Last week, we closed on a property in Southwest Louisiana. We now own 75 acres of prime farm and timber land. The land was previously logged a few years ago. We plan to grow timber on 50 acres and use the remaining 25 acres to have a small hobby farm. We will build our house and workshop will be first after I retire, then followed by building up a garden. But before that is done, we plan to plant the timber. We are planting Longleaf pine which is fire resistant and will build up a wildlife habitat. Bottomland containing a large creek adjoins our acreage. That bottomland has some young timber planted on it.

The Plan for our Land

We are planning Longleaf pine, Pinus palustris, because it is fire resistant. Last year there were many large forest fires in the area. The main industry in the area is farming and forestry. Most of the timber farmers planted Loblolly pines and the pines burned up in the large forest fires, thus ruining many people’s tree crops. Loblolly pines are not very resistant to fire. On the contrary, the native pine in our area is Longleaf pine which needs fire to grow correctly. Many programs by the federal and state government provide reimbursement to plant Longleaf pines.

We will need to come up with a business plan for the timber acres so that we can apply for reimbursement under the Forest Productivity Program after the trees are planted. Louisiana provides this program to help landowners establish timberland and wildlife habitat. There are also a few federal programs that we are also investigating. We have applied for Use Valuation for the property to reduce our taxes since we will be using the majority of the property for timber and wildlife habitat and the remainder for a future small farm. After talking to the tax assessor’s office, we should have no problem with the Use valuation for our property.

Future Actions

We have been in conversation with a certified forester from LSU about our property and he has given us a few recommendations. We will have to get estimates for each step of planting timber on our land. The Longleaf pine is a bit pickier that other pines on getting started. We will also have to apply in the future for additional help with controlling competing vegetation to the baby pine until they are large enough to survive controlled burning and have outgrown most of the competing plants in the stand of timber.