California Growin' your redwood sales

By Chris Grover California Redwood Association

I-lALIFORNIA GROWN. There's a \-,campaign afoot to tell Californians about all the benefits of choosing agricultural products that are grown in their state. You may already have seen some of the excellent television commercials.

Lumber merchants can capitalize on this campaign to help them market redwood. It's the perfect match. Buying California grown redwood is good for the economy. It's good for the environment. Most of all, it's good for your customers because they get a top quality product that's naturally beautiful.

A little background: Californians use 75Vo of the nation's wood products. Yet only one fourth of that wood comes from our own forests. What does that mean? That means we export our environmental burden to other places. We get most of our wood from other states and countries where there are fewer safeguards protecting forests, wildlife and the environment. That's just wrong.

Redwood comes from California forests and those lands are the most productive commercial forestland in the world. The Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) is the fastest growing softwood species in the United States. making it our most renewable building material. After redwood is harvested. landowners make certain that new redwood trees are started so that redwood lumber is produced on a sustainable basis.

Four of every five acres of commercial redwood forest are now indepen- dently certified as well managed and harvested on a sustainable basis. The major redwood lumber mills and landowners have completed independent third-party certification of their redwood forestlands. As a result, over I million acres, approximately 80Vo of the available redwood commercial forest are certified by one of the two most widely recognized certification programs: Forest Stewardship Council or the Sustainable Forestry Initiative program.

In the California Redwood region, we not only have the most productive commercial forests in the world. we have the most protected forests. We're proud of our more than 400,000 acres of redwood parks and reserves. The state and national parks alone, are equal to a mile wide strip of land that could reach from San Francisco to well beyond Los Angeles, nearly 400 miles!

So, Californians can be sure that their redwood forests are protected and that redwood lumber is harvested and regrown responsibly. They can also be sure that making a conscious decision to buy California grown products helps the state. According to a study conducted by Dennis H. Tootelian, Ph.D., professor of marketing at California State University, Sacramento, if Californians were to increase their purchases of all California-grown products by just l0 percent annually - which equates to about $1.63 per week for the average Californian - it would result in 5,565 new jobs and nearly $1.38 billion in additional spending within the state.

Lumber merchants can participate in the California Grown campaign in a number of ways. First of all, discuss the campaign with your employees, particularly those that work with customers.

Dealers also can order banners, price cards, bumper stickers and brochures with the California Grown logo from the California Forest Products Commision at (877) 7375268. For details, see their Web site, www.calforests.org/californiagrown/ stores.php.

Help spread the word to your customers that buying California Grown Redwood is sood for us all.