, generally speaking, Glenn brought up some great points. The pipeline is a factor and so people that are used to working with plants and are buying plants in large numbers, this is fairly routine stuff. A bump for them is not a big thing. For somebody to kind of jump into the market and try to find plants, late in the year maybe, or just people may end up getting plants that aren’t exactly appropriate to their site. And so that’s another concern. It’s not just a matter of the number of plants, but are they the right plants for the, for the places that need them?

Miller: And that question and we’ve talked about this in the past, but not directly with a nursery. And the question of the right plants in the right region, we don’t have the same answers to that question now as we did 20 years ago or 100 years ago. How is climate change affecting what you’re deciding to grow and to sell?

George Kral: That is a great point. We’re actually phasing out some species for a variety of reasons, but certainly climate impacts is one of those. So if we don’t think that our customer base is going to be successful in planting a certain species, I’m less inclined to grow and I want to send people stuff that they’re going to be successful growing. So we’re certainly looking at our flora and trying to understand what elements of it are going to persist, given climate change, and of course that is anyone’s guess, I mean based on this month so far, I’d say we’re in the midst of some global cooling, which is not also not a good outcome for us, I would say. But certainly, the long term trends have been for warmer and warmer temperatures, particularly in the summer and drier summers too, the data is pretty clear on that. And so again plants like Western Hemlock, Western Red Cedar, Grand Fir, red Alder, they just can’t hack that. And so those plants aren’t doing well in the Willamette Valley and we’re growing less of them and growing more of other species that we think will do well.

Miller: And Glenn Ahrens, just briefly back to you. I understand from what you were saying that supply is not the only issue, but going forward, are there enough seeds and seedlings for the forest trees that need to be planted?

Ahrens: I think there can be, the main thing is that the large scale nursery, to grow 140 million seedlings, which is actually about what the entire Pacific Northwest nursery capacity has produced in 2019, that was the estimate I think was 135 million seedlings that were produced in forest tree seedling nurseries in Oregon and Washington. So those same nurseries, to grow tens of millions more if they have the orders and the key is to take hundreds of landowners with small orders and bulk them up to a large order that will get the attention of the large scale nursery industry so that they will add the capacity or sow the seeds. So nursery capacity seems like it’s there, but it’s connecting the dots to get big orders in. And then back at the other end distribute those and help everybody plant their trees across hundreds of different landowners.

Miller: Glenn Ahrens, we’ve got to leave it there. But thank you very much. That’s Glenn Ahrens, an OSU Extension Forester along with George Krall, owner of Scholls Valley Native Nursery. Our production staff includes Elizabeth Castillo, Julie Sabatier, Rowley Hernandez, Chris Gonzalez, Senior Producer Alison Frost and Managing Producer, Shiraz Sadiq, Nalene Silva engineers the show, our technical director is Steven Kray and our executive producer is Sage Van Wing. Thanks very much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I’m Dave Miller, we’ll be back tomorrow.

Think Out Loud Is supported by Steve and Jan Oliva, the Rose E. Tucker Charitable Trust, Ray and Marilyn Johnson and the Susan Hammer Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation.

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