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Home sales, Japan, mills featured at forestry forum

Home sales, Japan, mills featured at forestry forum
SHREVEPORT, La. – Home sales, Japan, mills and helpful forest products websites were among the topics presented at the 27th annual Ark-La-Tex Forestry Forum March 17.
February had the lowest new home sales since 1960, said Joe Chang, professor of forest economics and marketing in the LSU AgCenter School of Renewable Natural Resources. But he forecasts steady growth in the housing industry over the next three years.
“The housing sector is the largest consumer of wood products,” Chang said. “We’ve got to keep enthusiasm. Forestry will come back.”
Japan is going to find wood from somewhere to rebuild after the earthquake and tsunami, maybe even from Louisiana, he said.
“We are not an island to ourselves,” said Buck Vandersteen, director of the Louisiana Forestry Association. “We need to know what’s going on in the world.”
A panel discussed whether north Louisiana needs a mill.
“Absolutely,” Vandersteen said. It is necessary “to add value to Louisiana. We’ve lost mills. We need to get some mills back. We have a logging force that’s hurt now. They need a boost.”
The Louisiana Department of Economic Development has a toolbox of incentives to offer businesses, he said.
Vandersteen asked the 130 in attendance to protect federal formula funds provided under the Smith-Lever Act that supports the Cooperative Extension Service. “If that budget is cut, we may lose folks who plan these meetings and provide soil samples,” he said.
Soil testing is important, and the LSU AgCenter provides research-based fertilizer recommendations in its Soil Testing and Plant Analysis Laboratory said LSU AgCenter extension agronomist J Stevens.
Some helpful forestry websites include LSU AgCenter's forestry page, employee directory, extension agent pages, research station sites and weather records going back 10 years, said LSU AgCenter forester Mike Blazier.
Stanford University developed a free SoilWeb iPhone application that takes GPS units and links them to survey data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, Blazier said. The app even shows soil types of individual locations.
The Society of American Foresters has a Forestry Mobile application that provides instant access to common forestry formulas, including interest calculations, basal area, growth percentage, relative spacing and acres-to-hectares conversions.
YouTube has videos on forestry site preparation, and www.bugwood.org provides information on invasive species, Blazier said.
Robert Capezza, GIS specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, demonstrated the National Agriculture Imagery Program website at www.fsa.usda.gov. The site gathers aerial imagery during the agricultural growing seasons in the continental United States and makes geometrically corrected, digital orthophotography available to governmental agencies and the public.
Blazier said www.atlas.lsu.edu also provides satellite images.
Also at the meeting, LSU AgCenter forester Ricky Kilpatrick introduced Cindy Kilpatrick, environmental science facilitator at Oil City Magnet School in Oil City, as the Louisiana 2011 Outstanding Education with National Project Learning Tree, an environmental education program of the American Forest Foundation.