What's Involved With Managing Your Land?

Determine Your Goals

If you’d like to consider managing your land, the first thing to do is decide what your goals are for your property.

If income is important, timber management may be a goal. If you’re most interested in protecting and improving wildlife habitat, that should be your focus. If your home is located nearby, how the woodland appears may be most important. In some cases, they all may be important.

Either way, you should determine what you’d like to see happen with your land, and get information and help to devise a plan to accomplish your goals.

Gather Information

One place to start is by gathering information. That’s where MFA can help. To request information from MFA on a variety of topics, click HERE.

One way to work out your goals is to see what other people have done with their land. Each year MFA holds a series of Woods Walks and Tree Farm tours to show different ways landowners are managing their woodlands in Massachusetts. To see a list of upcoming walks, click HERE.

Work With a Forester

Another place to start is by consulting with a forester. Foresters are trained to help landowners determine what they can do with their property, develop management plans to serve as a guide for doing it, and set up timber sales, improvement cuttings or other work to put the plan into action. In Massachusetts, foresters must demonstrate their training and experience to be licensed by the state.

Like any licensed professional, consulting foresters charge for their services. Landowners sometimes think they will save money by contracting with a logger directly, without using a forester. Studies, however, have shown that in most cases, landowners get much higher payments for their wood with fewer problems if they have a forester set up their timber sale.

If you use a forester, you should have a contract with them spelling out what they will do for you and what you will be charged. You should also check references to find out what other landowners’ experience with the forester was. For information about choosing a forester, or for a list of licensed foresters who work in your area, click HERE.

Develop a Plan

Once you and the forester gather enough information, the next step is to devise a management plan for your property.

Whatever goals are most important to you, they will take some time to carry out. The plan will help make clear what steps need done and when. Generally plans concentrate on a 10-year time frame, with plans being reviewed and revised when the ten years is up. In our modern world, ten years seems like a long time but for trees that can live up to 400 years, a decade is a mere blink of an eye.

Developing a management plan is often an excellent way for a landowner to discover new aspects of their property which either hadn’t been recognized or was overlooked. Do deer use part of your land as a corridor to travel between different feeding grounds? Are fishers napping in the old maples on the back wall? Is that little depression a vernal pool? Is there an old orchard that might be resurrected for deer, turkeys and sapsuckers? Is the stand of crooked pines keeping young oaks underneath from growing? The trained eyes of foresters or other resource professionals often discover hidden patterns on your land that you don’t see, especially if you only visit it on occasionally.

You may be able to get some monetary assistance in developing your plan. Ask your forester about this.

Carry out Your Plan

Once you’ve settled on your goals and have developed a management plan, the next step is to do the work as the plan proposes.

Some of the work, such as marking boundaries or cutting firewood or installing nest boxes or other wildlife improvements, you may be able to do yourself. Others, such as setting up and carrying out a timber sale if one is recommended, in most instances would be more profitable and practical to have a forester do.