The History of Woodlands on Lazy Day Farms

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Joe discusses the business of woodlands and their impact on the farm. 

I have been spending some time, most days the last week or so, walking the woods and marking the lines. Each of our farms, like most farms contains some woodland which was used by landowners until the early 1900’s to heat their houses and also to sell for cash. The piece I am working on is the woodland for the winery farm and is about 110 acres. In total, we have over 600 acres of woodland miles of lines. While lines for farms or houses often follow roads or ditches, in the woods, there are just trees. Each wood line was at sometime surveyed and recorded in the courthouse and now we just have to remark it every couple of years before it gets lost and has to be resurveyed.   

This particular woodland was my playground as a child, and I knew every inch of it. While it may have been a good playground, it was a nearly worthless woodland. It had been hi-graded, that is cutting the best trees and leaving worst, repeatedly over the last couple of hundred years. We clear-cut it and replanted it and now have a beautiful open parkland type of forest, which at same time if growing tress which will be mature and valuable in another 30 years. I have been finding and marking most of my lines, but have enjoyed my walk in the woods, shared only with the trees and the creatures, the squirrels, the birds, the rabbits and the dear.   

-Joe Layton