CANAAN – Fifty years ago, Willard Walker bought about 35 acres in Canaan.

“It was a good house and a good, pre-Civil War barn,” he said Wednesday, looking over at the still-standing buildings. The land was about half-rocky fields and half-woods.

It was Walker’s careful tending of those woods and his eventual purchase of more than 850 surrounding wooded acres that led to his being named Maine’s Outstanding Tree Farmer of the Year for 2004 by The Maine Tree Foundation.

But sitting alongside a farm pond Wednesday, watching a mother duck giving diving lessons to her six ducklings, Walker, 78, admitted it wasn’t a romantic notion of the beautiful Maine woods or a poetic desire to save trees that prompted him to manage his forest so carefully.

It was money – government subsidies that were paid to keep farmers from growing hay.

Walker soon discovered after arriving in Maine from Massachusetts in 1954 that he was “a poor farmer. I was a failure.”

With a family to feed, Walker went back to graduate school and taught anthropology and linguistics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., for the next 23 years.

As soon as classes were over each spring, however, he returned to Maine for the summer.

Meanwhile, he hired a forester to advise him on the care and tending of his Maine woods. In the 1950s, he did a lot of pruning and planting and placed all of his land in soil conservation protection, Walker said.

“You could get government assistance if you ‘got with the program,'” the tree farmer recalled. “They wanted to get farmers out. There was no support for family farms. They would actually pay you not to make hay.”

Once he retired, Walker moved back to Maine permanently and devoted more time to properly managing his woods. “If it grows here, we’ve got it,” he said. “We favor rock maple over hemlock.”

Walker said that in the 1940’s, there was no market for hardwood pulp, and since much of his acreage is “someone else’s old wood lot,” they are now filled with high quality poplar, hemlock and cedar.

“The woods aren’t just sitting there, doing nothing,” he said. “They are productive – harvested and worked.”

Walker designates certain species as crop trees and manages them carefully. “It’s not that we raise trees for one big crop. We are harvesting all the time. It’s a sustained yield,” he said.

“It’s really not important that they are recognizing me,” Walker concluded. “It’s the trees and the farm. Many people just raid the woods when if they learned patience and good management, they could have a lifelong return.”

The Walkers are hosting an Outstanding Tree Farmer Field Day from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 7, at their Battle Ridge Road farm in Canaan. There will be displays, presentations and demonstrations, and the Canaan Grange will offer a turkey dinner for $8 a person. For more information, contact Daren Turner at 474-7338.