The American Tree Farm System is celebrating its 80th birthday this year, a movement founded June 12, 1941, on the concept that recognizing landowners who practiced good forest stewardship would spur others to follow suit. And throughout its rich history, some of its state affiliates have made bigger headlines than others.

Washington lays claim to the first certified Tree Farm, a Weyerhaeuser property known as the Clemons Tree Farm, and Alabama certified the ATFS’s first non-industrial property in 1943. In 1976, the group’s first Outstanding Tree Farmer of the Year award went to a family forest owner in Florida. Wisconsin arguably has the most bragging rights of all as home to more than half of all Tree Farms in the system, according to Angela Wells, Director of ATFS.

New Hampshire: Honoring Longtime Members

There are more than 1,500 Tree Farms in the Granite State, including some that have been part of the New Hampshire Tree Farm program since its inception in 1950, and those old-timers are about to get some well-deserved recognition.

Rita Carroll, an administrator with the NHTF, said the group plans to recognize the Tree Farmer in each of the state’s 10 counties who has the longest tenure in the program. They’ll be featured on social media and in the NHTF’s robust spring and summer newsletters, which provide a wealth of information to members ahead of the group’s annual Tree Farm Field Day in the fall.

Carroll said the NHTF also plans to recognize 50-year members across the state, an effort to keep members and inspectors engaged while the pandemic makes in-person educational events impossible. In addition, she plans to dive into the NHTF’s history books, mining them for interesting facts and stories to post on the group’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.

“We want to focus on fun stuff like that,” Carroll said. “We like telling stories about our Tree Farmers, and there are a lot of interesting people here who we probably could tell some stories about.

“Some of the benefits of Tree Farm are the educational component and the recognition that you’re doing a good job managing your forest. It’s about camaraderie, recognition and education, so those are the things we’re going to try to promote.”

The NHTF has five co-sponsors that each provide staff to run the group on a part-time basis. Carroll, for example, is the Tree Farm administrator for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests and spends 10 hours a week working for the NHTF. The other co-sponsors are the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association, the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, the Granite State Division of the New England Society of American Foresters and the New Hampshire Division of Forests and Lands.

Inspections are conducted by about 150 volunteers, mostly private sector consulting foresters, who play a major role in steering landowners toward NHTF membership. New Hampshire is 84.3% forested, second in the country to Maine, according to the U.S. Forest Service, and more than half of that land is privately owned, with NHTF members accounting for 436,353 forested acres.

“We have some inspectors who are very enthusiastic, and they bring their clients into the program,” Carroll said. “If they’re working with a client who wants to do the right thing by their forest and learn more about it, the forester will make that connection because this is a good program for them to be in. So, we need to keep our inspectors engaged in order for them to want their clients to be engaged, and that’s one of the main things we’re focused on.”

The NHTF conducts outreach at the annual New Hampshire Farm, Forest and Garden Exposition, sponsoring a booth to provide educational materials. The event brings together the state’s farming, forestry and horticulture communities, offering educational workshops, a trade show and an awards banquet where the NHTF’s Outstanding Tree Farmer of the Year is among the honorees.

That Tree Farmer typically hosts the NHTF’s annual Tree Farm Field Day, an opportunity to showcase best practices in forest management and to offer educational opportunities.

The NHTF puts a lot of effort into its spring and summer newsletters, which feature profiles of Tree Farmers and practical advice on topics ranging from invasive species to estate planning.

Kayti Brinkman, ATFS Northern regional manager, credited NHTF leaders for organizing “excellent” field days and thinking of new ways to engage and support the group’s inspector base.

“The NHTF is a unique partnership of several keystone organizations for landowners in the state,” Brinkman said. “Tree Farmers in New Hampshire are well represented to bodies ranging from foresters to agency to [nongovernment organizations]. The leadership for NHTF is highly active.”

This piece was originally published as part of a larger article in AFF's quarterly magazine, Woodland Magazine. You can read the full piece in the digital edition of the publication.