Editor's Column

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Forest Facts

By: Jim Petersen

Jack Rajala prunes a white pine sapling on a company tree farm between Deer River and Big Fork. Mr. Rajala’s passion for white pine led him to write a book about his years spent learning how to regenerate the tree. Bringing Back the White Pine is both a forester’s manifesto and a how-to guide for anyone interested in growing white pine commercially. Replanting in the right places is the key.

“The point is this. Although certainly not as glorious as the past, there is a viable white pine industry yet today and there is a significant demand for this wonderful wood.”

Jack Rajala, White Pine Symposium,
Duluth, Minnesota, September, 1992

If Minnesota is successful in its quest to restore eastern white pine it will be because it followed Jack Rajala’s lead. Since 1972, he has planted more than 2.5 million seedlings on forestland his family owns between Deer River and Big Fork. No one in the state has spent more time or money learning how to grow white pine. Its charisma has become his passion.

“I know of no other tree growing in Minnesota forests that can fulfill so many economic and environmental needs,” Mr. Rajala said in a recent interview. “It produces beautiful wood, provides a wide range of wildlife habitat, can be grown under a wide variety of conditions, doesn’t need to be clearcut to insure adequate regeneration and is a sentimental favorite among Minnesotans who love forests.”

Mr. Rajala’s ardor for white pine led him to write a book in 1998 about his years spent trying to figure out how to regenerate the tree. Bringing Back the White Pine is both a forester’s manifesto and a how-to guide for anyone interested in growing white pine commercially.

“The future for white pine—of any abundance in Minnesota—has to do with methodically and religiously carrying out well-thought plans and rigorous silviculture,” he wrote. “It requires up-front commitment, disciplined execution and a willingness to stick with it.”

Indeed it does. Mr. Rajala—now 60—will not live long enough to see even the first of his planted pines harvested. But he is undaunted, this despite the fact that his capital investment now exceeds one million dollars.

“What I am doing is an investment in the future of Minnesota’s forests and its once grand white pine industry,” he says resolutely.

Although Mr. Rajala’s passion for white pine is widely admired, it has placed him at odds with environmentalists who see its sought after recovery as simply a matter of placing remnant stands in no management reserves where presumably they will regenerate themselves naturally.

“It is a romantic notion with no scientific basis,” Mr. Rajala says of the idea, which has twice led to efforts by environmentalists to force a moratorium on white pine harvesting in Minnesota forests. Both attempts failed.

“Self-regeneration hasn’t worked in a hundred years and it won’t work now,” Mr. Rajala declares. “The key to successful white pine restoration is regeneration, not preservation. The only remaining question among experts is whether regeneration can best be accomplished through natural seeding or planting. I don’t personally care so long as we bring back pine, though I can tell you that planting yields far more predictable outcomes than does natural regeneration. The only places where white pine is reseeding itself is in areas that have been subjected to natural disturbance—say a wildfire—or areas where timber harvesting has exposed mineral soil and created openings where regeneration can occur. White pine is not reseeding itself in untended natural stands.”

Remarkably, Mr. Rajala is not a forester, though he is certainly a keen observer of nature and of white pine in particular. His decision to start planting white pine on his land was born of his lifelong admiration for the stately tree and a desire to add new tree species to predominantly hardwood forests. But his earliest plantings failed, a fact he attributes to having misjudged the amount of shade pine seedlings would tolerate. “I simply erred on the side of too much shade,” he explains.

White-tailed deer are beautiful animals and a pleasure to watch, but for those who grow white pine they constitute a vexing problem. Among the many animals that feed on white pine seedlings, none does more damage than white-tailed deer. Repeated browsing— nipping new buds and shoots—can permanently stunt tree growth. Bud capping—putting paper caps on each bud—is a deterrent, but it is expensive. Adding to the problem, Minnesota’s 1.2 million deer population is increasing.

Despite his early failures, Mr. Rajala’s overall success rate is 50%—meaning that half the seedlings he has planted survived and grew. That’s not bad considering that he expects to retain no more than 150 of almost 1,000 seedlings he plants on each acre. “In a 100-yearold stand there will only be room for 100 to 150 trees,” he predicts. “The rest will have to be thinned out in stages.” Such staged thinnings speed growth among remaining trees. They also approximate the frequency of cleansing ground fires that burned through pine stands before forest firefighting efforts were initiated in the early 1900s, a response to public anger and fear that followed several conflagrations including Minnesota’s 1894 Hinckley fire. The entire town was destroyed and 248 lost their lives.

The fact that planted white pine seedlings tolerate modest amounts of shade cannot be over-estimated—at least not in Mr. Rajala’s view.

“White pine is the bridge between our past and the future. Its tolerance for shade presents opportunities for long-term management that short-lived shade intolerant species, like aspen, do not offer. Let aspen, balsam and spruce plantations serve the fiber demands of our pulp and paper industries and let longer living white pine forests serve the needs of sawmills interested in producing the highest quality pine lumber possible.”

The significance of such a momentous shift in Minnesota’s forest landscape may escape some, but not Mr. Rajala.

“Rather than divide Minnesota’s forestland base between intensively managed plantations and no-management reserves, which is the direction we are headed in now, I would divide it three ways. There would be short-lived forests private timberland owners to invest in white pine—something most have thus far declined to do.

“Most Minnesota landowners have concluded white pine is too difficult and too expensive to grow,” Mr. Rajala concedes. “So they’ve opted for red pine and aspen which grow faster and are less susceptible to insects and disease. That’s fine, but for forest landowners who are interested in adding species diversity or a new age class to their plantations, while aging their red pine or hardwoods, white pine is a perfect choice. Moreover, most of the costly insect and disease problems associated with white pine, including blister rust and white pine weevil, decline significantly when it is planted in openings under maturing trees.”

But there is one problem that is not reduced by planting pine beneath the canopies of other trees: deer browse. Indeed, of all the problems Mr. Rajala has faced none seems to have been more vexing than deer nipping off the buds of young trees. To protect the buds he staples small paper sleeves called “bud caps” to each budding leader. It costs five cents a tree and has to be done every year for five years.

Because white pine seedlings grow very slowly—often no more than a foot in their first five years—controlling competing vegetation, especially fast growing hazel and maple sprouts, is also a problem. Mr. Rajala chops them out—further evidence that what he calls “walk away forestry” will not work where white pine is concerned.

Then there is pruning. As seedlings become saplings removing limbs up to nine feet above the ground helps reduce the risk that wind born blister rust spores will reach their intended target: the needles of low hanging branches. It is one more arduous task Mr. Rajala underestimated.

“In my early years at this, I figured we could just stuff the seedlings in the ground and they’d take off,” he recalls. “They didn’t and the fault was mine. I simply did not realize how much hands-on care white pine seedlings would demand.”

Mr. Rajala could understandably be forgiven for switching to red pine or aspen, but there is more going on here than successful white pine regeneration. He is also determined not to surrender what he calls “forestry’s moral high ground” to his critics.

“White pine offers landowners the opportunity to add a much revered tree species to their forests, increase wildlife habitat diversity, sustainably manage their forests at a profit, and move away from clearcutting—all in the same motion,” he explains. “In Minnesota, this is forestry’s moral high ground, and I am unwilling to surrender it to misguided environmentalists who say that white pine can only be restored by first locking it up on nomanagement reserves. Even if white pine is never again harvested commercially from public lands, it will eventually die out unless the kind of hands-on work I am doing is done to regenerate and promote its growth.”

Mr. Rajala is particularly enthusiastic about opportunities for white pine’s advancement in county-owned forests, which emphasize profitable management, and private ownerships, which account for 40% of Minnesota’s timberland base.

Jack Rajala stands in a lumber shed at the family’s Big Fork sawmill. He believes white pine restoration could eventually breath new life into the state’s once vast white pine industry. “White pine is esteemed by skilled wood workers,” he says. “By first dedicating ourselves to growing high quality white pine, we an substantially grow a high quality white pine-based cottage industry capable of serving global markets for fine furniture, cabinetry, doors and windows.”

“The interest is there, but technical and financial resources are lacking,” he says. “The state could do much more to encourage private investment in white pine restoration, especially in northern Minnesota where aspen has overtaken too many mixed conifer-hardwood forests.”

Minnesota’s aspen invasion has indeed overtaken hundreds of thousands of acres once occupied by other tree species, including pine. But it is easy to see why those who currently own these forests favor aspen. It sprouts prolifically from its own roots—eliminating reforestation costs—and it grows rapidly. Equally important, it produces a wood chip that is prized by the state’s burgeoning OSB industry.

Despite aspen’s promising future, the state has bowed to public pressure, accelerating its white pine replanting effort to more than two million seedlings in each of the last two years. Still, Mr. Rajala believes the effort is insufficient.

“It’s a far cry from what we could be planting,” he says. “At this rate, we’re adding maybe 2,000 acres in new white pine plantations a year. By contrast, we had more than 200,000 acres in red pine plantations in 1990. I have nothing against red pine, or aspen for that matter, but my reading of the public’s mood is that it wants to see more species diversity in Minnesota forests. White pine would help satisfy this longing.”

Another reason Mr. Rajala would like to see the state do more to encourage private investment is that he fears white pine might be held hostage in the widening debate over public lands forest management, especially timber harvesting. “The state is allowing its white pine forests to age, which is fine,” he observes. “Harvesting state-owned white pine is also declining dramatically, which is fine too, but unless the legislature appropriates a lot more than it has to date, the state won’t be able to do the kind of stand tending work that is necessary to perpetuate the species,” he says. “Furthermore, I’m afraid the philosophical transition from allowing pine to age to simply deciding to never harvest will be easier to make at some future date than it would be if the state committed to more active pine management now. It is critical for Minnesotans to understand that these trees demand lots of hands-on care, including periodic harvesting, or white pine will gradually fade from our forests.”

Apart from his commitment to restoration, Mr. Rajala sees renewed economic potential in white pine. Its return, he says, is a first step in the long process of breathing life into a prosperous but scaled-down version of Minnesota’s once vast white pine milling industry.

“White pine is esteemed among skilled wood workers,” he says. “By first dedicating ourselves to growing high quality white pine, we can subsequently grow a high quality white pine-based cottage industry capable of serving global markets for fine furniture, cabinetry, doors and windows. Such an industry would be a real economic shot in the arm for rural Minnesota.”

The Rajala Companies—a venture he owns with his brothers and sons—is Minnesota’s largest white pine miller and would most certainly benefit from such an expansion, though Mr. Rajala seems surprisingly ambivalent about the prospect.

“I confess there are days when I spend more time looking back than I do looking ahead,” he says. “I am proud to say that the Rajala family has been working in Minnesota’s forests for almost 100 years. Our Big Fork mill has been cutting pine since 1902. Now we have two mills there, two in Deer River and one in Grand Rapids. I think our grandfather, who was a logger first, would be very proud of what we have done with the company he started.”

The various Rajala entities employ about 250 people and pay out about $7 million a year in wages and benefits. Most of the lumber they saw—softwood and hardwood—is custom cut for other Minnesota companies that make finished products, mainly windows, doors, millwork and furniture.

“We will continue to do well even if Minnesotans don’t embrace white pine restoration in a meaningful way,” Mr. Rajala says. “But I hope they do—and I hope they see the same potential I see because the kind of white pine restoration I envision would support a lot of small family-owned businesses, especially in rural Minnesota. But equally important is the fact that it would significantly increase the productivity and biological diversity of many thousands of acres of Minnesota forest. Everybody wins.”

 

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