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(62) Partnering with Consulting Foresters for High Impact
Mark A. Megalos, North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Robert E. Bardon, Susan Moore & Rick A. Hamilton (Emeritus), North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Session: Concurrent session D1: Reaching the Forestland Owner
In North Carolina a significant amount of time and energy is spent educating landowners on the importance of utilizing professional foresters in the management of their land. Just as landowners rely on consulting foresters, those same consultants rely on Extension training and outreach to keep their skills and knowledge base up to date. Consulting foresters were surveyed to document the financial benefits they provide to private landowners, assess their business education needs, and their support for a proposed forester licensure law in North Carolina.
More than 50% of the state’s 243 consulting foresters responded to the survey. Initial survey respondents averaged 15 years as consultants with more than 27 years of total forestry experience. The majority of forestry consultants are licensed realtors, while only 1 in 3 consultants practice forestry in states other than North Carolina. Consultants indicated that nearly half of their clients hired them for financial services, while more than a third hired them for management services. Six in ten respondents noted that local zoning and regulations impacted their forestry operation in the past year, suggesting that Extension research and education efforts to document local regulations were providing a valuable service.
Preliminary analysis of 172 sealed bid timber sales revealed that winning bids averaged 21% more than the minimum acceptable bid with fewer than 5 percent of those sales falling below the minimum acceptable bid. Winning sale bids ranged from 16% below to over 230% above the specified minimum acceptable bid from an average of 5 bidders per sale. Negotiated sales averaged 26 % above the initial offering price for 110 separate sales with a range of 4 % below to 180% above the initial offering price. Poor quality timber (58%), small acreage tracts (13%) and thinning (11%) were the major reasons cited for negotiated sales.
Mark Megalos, Ph.D
NC State University, CB 8008
Raleigh, N.C. 27695-8008 USA
Phone: 919-513-1202
Fax: 919-515-6883
Email: mark.megalos@ncsu.edu