Amazing Little Trees by Loren Howell Grover Plunkett teaches political science and history at Faulkner University. He is also a cattle farmer in North Alabama, and more recently, a tree farmer. Plunkett has been busy planting Empress Splendor trees on his family farm in conjunction with World Tree.
Tell us a little about World Tree. World Tree is a company that is devoted to trying to mitigate the effects of climate change. Several years ago they started a plan that would get people to plant more trees. This particular tree that they've done so much research on, the Empress Splendor tree, they've realized can produce a great deal of marketable lumber. So they're promoting the Empress Splendor tree to, number one, mitigate carbon from the atmosphere and number two, to generate an income from farm land. How did you find out about World Tree? A gentlemen at our church was telling me about some different ideas he and his son had for their property. I had been telling my family, my wife and daughters and son-in-law who make up our family business, that we needed to be looking for additional income streams for our farm because cattle prices were falling. We needed to look for something that would pick up the slack and make our land more productive. We just had so much land that was not producing any income of any sort, so my daughter contacted World Tree.
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Faulkner Magazine
Grover Plunkett with Wendy Burton, founder of World Tree
Did you buy the trees? World Tree gives us the trees for free with the commitment to plant them. We invest our time and labor. At the harvest, we'll share the revenue with World Tree. When did you start planting the trees? In the late summer of 2018 we began to plant Empress trees. We should have nearly 300 acres planted at the end of the planting season, which is the end of May. By the end of this year we will have close to 20,000 trees planted. It's a lot of trees, but it's an amazing little tree.
Newly planted Empress Splendor trees on the Plunkett’s farm in North Alabama
