Amazing Boardman Tree Farm, Orgeon, USA

The Boardman Tree Farm is situated in Morrow, county Oregon, along Interstate 84, 5 miles west of the I-82 junction. Boardman Tree Farm is owned by the GreenWood Tree Farm Fund and operated by a Portland-based tree farm management group GreenWood Resources, this 25,000 acres beautiful land comprises thousands of hybrid poplar trees, which are efficiently arranged in evenly spaced rows, and they are about the similar sizes, identical height and equal thickness. It’s such a fantastic sight that GreenWood Resources would conduct group tours for those visitors willing to invest some time and effort.

This Tree Farm is just one of the many holdings of GreenWood Resources in, South America, North America and China, but obviously one of the most accessible, being situated next to the interstate. The boardman farm is broken up into 40-acre and 70-acre plots with easy access of roads separating the plots from each other on all sides. Each plots comprises 600 trees per acre. For irrigation purpose, the farm employs nine 1,000 horsepower pumps that pull water from the Columbia River at a rate of up to 117,000 gallons per minute. In deed, this is the largest facility drip irrigation system in the country, with more than 9,000 miles of drip line. This whole system is controlled by computer so that each tree gets a very specific amount of water, allowing it to grow at an implausible rate while not wasting resources, like water or money. Moreover; use of chemical pesticides is limited, as integrated pest management processes are employed. Sawdust and the refuse from harvesting is chopped back into the soil, limiting the requirement for chemical fertilizers.

Therefore; type of tree they grow in the tree farm is called Pacific Albus, a trademarked name that loosely means Pacific whitewood. It’s a hybrid of 4 to 5 different poplars, cross strained for better yield, quicker growth, less use of irrigation water, straighter growth.The Boardman trees take 10 to 12 years to reach its maturity after which they are felled and sent to the mill where they are formed into boards and wood chips. The wood chips are mainly used for paper manufacturing, while tallers and older trees are harvested for lumber products. Any specific part of the trees that can’t be made into boards is turned into pulp or hog fuel. However; sawdust from the sanding mill is compressed into bricks for fireplaces and wood stoves.

Harvesting is contracted out to independent logging companies and on a normal day, 25 loads of saw logs and another 25 loads of chip logs from the saw log side, and probably 13 loads of chip logs from our thinning side, and up around 65 loads a day that will deliver to the mill, and each load averages about 35 to 40 net tons. The sawmill, is located roughly in the center of the tree farm, and process the produce of 2,000 acres of land each year. The processed lumber is sold to China, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Mexico, as the biggest off-shore buyers.