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Sustainable Woods Cooperative - Spring Green Wisconsin
Mission Statement: Sustainable Woods Cooperative is a timber management, processing, and marketing cooperative of local forest owners whose purpose is to maximize the aesthetic, ecological, and economic benefits of our area timber resource -- for the present and future generations --
by means of environmentally responsible forest management practices,
sustained yield harvesting, and the locally-based value added manufacturing
of Forest Stewardship Council Certified wood products.
Contact SWC for current membership information.
Dozens of forest owner groups are now forming across the continent. Each one will be unique, but here is a summary of the original vision for these value-added alliances:
Sustinable Forestry Coop members will have an initial property assessment with a certified forester. A FSC Certified management plan will be developed for each property as time and funding allows. A plan for a property must be written and approved before wood is marketed from a harvest. Cost sharing and other funds will be used where possible to assist members in paying for management planning. FSC plans are voluntary and owners are not committed to selling their timber through a SFC.
The goal of Sustainable Management will be to build a forest up to full value growth potential (your investment principle), and then regularly harvest just the annual growth (the interest), keeping the forest healthy, diverse, and productive throughout the future. Most forests in the region have been degraded due to high grade harvesting in the past. It will often take decades of Timber Stand Improvement and repeated low grade harvests to restore the natural bio-diversity and full productivity to this forest land.
Timber harvests will be marked by SFC approved foresters. Logging will be subcontracted to crews trained in low impact logging. Training and operating standards will be similar to sustainable harvesting on the Menominee Tribal Enterprise forest. Horse logging crews, cable skidders, tractor winch systems, and prehaulers will be used as circumstances require.
Through SFCs, forest owners will achieve economies of scale and will increase their marketing effectiveness when selling their forest products. Value added manufacturing will capture the incremental profit available at each stage of processing, within the cooperative, as wood moves from the forest to finished product. SFC will maximize the income of the forest owner and the woods workers needed for sustainable forestry. next
Sustainable Woods Cooperative's new website
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