Today’s Woodland Harvest Yields More Than Timber

There’s more to America’s forests than trees, a fact well appreciated by entrepreneurs cashing in on woodland products once overlooked or regarded as weeds.

In Georgia’s pine forests, needles are scraped from the ground and bagged for landscaping mulch. The evergreen woods of northern New England yield a bounty of Christmas greens. And the harvest of medicinal herbs, from goldenseal in Indiana to ginseng in West Virginia, is riding a wave of interest in natural remedies.

The new forest economy is especially strong in the Pacific Northwest, where logging bans to protect the Northern spotted owl and other wildlife forced a reexamination of forestry practices starting in 1989.

Revenue from cutting trees still far exceeds profits made from gathering what grows in their shade, says James Freed, a forester with the Washington State University Cooperative Extension.

“We’re talking billions versus millions,” Freed says. “But in some communities, special forest products are the only things they have now, since the timber industry, in its great wisdom, cut and went somewhere else.”

Much of the harvest is an underground, cash-only affair. But even the legal, measurable segment of the industry is worth more than $200 million a year and employs 15,000 people in Washington and Oregon, Freed says.

Wild mushrooms--morels, matsutakes, chanterelles and other fancy varieties bound mostly for Asia and Europe--are worth at least $60 million a year to the Northwest, Freed says. Floral greens add about $18 million.

Despite a gold-rush atmosphere, few forest gleaners get rich. In Oregon’s matsutake mushroom harvest, for example, thousands of pickers are lured by tales of prices that topped $600 a pound one night in 1993. But last fall, they had to settle for less than $10 a pound.

“A lot of people think they’ll go out there and make millions of dollars,” Freed says.

What they’ll find instead, he warns, is hard work.