Kraig Moore is more productive in the woods than in the office.
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — Kraig Moore is more productive in the woods than in the office.
That was the career reality he faced 12 years ago when a permanent job in government forestry became available. As a private consulting forester, he could guarantee his business suit would be waterproof boots, overalls, some tape measures and a paint gun.
"I was evaluating my future," Moore said. "If you move up in government, you tend to come out of the field. I don't feel productive in the office, but I do in the woods." Moore received a degree in forest management from Southern Illinois University. The curriculum taught him how to scientifically manage tree growth, forestry economics and conservation.
"After graduating, me and 10 friends went to work for the U.S. Forestry Service in Alaska," he said. "We were doing timber sale layouts in areas that had no roads. It was a ball. A helicopter would pick us up in the morning and drop us off in the middle of nowhere and we would traverse the area and layout the boundaries of a timber sale." Moore met his wife, Beth Ann, in Alaska. She was a volunteer for the U.S.
Forest Service fisheries crew, a wildlife outfit that was attempting to reintroduce salmon to area streams. After 13 years of marriage, they have four sons.
Moore left Alaska for the forests of Pennsylvania, where he did continuous forestry inventory and later landed in Elizabethtown with the Kentucky Division of Forestry. In 1993 he began doing private landowner assistance for timbering. By then he had the experience to launch his own consulting business.
"I find out what a landowner's objective is," he explained. "Do they want to do a selective cut, taking certain and limited amounts of timber, or do they want to do an aggressive clear cut?" State agriculture specialists have begun endorsing consulting services.
"A forest consultant assumes the same duties that a Realtor does when you sell your house," said Doug McLaren, an agriculture and natural resources extension specialist for the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture.
"They represent you and your timber resources," he said. "They have the tools and the knowledge to increase the return on your forest investment." Jack Scott owns about 10 acres of woodland in Alvaton off H.E. Johnson Road.
Moore has done work for Scott in the past.
"Some years ago when (Moore) was with the Kentucky Division of Forestry he laid a boundary for a piece of property I owned," Scott said. "When I heard he had gone into business for himself, I decided to contact him. You see, the government can evaluate your land and lay boundaries, but they do not help you market or sell it."
Blazing into Scott's wooded property Friday morning through a low wet area and under a curtain of late winter snow, Moore looked part construction worker and part lumberjack. A red forester's toolbelt of sorts was strapped around his waist with a field computer in one hand and a small hatchet in the other.
"You can tell each type of tree makes its own sound," he said, knocking on a tree's trunk with the flat end of his hand ax. "You can hear where the prime spots start and I'll mark the tree from that spot indicating to the logger where to cut." He stood back, held out his ax, winked one eye and, using a secret forester's calculation technique, estimated the tree's height. He then pulled out a tape measure and flung his arms around a chest-high portion of a tree trunk three times his size.
"By measuring the diameter of the tree and the estimated height of usable timber, I can estimate fairly accurately how many foot-boards of timber are available from each tree," he said.
Moore's field computer allows him to enter in trees by code, their measurements and the computed value of the tree and the overall harvest from a particular stand.
"This is beech," he said, firing a blast of blue paint from his paint gun.
"I'm spraying this tree to indicate that it needs to be cut. We have a nice red oak nearby and by cutting the beech, a less desirable timber, we're freeing up the oak, a desirable wood, to grow and mature." A forester's job is to manage a timber stand so a landowner's investment value in the timber is maximized, Moore said.
Moore said landowners should seek out reputable help. They should research the qualifications of the consultant. A good indication is whether or not they have professional liabilities insurance and whether or not they belong to the Association of Consulting Foresters of America." Scott found Moore's services very useful, he said.
"It impressed me when he showed me a list of 150 potential buyers," Scott said. "He then said that 40 or 50 from the list were interested in bidding.
Some of (bidders) never even came to look at the property. I thought that was a good indication of his reputation." Scott knows his stand will continue to mature.
"They want to harvest good, mature timber so that it won't lose value," he said. "It helps open up the forest floor, which helps the younger trees grow and mature. It does several things that need to be done, and it's a responsible act of conservation."
Moore marked 259 trees on Scott's property. The stand yield from this harvest included 53,900 board-feet of timber. The breakdown of trees by species, number and volume per species was included in a timber summary prepared for Scott and to be used in marketing the timber. Timber can bring upwards of 40 cents per board-foot or as little as 13 cents for some inferior grades such as sweet and black gum, beech and hickory, Moore said.
Fred Alcott, a former Warren County local soil conservationist for the Department of Agriculture, met Moore in the early '90s as their jobs would occasionally cross paths. Alcott's family has farms and tracts of woodlands in Warren, Logan and Todd counties. He said the state advised his family of forester services when they considered a timber sale in 1996.
"We got a forestry recommendation from the Kentucky Department of Forestry out of Madisonville," he said. "They recommended that we hire a private consultant. I knew about Kraig and made a suggestion to my family and we followed through on it." Moore did an evaluation of Alcott's land and said he could do a sale for a 10 percent commission.
"We ended up with five bids," Alcott said. "He sent the same bid packet to about 20 different bidders. The high bid was almost double the low bid. He saved 1,200 trees in that stand for a future harvest." Alcott welcomed Moore's thoroughness.
"He set up logging tracts and monitored erosion control," he said. "We were very impressed. He started the sale and stayed with it from the beginning to the end and it was very successful." Alcott employed Moore once again for a much smaller sale in the Allensville area on the Logan-Todd county line.
"The high bid was over three times the low bid in that sale," Alcott said.
"Both sales showed us that by getting a good consultant you can get the best market value for your timber. And that's important when you're speaking competitively. A consultant can help you increase your board-feet per acre considerably through good management."
ON THE WEB: More details about Moore's services and the nature of consulting foresters are available at www.betterforestry.com. Or contact Moore by telephone 781-5265 at his home office or 792-4018 on mobile.
To see more of the Bowling Green Daily News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.bgdailynews.com. Copyright (c) 2005, The Daily News, Bowling Green, Ky. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
