Some 85 percent of Missouri's 12 million acres of trees are privately owned. And less than one in 12 of those forested acres is intensively managed.

Instead, most timber stands are "high-graded," as the valuable trees are cut and less valuable trees are ignored. But more tree owners probably would better manage their timber if they could earn an income on the small and badly-shaped trees that need to be removed during timber-stand improvement.

"New timber harvesting and sawmill techniques allow harvesting value from trees that normally are left unharvested," said Hank Stelzer, extension forestry specialist, University of Missouri. "Growth that would have been put on smaller trees can now be placed on larger, more valuable trees."

"Here in the forested area of south-central Missouri, we're utilizing only 8 percent of the potential and only 25 percent of the top logs," said Jerry Lough, president of Canoak USA, a flooring and lumber milling company in Dent County, just south of Salem, Mo. "More timber owners would manage their trees as an economic natural resource if we created a market for that resource."

Canoak USA has funded a $70,000 study on the feasibility of utilizing understory thinning materials that are removed during timber stand improvement work. The first part of the study, to inventory those resources within a 40-mile radius of the Canoak mills, has been completed.

"Now, we're studying the economics and market development," Lough added. "We're looking at specialized equipment to harvest those low-quality trees and leave the good trees undamaged; to take out the poor quality understory and make an environment for those better trees-or new seedlings.

"And we're studying new ways to utilize the wood harvested," he continued. "We're talking about economics of scale here: improvements of existing tree stands within a 40-mile radius could produce a sustainable yield of 100 million board feet per year, which is ample for the kind of processing we're planning."

Lough envisions an operation which, in one pass through the mill, would convert a log into dimension lumber, chips for fuel and absorbent pellets for poultry bedding. The chips would fire a steam boiler which would power an electrical generator. That power generation would be used to operate the mill, and surplus power could be sold into the electric grid.

"The technology is available now; the equipment exists now," he said. "It's a matter of designing and putting into operation the total system."