Sawmill and kiln operator John Hurley of JH Lumber Products scales and grades lumber for Middlebury College's Bicentennial Hall. 1998.

Our History

“Conservation means harmony between landowners and the land.
When land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by the land; when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation. When one or the other grows poorer, we do not.”
--From Aldo Leopold (1939) The Farmer as a Conservationist

Vermont’s Forested Landscape

Three hundred years ago Vermont was blanketed by a healthy temperate rainforest. Within 150 years most of the forest had been cleared away and the land thoroughly exploited. Today--due in large part to the land’s capacity for self-renewal--forest now covers more than 78% of the state. In order for this remarkable ecological recovery to continue we must learn to manage our demands and to minimize adverse impacts.

Vermont expects a lot from her forests. These demands include timber supplies, wood energy, non-timber forest products such as maple syrup, and four seasons of recreation. Vermont also depends upon her forests for high quality water supplies, pretty views, wildlife habitat, solitude, and soul restoration. Many of these forest values are priceless for the community yet valueless to the forest steward in the traditional marketplace.

Vermont’s forests are adversely impacted by global warming, air pollution and acid rain, invasive exotics, forest fragmentation and simplification, and exploitive logging practices that result in soil erosion, stream sedimentation, loss of biological diversity and high-graded timber supplies. These adverse impacts are perpetuated by an increasingly global economic system that always externalizes costs and commonly fails to differentiate sources.

About 70% of Vermont’s forestland is non-industrial and privately owned. Owners of these private forestlands often have diverse interests and short tenure. Family forest owners often want to conserve the health of their forests but do not know how to act upon their values.

Wendell Berry once wrote that the two great ruiners of private land are ignorance and economic constraint. Vermont -- like many other states -- has a long history of providing educational programs for family-owned forest owners and the loggers and foresters who assist them. These programs have focused more on forest products such as timber, wildlife habitat, and recreation and less on forest health. Forest health must receive greater attention. To paraphrase Vermont Smallholders Association founder Justin Brand, “Without a healthy forest ecology there cannot be a healthy forest economy.”

Vermont’s traditional forest industry model is a linear and vertical one with forests and unempowered stewards at the bottom. Vermont has focused much effort on attempting to improve timber quality on family-owned forests but has expended little energy on systems that would allow family-owned forest stewards to achieve greater success in forest product marketing. Without this success in the marketplace, Vermont’s family-owned forest owners and stewards cannot be expected to maintain the health of their forests or to produce high quality forest products over time.

These long-term emphases on forest products over forest health and on high-quality timber production over the success of forest stewards in the marketplace have put the ecological health and economic viability of Vermont’s family-owned forests at considerable risk.

What VFF Has Accomplished

VFF puts healthy forests first. VFF’s mission is “to conserve the health of the forest community, and when appropriate to promote the careful cultivation of local family-owned forests for community benefits.” Healthy forests are fairly easy to spot. They are the ones that have clear, clean, highly oxygenated streams running through them. They also have well designed access networks that work with the land. Soils are stable and productive, and there are diverse populations of native flora and fauna.

Vermont Family Forests is a grassroots effort that started in 1995. The Addison County Forester collaborated with the Lewis Creek Association by offering workshops on many elements of careful forest stewardship. After several of these very successful and well-attended workshops, the collaborative educational effort was dubbed “Vermont Family Forests.”

A mission, set of principles, and a forest management checklist were adopted and eleven workshops were conducted on a wide variety of forest conservation subjects in 1996. In 1997, VFF identified 32 forest landowners -- with (continued from page 1) about 5000 acres and an excellent history of stewardship -- to form a pool of well-managed family-owned forests. VFF applied for a grant through the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund to become certified through the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). VFF was certified by FSC and incorporated as a non-profit corporation in 1998.

A broad-based dip stabilizes this access road on a VFF certified forest.

VFF has established a small but well-equipped office in Bristol and hired a part-time staff. VFF continues to offer workshops related to ecologically sustainable forestry and has been a leading sponsor in the Game of Logging training course. VFF also provides ecological forestry information though its website, newsletters, annual reports, and other publications.

VFF has developed many systems and tools to support the family-owned forest steward. VFF provides family-owned forest stewards with affordable access to FSC certification. VFF makes products such as non-petroleum bar and chain oil, and publications, such as log and tree scale and grade systems, management plan templates, sample contracts, and forest health monitoring protocols readily available to family-owned forest stewards.

VFF conducts research through teams of natural resource managers, forest ecologists, community organizers, ecological economists and other private contractors. Our most recently completed project assessed the availability of sustainably harvested, local, forest biomass as a fuel source for Middlebury College. The report received high praise from Middlebury College.

VFF continues to work on the groundbreaking Community Forests Project, which seeks to create conservation easements that actually conserve the health of the forest while valuing the forest so that landowners receive reasonable returns on their investments. This is a critically important element, in that even if landowners increase their success in the forest product marketplace exponentially, the gap between the values of land as forest and developed land continue to widen.

VFF has developed and tested a unique Community Supported Forestry System that is circular, collaborative, and local. In the VFF CSF System, forest products flow from healthy forests through local value-adding processes and are then sold as branded products to well-informed customers. More value is generated in the local community and more value is returned to the forest and the stewards of the forest. VFF experiments have identified substantial demand for high quality forest products that originate from healthy local forests and that result from collaborative local value adding.

Major Challenges That Remain