The Boardman Tree Farm is situated in Morrow, county Oregon, along Interstate 84, about 5 miles west of the I-82 junction. The Boardman Tree Farm is owned by the Greenwood Tree Farm Fund and operated by a Portland-based tree farm management group Greenwood Resources. This is 25,000 acres of beautiful land that comprises thousands of hybrid poplar trees.
Which are efficiently arranged in evenly spaced rows? They are of similar sizes, identical heights, and equal thicknesses. It’s such a fantastic sight that Greenwood Resources would conduct group tours for those visitors willing to invest some time and effort.
Boardman Tree Farm is just one of the many holdings of Greenwood Resources in, South America, North America, and China. However, one of the most accessible is situated next to the interstate. The Boardman farm tree is broken up into 40-acre and 70-acre plots with easy access to roads separating the plots from each other on all sides. Each plot comprises 600 trees per acre.
For irrigation purposes, the farm employs nine 1,000-horsepower pumps that pull water from the Columbia River at a rate of up to 117,000 gallons per minute. Indeed, this is the largest facility drip irrigation system in the country, with more than 9,000 miles of the drip line.
This whole system is controlled by a computer so that each tree gets a very specific amount of water, allowing it to grow at an implausible rate while not wasting resources, like water or money. Moreover, the use of chemical pesticides is limited, as integrated pest management processes are employed. Sawdust and the refuse from harvesting are chopped back into the soil, limiting the requirement for chemical fertilizers.
Therefore, the type of tree they grow in the Boardman Tree Farm is called Pacific Albus, a trademarked name that loosely means Pacific white wood. It’s a hybrid of 4 to 5 different poplars, cross-strained for better yield, quicker growth, less use of irrigation water, and straighter growth.
The Boardman trees take 10 to 12 years to reach their maturity after which they are felled and sent to the mill where they are formed into boards and wood chips. Wood chips are mainly used for paper manufacturing, while taller and older trees are harvested for lumber products.
Any specific part of the treesthat can’t be made into boards is turned into pulp or hog fuel. However, sawdust from the sanding mill is compressed into bricks for fireplaces and wood stoves.
Harvesting is contracted out to independent logging companies and on a normal day, 25 loads of saw logs and another 25 loads of chip logs from the saw log side. The probably 13 loads of chip logs from our thinning side, and up to around 65 loads a day that will deliver to the mill, and each load averages about 35 to 40 net tons.
The sawmill is located roughly in the center of the tree farm and processes the production of 2,000 acres of land each year. The processed lumber is sold to China, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Mexico, as the biggest offshore buyers.
The Boardman Tree Farm is situated in Morrow, county Oregon, along Interstate 84, about 5 miles west of the I-82 junction.
