08/18/2005

Black Belt Project Seeks to Create Local Markets for Small-Tract Forestland Owners

AUBURN, Ala. — Take a region that’s characterized by persistent rural poverty and substandard housing, add in thousands of small, unharvested tracts of timber plus a highly resourceful, internationally acclaimed rural architecture program, and you have the elements of an inventive research and extension project a team of Auburn University faculty has launched in Alabama’s Black Belt.

The project brings together faculty from AU’s College of Agriculture, School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences and School of Architecture in an effort to create local markets for local natural resources.

“We’re specifically investigating how we can link an abundant resource—in this case, timber—with critical housing needs in the local community,” said Conner Bailey, AU rural sociology professor and a lead investigator in the project.

Tangible success will come in the form of innovative new homes for impoverished Black Belt families—homes designed and constructed by students in AU’s Rural Studio program, using timber cut and processed from limited-acreage tracts in the area.

“But the ultimate benefits will be the generation of jobs and sources of income for small-scale landowners as a result of the increased harvesting activity and a marked improvement in the quality of life in rural west Alabama and beyond,” Bailey said.

The availability of timber on small tracts of forestland in the Black Belt is the result of a transformation in the wood-harvesting business over the past 25 years, from small-scale logging operations to a highly mechanized and capital-intensive industry, said Mark Dubois, associate professor of forestry at Auburn and co-leader of the west Alabama project.

Dubois said his studies have shown that while those changes have greatly increased the efficiency of harvesting large tracts of timber, the efficiencies decline significantly on smaller tracts of 50 acres or less. Consequently, hundreds of small-tract forestland owners across the Southeast have been left with no means of harvesting their timber and no market for it.

The basic objectives of the west Alabama project are to identify and promote both economical, small-scale harvesting systems, such as ones using farm tractors or horses and mules, and scale-appropriate wood-processing technologies—portable sawmills, for instance—that would produce valuable building materials for families currently living in substandard housing.

“In some cases, it’s possible the Rural Studio could choose to build a home for a family that owns land with some trees on it, and those trees could actually be used for lumber in the construction,” Bailey said. “The idea here is to generate markets for timber and the lumber that’s processed from that timber.”

The project will also improve management practices on small parcels of forestland because periodic thinning of pine stands reduces the threats of fires and Southern pine bark beetle infestations, Dubois said.

Pilot work on the project began two years ago with seed money in the form of an Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station grant. Based on the early success and the potential of the pilot program, the researchers were successful in winning a nationally competitive $460,000 grant from the USDA that will allow the project to expand its geographic focus to the state and region.

In addition to Bailey and Dubois, investigators in the project include AU agricultural economist Valentina Hartarska, a fellow Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station researcher, and Bruce Lindsey, head of AU’s School of Architecture and co-director of the Rural Studio.

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Office of Ag Communications & Marketing

Auburn University College of Agriculture
Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station
3 Comer Hall, Auburn University
Auburn, AL 36849
334-844-4877 (PHONE) 334-844-5892 (FAX)

Contact Jamie Creamer, 334-844-2783 or jcreamer@auburn.edu

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