Any kind of recourse for land getting logged behind me?

[hutchman]

I live about an hour away from the OP.

I just finished logging the 23 acres we plan to put a house on. It was totally wooded with 80-90yr. old trees. Had one State and two private forestry consultants look at the trees and all said the stand should be much more mature than it currently is due to the type of soil they were in. Said it was best to start over. I hired a forestry consultant and Mead Westvaco purchased our timber. A local logging company harvested the timber and had a whole tree chipper (yes - whole trees - never seen one of those before) and a bunch of practically new looking John Deere equipment ... I estimate the whole setup was over 2 million dollars of equipment they brought out.

The land is on a private road. One side is all wooded with no houses (the side I purchased land on). The other side has 7-8 families on it.

Right before logging started, I was taking a nap after church one Sunday afternoon (like all good Baptists) and my daughter busts in the room and wakes me up out of a dead sleep telling me a man is on the phone saying there is a problem with our land. It turned out to be the president of the home owners association for the families that lived on the developed side of the road. He informed me that several residents got wind of my plans and were upset and wanted to know I couldn't use the private road for logging and had to gain access to the public road some other way. I had to get attorneys to look into it and in the end they didn't have any standing at all (my deed is clear - I'm not part of their HOA) but they thought they could stop me.

Do my neighbors think it looks like a mess? Yea, I'm sure. Looks like a bomb went off to the untrained person. To all the foresters and others that know about this stuff - they went on and on about how clean the site is and what a good job the loggers did. There are absolutely no ruts (they did it in good weather), no tree tops etc. Only some limbs and pushed up stumps where they pushed my road to my future home site so I could get to it.

I worked with the country forester and have been approved in the state's crop share program and in the summer will be replanting loblolly pines.

I'm sure the neighbors want to put coal in my stocking but MWV graveled the road and put it back better than it was before. I'm sure they all hate me but I had to do what I had to do to be able to afford buying the place, building a house/pole barn and a 1/4 mile road to get to it etc. Plus the existing trees were falling and dying so we decided to "reset" and start over with something that was more suitable for the soil conditions.

I tried to do the best I could with what I had. There are other logging operations all around in the same area and one that was done last winter has already greened back up nice.

 

[SPIKER]

My place was logged a year or so prior to me buying it, (1998ish) and there were a lot of tops and large stumps down. It was more or less selective cut with mostly Oak and Cherry taken out. It is hard to tell it now other than a few of the Oak Stumps still there. Ice storm w high winds did 100 times more damage...

 

[Garandman]

Ice storm w high winds did 100 times more damage...

Very good point.

 

[Garandman]

Ice storm w high winds did 100 times more damage...

Very good point.

 

[RickB]

Classic case of somebody asking a question then not liking some answers.

 

[MossRoad]

Classic case of somebody asking a question then not liking some answers.

More like a case of someone asking a question and some not liking the question... let alone give an answer other than MYOB.

 

[ArmyPair2]

:whistleblower: The bottom line is have a contract with your loggers and have your lawyer look at it. When we had loggers come in we knew who had to do what. The loggers in the area we live in always leaves some kind of a mess and it took me almost 4 years without a tractor to clean it up. From the get go we knew what we are getting into but all that wood was sacrificed to the fireplace god. We kind of got over because the land to the North,South,East and West was logged. Guess where all the deer came to visit?

I have so many deer now that I talked to our front neighbor "second time in five years" if he wanted to put food on his table. I am more than happy to feed our deer but if it is a eye sore and he is over 90 help him move your eye sore. Using forks, ratchet rake plus a Piranha saved my back.I can hunt in a few hours from now but what sucks is in Alabama you have to fill out paperwork to hunt on your own land.

 

[Pilot]

So they are taking the pines--what are they leaving? How big are the trees being left? Are they a species that has a market when the trees get big enough? Are they being damaged by the logging?

If the pines are the only trees with a market and the logging is destroying any potential, then they are essentially clearcutting. So what? The article linked to earlier about the clearcutting controversy is exactly right about the issue. The worst thing about clearcutting is clearcuts are ugly. Otherwise any "clearcutting impacts" are a result of how the area was logged, not the clearcutting. I say this as a retired forester with 40 years experience.

You might want to find a fast growing evergreen of some sort and plant it along your property line to make a screen.

 

[Silvic]

When I did a PCT on a stand a couple of years ago the local pothead came ATV'ing up the private forest road to challenge the workers on whether they had a permit or not. Of course for that practice no permit is needed but the foreman looked him straight in the eye and said yes we have all the permits and you are trespassing on private property. Another neighbor thinks he was afraid they would find and destroy his illegal pot grow that he had back in the woods. I had contacted every land owner that had property that abutted mine before the work started so they would know what was happening.
Folks often think they have the right to stick their noses in where they don't belong and it frequently is the uneducated who are the biggest offenders. Of course then there are the folks that actually know what they are talking about and they can help keep bad actors from screwing up the area and causing landslides and such. You just never know which group they fall into until later unless you actually know who they are and have had interactions with them in the past. Communications with neighbors is the best idea.

Go talk with the landowner who is having the harvest accomplished if you still have concerns.