Transcripts

LEIF ENGER: Imagine a tree that grows like a weed, a tree six years old and 60 feet high, a tree you can plant like a crop, harvest in a few short years, and sell to a paper company hungry for pulp. That's the sort of tree Kit Hasbargen is growing on his farm near Birchdale, just south of the Minnesota-Canada border. Hasbargen leads the way through a field of hybrid poplars-- green, whippy stalks in straight, weedless rows. When planted a year ago, they were ankle high. Now they're over our heads.

KIT HASBARGEN: They're kind of your little babies. I'm very interested in seeing them thrive and do well.

LEIF ENGER: Hasbargen is the first farmer in the area to plant the hybrid poplars. Though pleased with the results so far, he's not staking all that much on the experiment, 120-acre plot and a few more years of care. If all goes well, he'll sell the mature trees to the company that asked him to plant them in the first place, Boise Cascade, which has a paper mill half an hour east of his farm. Boise's Midwest Woodlands Manager Steve Earley says fields like this one will be increasingly important to the paper trade.

STEVE EARLEY: We believe the fiber farm can create a quality fiber. And that would produce a quality paper in a very competitive sense. And you can genetically engineer these clones to have a better-quality paper or provide more of the characteristics that are important for paper making.

LEIF ENGER: In recent years, paper companies have begun investing heavily in fiber farming. Boise Cascade has similar operations in Maine, Alabama, and Louisiana. Champion International is buying thousands of acres to plant in hybrids in Central Minnesota. The Blandin and Potlatch companies have joined Boise and Champion in a research group aimed at improving the trees and opening the marketplace. Earley says Boise's first fiber farm in Washington State has more than justified the company's $2 million investment.

STEVE EARLEY: That was about six years ago that those were planted. And they're ready for harvest now. The goal was for those to be harvested in six years. And they would be 60 feet tall and 6 inches in diameter, about 4.5 feet off the ground level. And they found that it's actually going to be-- you can harvest it a year earlier, in the fifth year, and have a size that is acceptable for the mill.

LEIF ENGER: One reason for the feverish interest in fiber farming is a projected shortage of native aspen. Kevin Edberg of the Minnesota Agriculture Department says, in about a decade, the supply of harvestable aspen will drop for several years.

KEVIN EDBERG: What that will mean for the pulp and paper industry, we think, is that they are either going to need to increase use of some other species of wood or to bring in pulp from other states or to decrease their paper production in Minnesota. Clearly, the latter option of those is not a desirable one for us economically. So we have the opportunity, we think, of substituting hybrid poplar for the native aspen to offset for that anticipated shortage.

LEIF ENGER: The pulp and paper industry is apparently taking the prediction seriously. Boise Cascade alone has created more than 900 genetic combinations of poplar trees. The best of these, the company hopes, will be both fast growing and hardy enough to withstand disease and 50-below temperatures.

Kit Hasbargen's 20 acres, the first in Minnesota under contract to Boise Cascade, may represent a shift in philosophy as well as technology. Genetic engineering may have given the forest products industry an answer to long-time critics who have protested the clear-cutting of American forests. Spokespersons for the Sierra Club, which wants to end all logging on public lands, and the Audubon Society have cautiously praised the concept of fiber farming. Ray Fenner is a member of Sierra Club's Forestry Task Force.

RAY FENNER: Private and marginal farmland is really the way to go pay farmers to grow this as a cash crop, instead of having money losing timber sales on federal and state county lands, as long as they just don't add this wood on top of what they're already taking. If they use it to cut back, eventually ending their cutting on public lands, more power to them.

LEIF ENGER: Fenner believes this may be one instance where the best interests of the environment and industry coincide. After all, a field of uniform trees in clean rows is simple to log. A natural forest is messy and expensive by comparison.

The Ag Department expects up to 150,000 acres to be planted to hybrid poplars in the next 10 years. Even that would equal only a fraction of the native aspen now used in pulp and paper operations. But it would also be what one environmentalist called a significant shift to growing the pie rather than fighting over diminishing crumbs. Leif Enger, Mainstreet Radio.