
Dale and his wife, Lola, were awarded the 2013 Crawford County Conservation Forestry Award for their efforts to promote and enhance healthy forests in southwestern Wisconsin.
Dale Parker was looking to come home when he purchased 80 acres in northwest Richland County in 1978. As a teenager, he had hunted the property, but as an adult, had an added interest in producing high quality timber on the land. A lot of the property was mixed hardwoods like ash, oak, and maple, but about 18 acres of it was on an old ridgetop meadow overrun by brome grass.
After consulting with Wisconsin DNR forester and recently deceased WWOA member, Rudy Nigl, in addition to a soil conservationist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dale decided to plant the brome grass meadow with black walnut.
The entire property was enrolled in the Managed Forest Law (MFL) program to help formalize the management plan. Dale has practiced timber stand improvement on the property with three crop tree releases. The property is currently in harvest mode and is half done.
As with anything, the unexpected and undesired happens, and Dale was one of the first landowners in the area to have a confirmed case of oak wilt. The recommended (and soon implemented) treatment was to cut all of the oaks in the immediate circle, then trench around them to break up any root graphs that could facilitate the disease spread. [Read more…]