FROM: Ostroff Associates

DATE: November 2, 2020

RE: Climate Action Council – Agriculture and Forestry Advisory Panel

Chair
• Richard Ball, Chair, New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets

Members
• Peter Innes, Natural Resources Supervisor, New York State Department of Environmental
Conservation
• Rafael Aponte, Founder, Rocky Acres Community Farm
• Amanda Barber, Manager, Cortland County Soil and Water Conservation District
• John Bartow, Executive Director, Empire State Forest Products Association
• Michelle Brown, Conservation Scientist, The Nature Conservancy
• Tom Gerow, General Manager, Wagner Lumber Co.
• Suzanne Hunt, President, Hunt Green LLC and Co-Owner, Hunt Country Vineyards
• Peter Lehner, Director of Sustainable Food and Farming, EarthJustice
• Samantha Levy, New York Policy Manager, American Farmland Trust
• Robert Malmsheimer, Professor of Forest Policy and Law, SUNY College of Environmental
Science and Forestry
• Stephanie Morningstar, Coordinator, Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust
• John Noble, President, Noblehurst Farms
• Julie Suarez, Associate Dean, Office of Land-Grant Affairs, College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences, Cornell University
• Ned Sullivan, President, Scenic Hudson
• Donna Wadsworth, Communications Manager, International Paper
• Elizabeth Wolters, Deputy Director of Public Policy, New York Farm Bureau
• Peter Woodbury, Senior Research Associate, School of Integrative Plant Science, Soil and Crop
Sciences, Cornell University
• Nelson Villarrubia, Executive Director, Trees New York

Richard Ball: Spoke with the U.S. Climate Alliance last week, they have offered their assistance, expertise
and network to us as we continue to build-out recommendations. They will help us with what other
states are looking at.

Subgroups so far:

Agro-forestry, Livestock and Dairy Management, Nutrient Management & Regenerative Agriculture,
Land Use Conversions, Forestry & Forest Management and The Bioeconomy.

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Presentation by Michelle Brown

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Michelle Brown: Over 75% of forest land is privately owned.

Brown: In New York, about 190,000 family land owners own at least 10 acres of land, totaling over 9
million acres. They hold the majority of family forest acres but represent only a quarter of all forest

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owners, which means targeting these owners would exclude over 1 million acres of forest family
ownerships.

Brown: Most owners have forest land for reasons other than financial ones.

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Brown: New York forests currently store over 1900 million metric tons of carbon across various carbon
pools. In terms of carbon flux, New York forests currently sequester over 22 million metric tons of CO2-
eq and that gets larger when you consider settlement areas. Our starting point is around 26.4 million
metric tons.

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Brown: Right now, partial harvesting is the dominant practice.

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Brown: The U.S. Climate Alliance is working with states to provide resources for the type of work we are
talking about, this challenge helps identify solutions that allow lands to be resilient carbon states while
also protecting communities and economies.

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Brown: There is a national network of people working on these types of questions. (The right side of this
graph is just a zoom in of the left). Colin Bayer at SUNY ESF is leading the development of a forest
greenhouse gas accounting protocol for the State, incorporating carbon mapping, change detection,
landscape monitoring and future forecasting. The second piece of ongoing work is avoided forest
conversion

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Brown: Recently started exploring a similar program for smaller land owners.

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Peter Woodbury: How is firewood harvest incorporated into your analysis?

Brown: We do think a lot of that partial harvesting is likely due to firewood harvest. Our model captures
all removals without knowing exactly what is happening with it. But that’s what we think a lot of those
low removals are about.

Tom Gerow: There is a perception that cutting fewer trees is environmentally responsible. It’s an
educational situation. There are landowners who don’t want large harvests, because they don’t
understand what it does for the forest, which precludes regeneration.

John Bartow: We had seen a projected decline of forest sequestration between today and 2030, a lot of
my associates believe that is because of the age of New York’s forests. How does that path of light
harvest address trying to increase sequestration?

Brown: This is an important question for the panel. It’s really hard to tell from the numbers what is
happening with that trend. We need to understand what is gross growth, where is natural mortality and
where are removals. Those are the three things driving those trends. With respect to young forests and
old forests and sequestration, much of the biomass is shifted towards younger biomass classes right
now and data does show that reducing biomass from where we are now, will not increase the rate of
sequestration.

Ned Sullivan: You mentioned herbivores, I wonder how much of a threat that is to sequestration? You
also mentioned 700,000 acres were at risk from pathogens, could you drill down more on the extent of
the threat and viable mitigation strategies?

Brown: The pest and pathogens on the map were both native and non-native. Solutions include tree
smart trade, which is reducing pallets coming into New York ports where a lot of pests show up from.
Deer are having a major impact as well, they are the primary threat impacting the regeneration in areas.

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There is low likelihood of those red areas returning back to fully stocked forests. A full 15% of FIA plots
have no seedlings or saplings.

Peter Lehner: Looking at your slides, it seems like the biggest no-brainer option is trying to move
whatever is harvested into long-term products and away from landfills. Correct?

Brown: Yeah. I think that’s exactly what we want to explore. Our numbers are getting better in terms of
nailing down what sequestration possibilities are, but that’s fair.

Robert Malmsheimer: I think anytime we can substitute a wood product for plastic or any fuel intensive
product, we get that substitution benefit and the sequestration. Also need to think about the end of life
of these products. In Syracuse, we have a waste-to-energy facility. The idea that the methane gas from
landfills is a big contributor – I think as we start to think about decarbonization, we are likely to see our
landfills have methane capture systems. Did you include that in the way you modeled this, and if not,
how much of an impact do those emissions have on the amount of sequestration?

Brown: We included methane capture based on some EPA regional estimates. We did not include an
offset, if there is one. As more and more wood products get produced, that methane has a more potent
effect, driving net sequestration down.

Samantha Levy: I'm curious how you see this intersecting with farming and farmers? According to the
last census, about 20% of farmland is forested, since farmers are already land managers, is there a
different program or way of thinking about farmers in terms of opportunity for forest land
management? Are there other areas of intersection between ag and forestry that seem like big
opportunities?

Brown: I don’t have the answer, but I have been thinking about how we need these intersections. We are
a little siloed. I completely agree with you. The opportunity is big but there are a lot of challenges.

Amanda Barber: I think water conservation districts are in a great position to negotiate this path.

Tom Gerow: On forest management, you mentioned having more foresters involved and going towards
more sustainable harvests, a lot of people lean towards cutting big trees and letting little trees grow,
which doesn’t always work. It comes down to land owners understanding the impacts of their decisions
and accepting less money short term, but more long-term. You also mentioned wood-made durable
goods – have you thought about what we are cutting vs. what we are growing, did your research answer
that at all?

Brown: Your points on landowners are excellent. Our harvest practices were calculated based on what is
out on the landscape, so we did not do any simulations that would have nudged anything in a direction
that is not already reflective of what is on the landscape.

Gerow: Many goals of land owners require timber harvesting. It again comes down to them being
understanding. The educational aspect will be huge.

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Presentation by Peter Innes:

*Slide edit: 18.6 million not 18.3 million acres.

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Gerow: One of the issues with foresters is that, it is not a licensed position. Another thing you brought up
was encouraging manufacturing – wood waste all goes into the economy (saw dust, bark, chips, etc.). All
of those displace the use of fossil fuels. Where do people see firewood and biomass moving as we go
forward?

Innes: That will have to be looked at, at the subgroup level. Utilizing wood waste is an important aspect.

Malmsheimer: 60 million metric tons by 2050 doesn’t have to all be land based. We need to think long-
term where the opportunities for sequestration will be, like in soil and biochar. Next, we also need to
think about incentives for us to understand what the next generation of use of biomass will be. Thinking
about how we use that biomass when we displace it. I worry about unintended consequences in terms of
what we propose. Wondering why there is nothing on energy crops?

Innes: Not everything has been thrown against the wall. Hope to get people thinking, it wasn’t an
intentional oversight. One subgroup is bioenergy, so fully anticipate that.

*Next meeting, November 18th at 10:00AM

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