Preserving Forest Diversity: Insights into Tennessee's Tree Improvement and Conservation Efforts with Dr. Scott Schlarbaum

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Scott Schlarbaum, the director of the University of Tennessee's Tree Improvement Program. Most people listening are probably surprised that any university offers a tree improvement program, and they'd even be more surprised to know that the program isn't designed specifically with future cash crops in mind but rather protecting ecotype genetic diversity and developing the foundation for potential tree crops such as acorns, black walnuts, butternuts and more. Scott's a wealth of information and I really enjoyed our talk, and I'm sure you will too. For more information about the University of Tennessee's Tree Improvement Program, check out the school’s website.

Andy:

Scott, thanks so much for joining us. Tell us a little bit about this program at the University of Tennessee.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

The University of Tennessee's tree improvement program started back in 1959. And in that era, in the 50s and then early 60s, there were a number of tree improvement programs across the nation. The goal is a forest tree, not a horticultural tree or necessarily a landscape tree. At the time, there was, of course, more money available from not only the federal government but also from state governments, and they started to show that you could actually genetically improve pines and, before that, some poplars and things like that.

And as, of course, our population grew, the demand increased. So in the 1950s, industrial cooperatives, university slash industry cooperatives were formed using the expertise in breeding, testing, and things like that at the universities to start basically tree improvement programs and companies, and in the South, of course, that focused on Southern Yellow Pine.

Three cooperatives were formed in the early 1950s: the Western Gulf Cooperative at Texas A&M University, NC State Cooperative, which is the dominant cooperative in the state of Tennessee, and the University of Florida, which had a cooperative for some deep-south species like sand pines. Well, you know, the demand was also for a number of other tree species. Of course, in those days, we were thinking more about timber than anything else: timber pulp production.

And so the universities decided well, we better get into this, the agricultural experiment stations. So, at the land-grant schools, they formed tree improvement programs. At one time back in the heyday, in the 1970s, there were a number of tree improvement conferences. In the east, there was the Lake State Tree Improvement Conference, the Central State Tree Improvement Conference, the Northeastern State Tree Improvement Conference, the Central State Tree Improvement Conference, the Northeastern State Tree Improvement Conference, and the Southern Tree Improvement Conference. And now, the Southern Tree Improvement Conference is around today. And then they've kind of merged all the northern groups, and I think they call that the northern or north central. I can't remember what they call that now.

But after that first round of forest geneticists retired and forest tree breeders retired, money had gotten tighter and tighter. And then, of course, we had the revolution of clonal propagation in plants and then followed very closely by molecular biology, applications of molecular biology in plants, which also started to include forest trees. So when the land grant year and again, money was tighter, state money was tighter. A lot of the universities and the tree improvement programs were funded through the McIntyre-Stennis program, which is a federal formula-funded program where if a state has X amount of acres and forests, they get X amount of dollars from the feds, but they have to match those in different ways, so it's not just federal money turned over, the state has to kick in too.

Unfortunately, the McIntyre-Stennis money stayed relatively stagnant compared to what everything else was going on, and so that hurt the improvement program. So as money got tighter and tighter, and I've heard it expressed as there was a lot of administrative fatigue about renewing these very expensive and slow results low, you know, and not exciting results tree improvement programs. And so in the 80s, all these 70s and 80s, as the original heads of the tree improvement programs retired at land grant schools either closed.

Well, they replaced those programs with molecular biologists, clonal propagation specialists, and other people who were interested in a little bit more basic science, and the expense and the labor and everything associated with tree improvement programs proved too much, and they basically most of them went by the wayside, and so we don't have many of those programs left. The industrial cooperatives are still around. There's three in the south, one up in the lake states, and then there's one out on the west coast, and then you move away from those, and you have very few tree improvement programs. Now, there are programs that work with forest molecular biology and things like that. They're around, but actually you know, breeding and testing field plots and all of that. There's not too much left of that in the country.

\The University of Tennessee started its program in 59, and it hired a Norwegian board forester named Ivan Thor. His name actually was Ivan Thor Bjornsson, and when he became an American citizen, he changed it to Thor, and Thor was. He was quite a character, and he headed the program until 82. I came on in 84, and it was my choice to continue Professor Thor's materials and tree improvement plantings and things like that or basically work and do a lot more laboratory-oriented work.

I've got a mixed training. I'm trained in tree improvement, but it was Great Plains tree improvement through a horticulture department, not anything like Southern Pine, and I worked with oaks then, and then my PhD is actually in basic research. For the time, I was in cider genetics working with tree chromosomes and things like that, and so I'm kind of a hybrid tree chromosomes and things like that, and so I'm kind of a hybrid, and I saw what was happening with a lot of the more basic research.

At the time, again, late 70s early 80s, they were using anything, like Norway spruce. Well, we use that one that's planted on campus, you know, and that's not a way to really do it. You need to have an integrated program effort with tree improvement and basic research, and that's what I told UT that I would do when I came here. Long story short, with a $9,000 startup fee and no lab technician you're not going anywhere in the laboratory, so I would not let the tree improvement program go because that is the future, and so we hung in there and are still going on. For anyone who wishes to read this, there's a publication by Nick Wheeler and Kim Steiner and Dave Neal and myself in the 2015 volume of the Journal of Forestry, and it traces kind of the history and the rise and decline and then the integration of molecular biology and all that. So that's how we ended up still in business.

Tennessee is a hardwood state, and so, unlike the Southern Pines program, I decided to emphasize hardwoods., and so now we're dominated by oak species, but also, again, as civilization marches on, we're using more and more land for non-forest use Urban sprawls have just been terrible development and things like that and so species that were once maybe common, maybe rare and in the state of Tennessee not necessarily rare in the eastern United States, but in the state of Tennessee those habitats and those species are gone away.

I've felt for many years that the small stuff like pawpaws and crab apples and things like native species, like that and plum, are actually going away, and so we not only went with hardwoods but we also worked with things that have problems. So that's how we ended up. Hardwoods are a lot more difficult to work with than pines, for example. We don't breed hardwoods or at least oaks. We've bred other hardwoods like yellow poplar, but not oaks. You make a cross with, you know, an oak tree. You get one or two seeds, you know for, basically, cross and pine, you can get like a pine cone with 100 seeds. So it's a lot harder. The hardwood trees are just harder and harder to work with. Overall. You know we're moving relatively slow.

What I decided rather than just look at Tennessee forests, which are tremendously diverse and that's why this state is so beautiful. We go all the way from the mountains, where you have Fraser fir and red spruce, up on the top of the mountains and high elevation, you know, kind of higher elevation species all the way to bottomland hardwoods in West Tennessee, and you just have just a plethora of species to work with. And in Tennessee, we've got 35 commercially important hardwood species. Now, some you know are much more important, you know, than others, but that's the challenge. And so what did I decide? Rather than to work on one species, and I was probably best fit to work on northern red oak or oaks in general, best trained for that, I decided that we needed to take that first step toward domestication with a wide variety of species. And so we have.

Right now, I think we have seed orchards, about 28 hardwood species and growing. We're constructing them, and we construct them in different ways, and some of those species are quite common, like white oak, northern red oak, things like that, and others are rare like we have one of the rarest trees in the world, Harbison's hawthorn here in Tennessee, only known from two trees until Barry Hart, an NRCS biologist, Mike Hansbrough, another NRCS biologist, found a population in northwestern Tennessee. Still, though, under 200 trees in total. That's for the world, you know, and so you know, we're actually getting involved with them and teaming up with them so we can bring those representatives from that population into a seed orchard situation where we can protect the genetic resources but also generate seed to reinforce more sites with that species so we don't lose them.

If you look at the history of civilization and the history of natural resources as civilization developed, you start out with a hunter-gatherer society. In this society, you don't really impact the land, and few people use up what you do locally. Then, you just move on to another spot.

All the way up to the island of Manhattan, we used to have wild, a lot of wild areas, and all that now skyscrapers. You know, and you know. However, the demand for wood products and the other values that come from the forest, including the diversity, are still there. So, what is this domestication? It allows us to conserve the genetic resources of the trees and basically have the seed sources so we can put back those trees, and if we use genetic improvement, better, more productive trees on less acreage. Because that's the trend of civilization, that's the trend that's happening right here in the United States More people, less land. You don't have a choice. You have to manage your land either more productively for natural regeneration, or you have to go to domestication, and that's essentially what we're doing here.

Andy:

You've brought up so many interesting points that I want to ask about. The first thing is that, like clearly you, from your experiences, you feel that this idea of natural diversity versus this very isolationist genetic process to try to work with these trees is important. And you're also talking about this idea of domestication. I really want to kind of pull that thread a little bit of what you mean by domestication because typically, when we talk about domestication, most of the time, we're talking about food crops, and I'm not getting the impression that's what you mean by this.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

It's just trees are larger and more expensive to work with. They're not an annual crop; they're like humans. They have, you know, juvenile maturity in terms of reproduction. You know. They're just harder to work with and way more expensive to work with. That's really the same idea behind that. Again, they would domesticated food and fruits and vegetables and things like that because the wild sources just were not meeting the demands of society, and so basically they went through selection, breeding, testing, and now, of course, they're integrating molecular biology and cloning and things like that into those processes, and so we're basically doing that. We're just years and years behind Our hardwood. I'm talking not you can have like poplar plantations for fiber and things like that; I'm talking like your mixed hardwood forest in Tennessee, like your mixed hardwood forest in Tennessee.

Andy:

So when we're talking about this idea of domestication around food crops, as you're talking about, there's a very long history of humans doing that. We've done that with walnuts, apples, and all of our fruit trees. When you start talking with oaks, it's a really interesting animal to pick a specific one because of how varied that genetic diversity is, how easily they hybridize, and that's why, like we actually with the podcast, one thing we're working on is collecting improved seed from burr oak, specifically because low tannin, large nuts, and I think that could be like a really good starting point for trying to identify some of these species.

When you're talking about, like, with white oaks through this tree improvement program, how did you select those trees? Like, what is your thought process? Because obviously, you're not. Your work is about on a timeline much longer than either of our lives. So, kind of like, what does that trajectory look like? What are your thought processes in that?

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

Well, as I said, the domestication, whether you're dealing with a grain or a fruit, the process is kind of the same in forest trees. It just takes a lot longer time and it's a lot more expensive for that. What you do, you should do anyway. You should take a look at, well, what does the public want? Remember, the public pays my salary. So you need to say what does the public want? What can we anticipate that we're going to need more of as the population grows and the land base shrinks? And so you make some decisions along those lines.

Now the UT program is a little different in that we're holistic and that we recognize that something like post oak has absolutely no value or very little value as a timber species, but it inhabits a really dry site. It inhabits, you know, it produces mast that wildlife will eat. So we actually work with post oak and then some species like that. So we make a decision like that. You always have to figure that out. You know you have finances in back of it, so you know you can't do everything for all purposes, you know. So you do have to make some, you know, choices there.

For example, sassafras. Sassafras now has a non-native pest disease that catches this laurel that has devastated Red Bay down in coastal Florida and the coastal states and things, and it gets off. It actually gets off in a wide range of things but Sassafras is one. We got it here in Tennessee. I should be conserving the genetic resources of sassafras but I don't have the resources to do that and it's more difficult, probably will be a more difficult species to do that with. We don't know anything really about Sassafras, which I will say I've been working with oaks for almost 50 years now and I don't feel that we know very much about oaks.

You move away from northern red oak, which we probably know the most about, maybe white cherry bark, which is a bottomland species, and maybe a white oak, and then you move away from those trees. We don't know very much about these species at all. We don't know much about the genetic diversity. I mean, there's information out there, but it's just scratching the surface, much less to basically take that first step of domestication, plant that seed, and then develop a seedling that can be planted and live out in the forest without spending a million dollars per seedling White oak's very challenging, you know, to produce something out of the nursery that a landowner can plant and walk away. We're not there yet, you know, and that's going to take a lot of time, you know.

But I make those choices in consideration of the products that come out of these tree species. I do not advocate, for example, planting pure white oak stands because you're going to run into disease and insect problems right away. We have some of those in our seed orchards that you don't find out in the wild. You can go to a pure species kind of a type planting. Now, you might say, well, what about all these pine plantations? Well, pine plantations were developed when the US Forest Service had a tremendous infrastructure of disease and cone and seed, insect people and disease people behind all of that. That dealt with a lot of those problems.

You know, when you put lava, olive pine, or another pine species into a pure stand. If you do that, you're really taking a chance. But I will say, in this state, people don't want to see that. People want to see, in general, people want to see their mixed hardwood forests, and so that's what we're in, where they extract so many values out of it. You know static values, timber values, wildlife values for wildlife just for let's go out camping or let's shoot that turkey. We try to manage the tree improvement program to meet a wide variety of those values, and we take a look at what's going on with some of these species like hemlock woolly adelgids ruining our hemlock and killing our hemlocks back here. So we're conserving that. We're not breeding for resistance or anything, we're just conserving the genetic resources, something like harvest and hawthorn.

And then, strangely, this is strange for me because I'm from Nebraska where we had wild plums just lining the roadside. Our plum populations, I think, are going away, particularly in West Tennessee. It was Jim Byford, who's a prominent wildlife biologist and he was dean of the UT University of Tennessee Martin Campus Ag School. Jim told me that about 20, 25 years ago, said that I asked him about wild plum. He says well, we don't have hardly any of that out here, and it's true. We're surveying now, and we're actually cloning them through rooted cuttings to develop wild plum orchards, and it turns out Tennessee's got like six species. Some of them, you know they're going away. You know, another example and I really didn't know this is we're into crab apples, now Southern crab apple and sweet crab apple two different species are in Tennessee but they're going away too, I think. So we're bringing those in.

Swamp white oak is another example. A good wildlife tree probably can get some timber out of it, but a good wildlife tree, you know, it grows in a wetter habitat and the main part of the range is more north and west. We just have you know, if you look at those distribution maps where you have the little dots instead of the whole range, we just have that kind of dots and things. We've been surveying for that for years. I know we don't have over even 30 different locations in the state of Tennessee for swamp white oak. Oh, wow, yeah, so that species. I think some of that was cut too, because there never was much of it, and some of it's cut. It's just like in a lot of these plant species. Nobody targeted them, but they lived in a certain habitat, which society used for something else. Swamp white oak, I think they cut them. You know they live by water. Well, there are early settlers that came in, the European settlers. They lived by water. You've got to have water and so they cut them.

Andy:

It's really interesting to consider the myriad of factors, including the expansion of urban and suburban spaces, landscape management, and the removal of Indigenous land management practices like fire. The elephant in the room right now, I think, for anyone in this space, is that both invasive species and climate change are doing their thing and really amplifying the pressure on these native species. Short-term invasive species are much more devastating than climate change.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

Climate change will move things around. Some of these things, like swamp white oak, the little dots on the map, may. Change will move things around. Some of these things, like swamp white oak, with the little dots on the map, may go away those populations. But invasives, these non-native pests, are just awful.

I teamed up in the early 90s with Faith Campbell. Faith is probably the nation's expert on policy for non-native pests, and if you look on the UT website, there's a non-native pest. There's a section that we have. We developed over a 25-year period of time three reports called Fading Forests. Read those, and, of course, the last one we put out was in 2015. They're fairly lengthy reports in integration of policy and biology, and you read those in that our forest, and I tell students that they are being transformed before our eyes.

These non-native pests are going to our forest. In 50 years is going to be very different from them. And then you compile that with the, you know, slower effects of climate change, on that. You know we still. You know there's debate on. You know how. What's it going to do? Is it going to make it hotter? Is it going to make it wetter? You know all of that, and we still really know on that certainly not down to the species level, not with biological data and so, but you know that's common, and that's going to. It's just going to make things change. So we've got, really, we've got the non-native pests, we've got the climate change, and then we have our society, which is more and more and more people wanting more and more values out of what's left of the forested land.

Andy:

Yeah, and I like that you brought up the invasive insects, pathogens, because people, when you start talking about invasives, they'll say, like here in New England where I live, autumn olive, like at least birds eat the fruit or whatever. Or you know, Japanese knotweed, like it eventually gets shaded out by a forest or whatever, and like, okay, those might be true, but those aren't even really the big problems. You look at the canopy species of an old-growth forest, and here in New England, almost every single one of them has a major invasive issue that is killing them, whether it's the beach or, obviously, American chestnut. You start going through the list, and it's like a majority of the keystone species for our forests are under major attack. It's not, yeah, Japanese knotweed has its problems, but that's not really the issue here.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

What I tell our students is my generation, the generation of Earth Day, the green Revolution, and all that stuff we failed. I mean, there was a warning, but we let this go on. It's still going. You don't think so? Look for a champion in Congress on this. It's getting worse and worse. Trade doesn't help because we're getting a lot of these insects, and we can even get pathogens in solid wood packing material. You know we've been warned if you read the Fading Force series, and before that, Faith Campbell has warned and warned and warned against that we could solve that right away. You basically go. You can make a composite pallet or packing case, probably stronger than solid wood, and nothing can survive that processing of the wood, and we just aren't doing that.

Andy:

With the work you've been doing. You've been in this field for a long time, to kind of go the opposite end. What is the species, the species that you're most hopeful for, like what? What is it from all this research that you're like, yeah, we have these problems, we're not addressing them, we don't have the right funding? But here are these like, really, things that are giving me hope for future generations in this area? I hope there's something.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

I think the work that we're going to do with the harvest of hawthorns is going to certainly, you know, keep it in the forest and the plums and the swamp white oak here in Tennessee and the crab apple, two crab apple species that are native to Tennessee. I mean, we're going to do that, and you can do that with just anything. It's just a matter of resources. And I'd like to emphasize too, that while I'm talking, I talk UT Tree Improvement Program, basically collectively. I refer to all the seed orchards across the state as the Tennessee seed orchard system. But we just administer that. That depends on many, many cooperators we have.

In the next year or so we'll be on all 10 of our University of Tennessee's ag research stations across the state. We have three seed orchard hubs One's on the Ames Ag Research Station out in West Tennessee. The Middle Tennessee hub is on Jack Daniel Distillery land. We've been working with them for 25 years, and of course, they were initially interested in sugar maple because they filtered their rock whiskey through sugar maple charcoal, which makes it a Tennessee whiskey. But they've been very generous, and now we have 65 acres of seed orchards of a variety of species down there, including butternut, which is a species of concern on the state list of threatened and endangered.

So you know they've been, and the deal we have is we provide the technical expertise, they give us a little bit of money, you know, for a couple of our travel expenses, and then they maintain this and provide the land. So we got, you know, there's a good, that's a good example of a public-private, you know, partnership that has lasted, again, you know, for 25 years and will last, I'm convinced, for many, many more years. And then in the East Tennessee, we have the Tennessee River Valley Authority that basically we had. They had a hardwood tree improvement program, the premier one in the country. They were suspended in 82. But we've got all their old records and plannings and we work with some of those still. And then they've infused new money where we're developing new orchards for East Tennessee on TVA land.

For people who would want to go to our website, I assume you're going to give the address out. If you go to our video channel, you can see what we're doing with Swamp White Oak, which is really interesting. We're working with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, and we basically planted a seed orchard on their land in a wildlife management area that they don't want a normal seed orchard management, which is basically a scorched earth policy under the trees so we can pick up the acorns easy. They basically want to continue to have that as a wildlife management area so we can live with that. It's just at certain times it makes things a little more difficult. But we've got a system where now that land is being used for the dual purpose for the wildlife management area and then also for the production of seed that goes to all.

If our seed goes to the East, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture's East Tennessee State Nursery, and we're set up for that. So Professor Shore started cooperating with the Division of Forestry here in 66, and we've continued that as well. And, of course, we can cooperate with TWRA and NRCS. We really, you know, have cooperated with, you know, the federal and state agencies. So while we generally administer and set direction for this Tennessee seed orchard system, it's really a cooperative effort right down to the people assigned to mow those orchards and maintain them. We can't live without those people. It's a huge cooperative effort.

Andy:

You brought up the TVA, which I know is really polarizing, depending on who you talk to in Tennessee. But despite all the challenges people have with it, one of the most important things, in my opinion, is the work that they've done in the forestry space, and I know we email back and forth about kind of how that evolved a bit and from the John Hershey era to kind of the second wave of the TVA forestry project. I don't know if you could speak a little bit about, like, what those genetics were and why they're important for that, that, the ones that you guys started working from.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

The TVA had two primary three kinds of programs. One was started in the 30s and lasted into the 40s, called the Tree Crops Program. and that was really a horticultural program with tree species. and what they wanted to do was to provide a cash crop to Tennessee River Valley residents, which, of course, many were very poor, and they wanted to put cash into their hands, you know, quickly. So they basically gathered together black walnut cultivars from nut productions, all kinds of things like that, and then even went overseas and got Chinese dates, which is called Jujubes.

Have you ever eaten one? To me, they taste like preserved cardboard. An interesting tree that they also pulled in—and they have just one example—was the mandarin melon berry.

Andy:

Oh, I've seen that Someone posted about that.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

That's a good-tasting fruit. So it's about the size of a raspberry, but it's sweet, but not overly sweet, and has a melon aftertaste. So they had those programs the TVA set up. People don't understand this, but the TVA set up to take that initial step and then spin it up, and so you know, after a few years, you know, a couple of 20 years or so, they basically moved on from the tree crops program.

Of course the TVA was very cognizant of what was going on with the southern yellow pine tree industrial cooperatives and then all the tree improvement programs popping up. And they had the foresight to basically take that step into pines but also, strangely enough, into hardwoods in a pretty big way. They selected trees, grafted them, brought those into common locations, and tested them. They put out the first test of white oak the second major round of testing of northern red oak, the major round of testing of northern red oak, and then the only testing of chestnut. And so they were working with species like that.

Again, the steam kind of went out of that in the 1970s, and by 1982, the TVA had decided to suspend those programs. However, they worked closely with the state of Tennessee when the state had a tree improvement program and with us as well. So, that continues on the nation's largest oak orchard. Its northern red oak is an old TVA genetic test.

That's up in northeastern Tennessee on the northern end of the Cherokee National Forest, and we manage that for the Cherokee National, for the southern region, is what we do, and I work hand in hand with the Forest Service on that. So it's 16 acres in size, and the acorns' yields are now in tons. I've been working on that. I started working at that orchard in 1990, although I visited it before then in 85, and then we took over the management in the late 90s. I have to say this: the Forest Service seed orchard manager was a gentleman named Ken Proffitt. He retired from the Forest Service in 2005. And so we hired him back as a contractor. So Ken 77, he's the seed orchard manager, operational manager, and he's up there right now today picking up acorns.

Andy:

You're talking about this genetic diversity. What exactly are you hoping to get out of it for the future? You know you're harvesting these tons of acorns, like what? What is the the goal?

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

Well, we harvest them, we keep them separate by pedigree, and we create a blend of a genetically diverse blend, and then they're growing, for they're growing for the state of Tennessee, but they're also growing for the US Forest Service, for reforestation. So, oaks, what we have found is that oaks, well, they produce different levels of acorns. Some just rain acorns down, and then some don't. And what we find with oaks is that some produce a lot of acorns, and some don't. And so if you, in this 16-acre seed orchard we call the Motaga seed orchard, I could meet forest service demand for the entire region with 10 trees, and the trees are not enough diversity. So basically, we do blends of seeds to ensure their genetic diversity of them. So that's, you know, and we're still learning about how to manage that orchard and meet different challenges that come along the way, including disease challenges, the way, including disease challenges.

Andy:

So, some of the goals are to try to level out some of those that are mass-produced or to at least try to winnow the selection of red oaks to more high-producing acorns or trees.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

Well, no, you don't want to do that. As I said, if I wanted to, I'd cut down everything except 10 trees, and we'd meet the demand. That's too low genetic diversity. In your tree improvement programs, we're very cognizant of genetic diversity. We don't want something that's really, really narrow.

We want a tree that'll perform, but we try to ensure that it has a broad enough genetic background to withstand pests climate I won't say climate change, but climate fluctuations because it has to live for a long time. Particularly, if you're looking at oaks, you know you've got to live for probably 60 years before you get to start harvesting them for timber 50, 60 years or so. So you need that broad genetic diversity that's still in them. The reason I blend acorns from the Watauga orchard is that if I just use 10 or if I just combine the low producers with the big producers, they get swamped, and so we ensure that the forest service receives a nice blend of seed.

But we're just learning this stuff. I mean, you know, like I say, that's the largest. I don't know if it's the oldest, but it's very close if it's not Seed orchard, oak seed orchard in the United States and we're learning tons about it. You know, the TVA program, even though they suspended in 82, they still their materials, that we still use their materials in different ways, and so it still carries on, even though TVA, you know, doesn't operate a tree improvement program. But then, in 2015, they started making resources available to us to start new plantings, including a genetic test of the trees that came from the Watauga orchard, so kind of a second-generation planting, and so we're doing that. So TVA, we're working hand in hand with them on things.

Andy:

Awesome. Now, I want to ask about the Jack Daniels Distillery project, too. You mentioned working with butternuts there. I know you're also working with black walnuts and bald cypress, so I'm really interested in why those trees were chosen. As you said, their bigger concern was sugar maple.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

Well, this started back in 98. The distillery contacted us and they said we think we might have a problem with our sugar maple supply. And I'll say this about Jack Daniels Distillery: they are very, and of course, they're owned by Brown Foreman Company out of Louisville. They are a very, very environmentally conscious company and of course, they're good business people too. So if they have a product that's critical to their production of whiskey, say sugar maple or another product, let's say water, the story that the water comes out of this cave, that's true.

They map their water. They do all kinds of things with water. Anything threatens those. They don't wait until they have a problem. They do something before.

So at the time they weren't harvesting sugar maple; they were buying sugar maple and making their own sugar maple charcoal to mull over whiskey, and they thought well, we might have kind of a local problem. So we looked at the inventory one of our professors, John Rennie, and he said you may or may not have a problem. We told him that, and I said, well, we want to do something anyway. And he said, well, we don't have a sugar maple orchard in the state of Tennessee.

TVA did some work on it back in the 50s, and that's been it, and so basically said, okay, we've got this piece of land. Well, they had a big piece of land and it's 27 acres, I think it is, and I looked at it and I said, well, we don't need all of this in sugar maple. You know, I tell you what, you guys use white oak as barrels and for barrels.

And right away the general manager's name was Tommy Bean. He and Doug Clark was another manager that was out there too, and I said, well, that's not us, you know, that's a cooperage; we don't do that. I said, yeah, but White Oak's a good tree. And I said, and you got a lot. Central Tennessee is walnut country, with black walnut & butternut traditionally.

A long, long time ago, and I said you know, black walnut's a good tree too. So from that start we have, and all those would fit in that 127-acre property. They said, okay, and so from that start and I will say this is a handshake deal still is I told them. I said you understand; if you commit to this, you're not committing for the next five years. You're going to give me a little money upfront, but I'm going to use that money, you know, and it'll be gone. You're committing for decades, decades here. I just want you to understand that. And they said, yeah, that's what, that's, okay, we'll do it. So we shook hands, and we've gone on from there, and the distillery they have, you know, warehouses of land where they can't use it for anything else have allowed us to expand the orchard system, and now we've got I think, we've got 10 or 11 species and counting, we're adding some too, we're still adding to all of that, fitting them into the land, and we ended up with 65 acres of seed orchards, including butternut.

Andy:

Oh, wow, that's awesome.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

And now, well, when we started this, we didn't know anything about sugar maple, and so the Vermont foresters told us well, it grows real slow, it'll be 25 years to reproductive maturation. Okay, so we planted it and our stuff grew great. So I thought we'd have seed production in 10, 12, 15 years, and no, this year, 25 years to date, was the first year that we had production in the orchard. So you have 25 years of investment there for land maintenance, put a fence around it, things like that that you have to be willing to make that investment before you get fruition. With the white oak orchard, we're taking now crops to the East Tennessee State Nursery. We had production, but the first big production year where I felt well, this is commercial scale was in 2021, which is 20 years after we planted the first.

Andy:

Yeah, and now those black walnuts and butternuts. I know you said the butternuts were critically endangered. Are you doing any specific work with the genetics, or was it just bulk by black walnuts thrown in?

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

The black walnuts are producing small, I call it. It's an orchard business, and we've got the genetics on, but it's really a seed-production orchard, so you know that. And then the butternut is much younger. It'll be years before it produces. There's another thing: We put a lot of effort into butternuts, I'll say 20 years ago, for about 10 to 15 years.

But I basically decided the cost of breeding and real intensive work with any tree species, whether it had a pest problem or not, was so extensive that I would have to sacrifice broadening the effort to different species, taking that first step to domestication. And so I decided to go the latter route. I thought in retrospect, if I can conserve the genetic resources on things that have problems like butternut if we can get seed orchards and genetic improvement started in some of the other species, then that's probably a better contribution to the state of Tennessee than concentrating on just one species. And of course, you know here again, you know you take the risk, when you do something that's going to extend beyond your career, that may or may not be wasting your time. I saw the other three improvement programs fail and nothing came out of them.

In the 1990s, I decided I was going to take a rapid approach to, at the very not have in my career a genetic improvement, but we're going to have the seed orchards there. And I took a different approach, too. We basically called Tennessee the three states of Tennessee. We have three major physiographic, you know, different regions in Tennessee, and so our program is constructed with local genotypes from each one of those three states in Tennessee, so the hub at Ames Ag Research and Education Center are West Tennessee genotypes. Jack Daniels, middle Tennessee genotype. East Tennessee, TVA, those are Eastern Tennessee genotypes. So, eventually, our state nursery will end up with seeds from each of the three of those regions.

Now, I'm having trouble with genetic diversity in swamp white oak. Our one orchard in East Tennessee bore two years ago, and we had some albino seedlings and things like that, and that's a sign that you've got inbreeding depression. You don't have enough diversity there, and so, unless we can find some more, and I've got a grad student that's working on that right now, Jesse Parker, who's working with Laura Thompson, who's a USGS scientist, and they're trying to develop a predictive model we actually did this 20-some years ago with butternut to locate more of the diversity, but I may have just an all-Tennessee orchard of swamp white oak. I'm thinking maybe also of southern crabapple and sweet crabapple as well. So it's evolving.

Andy:

Yeah, you worked on many different plots, hoping that at least some would continue.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

I mean, you know, it's going to be, you know, up to UT administration and, of course, the state to see, you know, is this effort worthwhile and all of that? I think the answer, of course, is yes, and the next person will not have to take that first step to domestication, which it's not career-friendly, I will tell you that, and it's very hard, it's very expensive and you're not going to see the fruition of your labor. But if you're in forestry, you better accept that from day one.

Andy:

It doesn't mean the work isn't important. Someone needs to do it, someone has to take those first steps, and that's your role, Scott. So, for folks who are listening, I know you guys have an Instagram page, plus the Tennessee website, Instagram, I think, and Facebook. I know it's @UTTIP on Instagram.

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

Well, if you just enter UT tree improvement program, you should see all that pop up on a Google search. Facebook and Instagram are basically what we're doing right now. I mean, what we're doing is kind of a current events update, and then the website is what I’d call stable. We don't make frequent changes to that. We are adding one change in that American Forest, which actually is the American Forestry Association, which is the oldest forestry association in the nation, formed back in the late 1800s.

They have put up some money for us to start with the Tennessee Division of Forestry, for us to start a wild seed forest seed collection network where we go out and locate native trees, collect those seeds, and that seed goes to the state nursery. So we've got locally adapted stuff going to the state nursery and as a stopgap until the seed orchards start to bear enough to meet demand. So we've got that project going on. A very fine young woman, Erin Victorson, is heading up that project for us and she's going to be out collecting acorns this week.

Andy:

So, for folks who are listening, can they contribute seed? Can they do it as if they live in Tennessee? Is there anything they can do to get involved?

Dr. Scott Schlarbaum:

We're kind of feeling our way through that. And certainly, if they go to the Facebook site and indicate interest in participating, we're looking for native trees, generally large trees, and then permission for us or one of the state agencies to collect seed underneath those trees to take to the East Tennessee State Nursery. Awesome, you know.

And again, this program's stopgap program until the orchards come in, which maybe, you know, I mean, we're looking at 20-some years, you know, probably for the newer ones that we're putting together. So you know these things hopefully will be around for a long time. We get things right in our nursery, you know, where we do not have to buy seed from, you know, anywhere having to buy seed from, you know, anywhere. We get basically Tennessee seed that's locally adapted, and then, as it comes from some of our orchards, it could be genetic.

Andy:

That's awesome, Scott. This has been really interesting. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how this evolves.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #183 of the Poor Proles Almanac.