US (IA): State forest nursery holding meeting on price increase of seedlings
DNR Chief of Forestry, Paul Tauke, says it’s part of a bigger issue faced by the nursery as the requests for planting large-scale conservation areas has dropped off.
“Those would be on the small end three acres, and back in the glory days it was not uncommon to have 30, 40, 50 acre plantings and sometimes plantings as big as 100 acres,” Tauke says. “That’s sort of the crux of the problem, those large-scale plantings just aren’t occurring anymore.” Those big areas required a lot of small trees to fill them.
“In the glory days of tree planting — probably from about 1990 through about 2002 or 2003 — the nursery was selling anywhere from three to five million plants a year,” Tauke explains. The incentives to plant trees for conservation have stayed about the same and Tauke says those who wanted to take advantage of them have already done so, leading to a drop in demand.
Fewer sales drives up the cost to produce the seedlings, and Tauke says they need to make up some of the difference.
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