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.