huntnma

I am not firmiliar with the cp-33 program...enlighten me please
now i am going to vent, lol...we've done a couple of timber harvests(thinning of the pines) and the old bio. we had said that the timber company wouldnt take it if it was burned, so we spent a month climbing over /through saw palmettos painting trees.....i wonder why we couldnt of burned first, it would of made life alot easier and safer, lol....i fell several times, i mean SEVERAL hundred times, lol......but i'm like a weeble wobble, i fall,but i get right back up, lol....tumbleweed is one of my nicknames, lol...the next time we took the tree cutter and made some roads through it to make it easier to get to everything, but burning would of been great.
you know , up until this year we used a big ol disc to do the fireline butthey make a mess and are hard to drive/walk on......so i took the tractor and a blade,shaped them like the roads so the water didnt sit in the middle of em, then when the grasses grew , i took a roto-tiller and did my lines with that...talk about sweet....doesnt chew the soil up like the disc....the only fall back is you can't throw the dirt towards the inside of the line, but if you have a nice slant on the road/line ,you dont have to worry about it screwing up the shape...with the disc, you could shape them to some degree....but it wasnt worth the mess....we've done some planting of millet and rye, but not on any of the firelines....the rye as mainly for the road itself, it was real sandy and we were always having to close it, so it was cheaper to plant rye than buy some shell....2 miles of rye or shell, that was easy choice seeing our budget, lol...i believe we're going to plant millet there next....
we try to burn the marsh every other year, we tried every year , it just didnt burn well....we get out on the airboats and away we go.....talk about fun....we have a terra torch and a home made airgun that shoots ballsfor the easy stuff, then for the hard to reach areas, he drops us off, lol...the first time i was dropped off, i was completing my end of it,i turned the corner and this huge gator jumps into the water, i take 2 more steps and a ball of snakes seperated and snakes went everywhere, i was torn, do i go towards the snakes and gator or stay there until the fire got to me and i would have no say but to go forward, lol, bout that time, the airboat showed up, thank God, i really dont mind the gators, but them snakes suck, lol....
on mom's day of this year , we ended up having 4 lightening strikes fires and another on the other side of the river...only one was an issue for us though, took out 200 plus acres....looks beautiful now...forestry broughtin the dozers, tore it all up, but then they came in and repaired it as much as possible.....never did a night burn, i mean , i have ended up being there until midnight at time or two,and when we had the wild fires last year, i was out late, but we never intenionally did a burn at night....i think it would be awesome....folks just dont realize how important burning is...the wildfire last year was insane....we spent weeks battling that bad boy and the bad thing about it is the area it had burned, most of it already burneda fe w monthsbefore, but the intensity of the fire just took it all out....it even burned a cedar area that would never burn, destroyed it, historically it burned every 80 yrs. , or so i am told....i was the lucky one, i was theonly one there when a helicopter came down right over me and created enough winds to make it jump the road, then it jumped the river, all hell broke loose i tell ya.....heres a couple of pics...this is right after the news helicopter left.....

this is it about an hour later, maybe 2.....


and this was the end result......devastation.

daleh

The CP-33 program was designed to bring back habitat for upland birds. It benifits other species as well. especially rabbits. Turkeys benifit from it as well as deer.
The program was based on the facts that before modern farming practices. we had lots of game because there was always a grass and weed edge on all fields, ditches,and fence rows
the program designed for farming and pasture land puts a boarder around the fields and pays the land owner/ farmer to leave it out.
Contracts for this program varry. ours is a 10 year deal paying 100 per acre as an inital sign up and then 30 peracre the 2-10 years. also signed up for the wip program cost sharing planting native and warm season grasses in the boarders.
we aslo have some crp in which a ag field or pasture is taken out of farming or can not be grazed. you can plant it in pines or mow/burn/disc when they tell you, you can.
the only draw back with this program is planting pines. the pines are regulated by theprogram. they determine when and how you can thin for pulp wood/chip and saw. by the time the trees are mature for the final cut your contract is over 30 yrs.
this program is very economical for the land owner. paying up to 150 per acre intial sign up and then 20-35 per acre per year for 30 yrs. the pine trees also yield about 100 per acre of the coarse of the 30 yrs.

With the rising cost of land and taxes. we are loosing allot of farm land to developers. Farmers/land owners need to take advantage of every opertunity to get the most $ per acre they can.
State and Federal programs can help with this a bunch. Especialy, when combined with a good management program of trees, agriculture, and of coarse using the land during thefall and winter forrecreational use(Hunting)

huntnma

i have heard about this, but never in detail....it sounds like an awesome thing, but the planted pines, but thats ok too.... the landowners and the critters benefit, you couldn't ask for a better thing ....i wish more landowners would look to this program or one like it.....thanks for telling me about it.