What the Future Holds for Our White Oak Forests A Potential Catastrophe Awaits an Industry's Key Component WRITTEN BY GABE TOTH
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here’s a coming supply crunch that will impact American distillers of all sizes, and addressing it will require a commitment to long-term, multi-generational thinking. After several decades of providing bountiful supplies of wood for barrel staves, flooring, and other uses, the nation’s white oak forests have been rapidly aging over the last 20 years. Those stands of trees, which range through most of the eastern United States and into southern Canada, are reaching the end of a 100-year cycle. There won’t be a shortage of barrel oak next year, nor in five or even ten years. Penn State Assistant Professor of Forestry Calvin Norman said the current cycle began in the 1920s with forest management policies that benefited white oak trees, and continued into the Great Depression as farms were abandoned and oaks moved into the sunny and semi-shady space that was suddenly available. As a result, there remains a large population of oak currently available, but the stocks of young oak as a proportion of the greater population are rapidly declining. Norman said an ideal mix of forest would be about 20 percent young, 60 percent mature, and 20 percent old growth, but the current mix is 7/90/3. White oaks generally live to 100-120 years, potentially up to 150 years. Most of that current mature stock is in the 80- to 100-year range, prime for harvesting. In another 20 years, that population will move into the “old growth” category, and there will be very little to replace it. 58
Until a couple of decades ago, there was plenty of old stock and not much room to replant, “but we’re getting to the point where we need to start creating new forests, young forests,” he said. “We’re on the back side of the bell curve. The young forests don’t stay young long. You never get to turn back the clock.” As a result, the oak supply chain is heading towards “a huge population collapse. It’s going to be a bad time,” he said. “If we take all of the oak saplings that are in the ground today and put them into the future, that’s a 77 percent decline from the oaks that we have today. And a stave-quality oak, that’s the NFL. You’re looking for the top one percent of the top one percent, so it’s going to be really bad. You’re not buying common-stock white oak, this is the high-quality shit.” The recent decline in young oak is largely a matter of forest management, he said. Clear-cutting has gone out of vogue because it seemed more impactful to the forest, but the practice was actually beneficial to regenerating oak forests. “Folks used to be a lot more aggressive in their forest management,” Norman said. “What people want to do now is to go in and just cut one, two, three oaks from the forest, because it makes them feel like, ‘I’m still making money, I’m still cutting, but I still have a forest.’ But that’s not what oaks want.” Prescribed burns are another crucial tool that has been under-utilized in much of the white oak range. Some areas, including a lot of the core oak population in Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, have continued the practice, so they’re less impacted than other areas. “Once you get north of the Mason-Dixon line, there’s just not a culture of burning,” he said. “Outside of that core, both of the bourbon industry and the white oak range, the decline is much more apparent.” He said the country’s forests had been actively managed to support oak and other species for thousands of years. Native American populations understood the forest’s natural successional process. Shortlived shade-intolerant species such as aspen, poplar, and birch would initially grow into open areas. Once those populations began to die off, then the medium shade-tolerant species such as oak, hickory, and — prior to a catastrophic blight that wiped out billions of trees in the 20th century — chestnut, would populate a stand for 100 to 150 years. Following that, the forest would transition into maple and hemlock. “The first nations in this area managed for those nut-bearing trees. They burned and harvested, and intentionally managed large swaths of the country for oak, hickory, chestnut,” Norman said. “With some of the environmental movements, that doesn’t feel like what we should be doing, but historically that’s what the oaks want. Oaks like to be handled roughly. They like when there’s fire in the woods, they like when there’s grazing. They like when there’s pretty aggressive harvesting.” Adding to the shift in forest management practices is the pressure of invasive species. He said there are 140 invasive plant species in Pennsylvania alone, including a whole suite of nonnative plants and insects that can stunt or destroy an oak forest. Plants like Chinese and European privet, buckthorne, or tree of heaven can quickly overgrow a space and crowd out other plants. W W W . ARTISANSPIRITMAG . C O M