Brush thinning key to managing forest ’70s clear-cuts led to jobs for woodsmen

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The remains of the huge clear-cuts that scarred the northern Maine landscape are the most visible reminder of the spruce budworm outbreak nearly three decades ago. But in fact, the voracious insect had other far-ranging effects on the timber industry, including the increasing presence of Hispanic workers in the woods.

The infamous bug and other important factors, including a violent hurricane in Central America, conspired to shape the work force that now labors in the woods. The Hispanic workers, an almost invisible component, were tragically propelled into the public consciousness last month when a van carrying 15 Hondurans and Guatemalans plunged off a bridge in the Allagash, killing 14.

The men were brought to Maine to thin trees on land owned by Pingree Associates, Inc., and managed by Seven Islands Land Co., both of Bangor.

The work, called pre-commercial thinning, is actually new to the Maine woods and is a legacy of the budworm outbreak.

Too many trees

Because huge swaths were clear-cut in the 1970s and ’80s to salvage wood ravaged by the insect, that land is now thickly covered with small trees. In many places they are growing too close together to thrive.

Pre-commercial thinning is an attempt to mimic plantations, in which trees are spaced for maximum growth.

Holding up cross-sections of two trees in his Augusta office recently, Ron Lovaglio, the state’s commissioner of conservation, graphically demonstrated the beneficial impact of thinning. One slice was from an 80-year-old white pine that grew in a natural stand left alone by foresters. That tree was 10 inches in diameter and grew at a rate of .8 cords per acre per year.

The other slice was also 10 inches in diameter, but it came from a 40-year-old white pine that grew at a rate of 2.5 cords per acre per year. That tree grew on a plantation where the space between trees was precisely determined by where seedlings were planted.

“The results [of thinning] are remarkable,” said Lovaglio. He investigated the subject extensively in the late 1970s when he worked as a forestry researcher for International Paper Co.

Thinning not only increases the productivity of each acre of land, it also makes it possible for landowners to harvest less acreage for the same return, enabling more land to be set aside for conservation. One model, developed by University of Maine forestry professors, predicted that one-third less land would have to be harvested, if techniques like thinning were used.

The work, however, is very expensive, and the returns won’t be reaped for decades. It costs as much to thin an acre of forestland as it does to buy one. So only the most committed landowners do pre-commercial thinning, Lovaglio said.

Last year, nearly 22,000 acres were thinned, according to the Maine Forest Service. That was more than double the amount in 1990.

Once foresters realized thinning was so beneficial, they had to decide the best way to do it.

Beginning in the late 1970s, different landowners experimented with various methods. Herbicides were tried but they killed trees indiscriminately.

Various size strips were cut through the woods as a thinning method, but this only allowed the trees on the edge of the strips to grow faster.

Realizing that individual trees would have to be cut, loggers with axes and chain saws were sent into the woods. Since the trees to be cut are only a couple of inches or so in diameter and 12 to 15 feet tall, and since loggers are relatively well-paid, this wasn’t efficient.

In the early 1980s, the Swedish saw manufacturer Husqvarna sent its representatives to Maine to show off the brush saws the company had developed specifically for thinning. The saws are like oversized weed whackers with a circular blade at the end of a long metal pole.

With the Swedish saws came Swedish workers and other foreigners willing to do the hot, buggy work.

Evolving work force

Ron Lemin, another forester who researched the potential of thinning with the university, recalls coming around a bend in the woods and seeing tall blond men without shirts wielding brush saws. Their families were often camped out in nearby gravel pits.

Rather than a means to escape poverty, the Swedes saw the woods work as an opportunity to see America, Lovaglio said.

At some point in the early ’90s, the landowners began hiring Hispanic workers for thinning work. Lovaglio said he believes the practice began with migrant workers who had finished picking blueberries and were looking for something to fill the time before they moved on to other crops. Thinning work is typically done in the summer and early fall.

“It was an evolution,” Lovaglio said. “It was not focused on ‘let’s get foreign labor here because it’s cheaper.'”

Most of these workers came from Mexico, recruited largely by word of mouth.

Later in the 1990s, contractors began to bring in workers from poorer Central American countries.

Honduras, where the average annual income is $850, is the poorest country in the region, and its already lagging economy was devastated by Hurricane Mitch in late 1998. The storm displaced one-fifth of the country’s population and ruined much farmland.

Just to keep their families from starving, many of the men headed to the United States. Some ended up in the Maine woods, where more than 1,200 foreign workers have been certified to work this year alone. That number has been steadily increasing, said Juan Perez-Febles, director of migrant and immigrant services for the Maine Department of Labor.

Woods worker shortage

While Hispanic workers are new to the woods, foreign workers are not. For more than a century, loggers from Quebec have cut Maine trees. In the days of the river drives, it was actually easier for these men to get to the forests of northern Maine than it was for Maine cutters. Men from both countries spent their entire winters in the forests, cutting trees all day and staying in logging camps at night. The Quebec loggers typically returned to their homes in the spring to farm.

Now that roads criss-cross the privately owned forest, workers from both sides of the border spend their days in the woods but return to their homes at night.

Despite being able to return home at night, however, even higher-paying and highly mechanized logging jobs have lost their allure for most Mainers. A survey done last year by University of Maine researchers found that 72 percent of current Maine loggers would not encourage their sons or daughters to enter the profession. Thinning, the most menial and physically demanding woods work, pays far less than logging.

“The domestic labor disappeared,” Lovaglio said. “These [woods] jobs, as you move up the social ladder, are looked on with less favor.”

While several state panels, as recently as last year, have reviewed the issues surrounding the use of Canadian workers in the Maine woods, scant attention has been paid to the Hispanic workers.

Independent contractors

While the work force was changing, so were the laws governing it. Federal and state safety and insurance rules and their enforcement have pushed landowners to distance themselves from workers, said David Field, a forest policy professor at the University of Maine. Instead, landowners began to hire independent contractors to do thinning and other woods work.

The men killed last month worked for Evergreen Forestry Services, an Idaho company that provides tree planting and thinning workers to companies across the country. This year, the company has brought 354workers to Maine to work on land owned by several timber companies.

“It’s simply easier for the landowners to hire someone to take care of that stuff,” Field said.

Otherwise, the landowners would have to pay worker’s compensation insurance and social security benefits, and provide amenities to the workers, Field said. The contractors are responsible for providing those things now, paying for them out of the proceeds collected from the landowners.

“Direct hiring would be best to ensure workers are treated well, but, of course, they don’t want to do [direct hiring],” Field said.

Using contractors is by no means unique to the forestry industry, he said.

“I would like to think that some landowners would take the moral high ground and say, ‘Yes, we want to ensure good working conditions for all [employees] whether they are thinning or driving a truck,'” Field said. “That would be a high standard.”

Thinning’s future

The amount of acreage thinned is expected to increase as calls for more responsible timber harvesting are heeded by large landowners.

However, there will be fluctuations. Since it is expensive to do, it is one of the first things landowners forgo when budgets are tight.

For example, lumber prices dropped last year, causing some companies not to do any thinning work. That means the number of acres thinned was about 3,000 acres less than the year before.

“There is a greater focus on the management, productivity and sustainability of the Maine forest,” Commissioner Lovaglio said. “As a consequence, this treatment will grow.”

However, that does not automatically mean there will continue to be increasing numbers of foreign workers in the woods. That’s because the work may be done by Maine residents who have been laid off or are otherwise unemployed, or it may be done by migrant workers who are U.S. citizens, he said.

Still, history shows foreigners are frequently brought in to do jobs that Americans don’t want to do.

“That’s the history of labor evolution in this country,” he said. “We bring in foreigners to do the jobs we don’t want to do.”