Tree Farm of the Year Tour at Reclaimed Tree Farm
Rob Davis, left, owner of the Reclaimed Tree Farm, and his brother Cal. The Reclaimed Tree Farm was named the 2024 Tree Farm of the Year. Cal Davis also is a tree farmer.
The public is invited to attend the 2024 Ohio Tree Farm of the Year Tour at the Reclaimed Tree Farm of Rob and Pat Davis at 40480 Cadiz-Dennison Road outside of Cadiz on Sept. 7.
The tour will be open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. There will be plenty of activities including an active timber harvest, a pond clinic with Fender’s Fish and children’s activities.
Guests can learn about solar panels, tree shelter usage, invasive plant species control, food plot management and tree planting maintenance. Forester guided wagon tours and oil/gas well pad insight will be available. There also will be self-guided walking tours of the grounds. Food and beverages will be available for purchase from Byler’s BBQ.
There is a lot more to tree farming than meets the eye. Jeremy Scherf, a service forester with ODNR Division of Forestry, nominated the Reclaimed Tree Farm for the honor of 2024 Ohio Tree Farm of the Year.
“We typically look for a landowner that’s really engaged and active in managing their forest,” Scherf said, “one that’s managing for a variety of uses. The four corners of the tree farm program are wood, water, wildlife and recreation. We’re looking for somebody that’s following all those and somebody that’s been doing it for a while. This isn’t something you can do in one year and you’re getting an award. We’re looking for management. We’re looking for results and sometimes something unique.”
They are looking for sustainable tree farming practices and good land stewardship.
Scherf was impressed by Davis’ desire to plant trees. He has been working with Davis to improve his tree farm for 24 years, and before that, Davis worked with another ODNR forester.
“Early on he struggled. He planted trees and they died, and he tried something else, and they didn’t grow. He didn’t give up. A lot of times, landowners would have just given up, but he didn’t,” Scherf said. “We figured out what the problems were. A lot of that property was strip mined for coal, so the ground’s compacted; topsoil is gone. There are deer problems. There’s moisture competition. We figured out how to kind of get around those issues and tolerate those things. He finally started finding some success, and he just ran with it.”
The type of trees you plant can make a difference too.
“In the early years, we were trying to plant different pines, and they’re strictly deer candy. I didn’t know that. We lost thousands of seedlings to the deer, but we kept trying different kinds of trees and started focusing much more on hardwoods,” Rob Davis said. “The eastern red cedars were an evergreen that the deer did not like to eat. They didn’t like the taste of them. They rub them and tear them up, but we could grow those.”
As the years went by, Davis learned damage to young trees could be prevented by putting a 5-foot tree tube over the seedlings.
The Davis family purchased their first piece of property in Harrison County in 1995. Initially, the land was all strip-mined ground, but later they added to the property by purchasing some contingent land, some that provides pasture ground and hay fields. Davis enjoys seeing trees grow. He estimates they have planted about 150,000 trees over the years.
“We’ve had even greater success when you have good dirt,” Davis said.
The land was initially stripped about 1970 when there were no laws in place that provided for the saving of topsoil and reclaiming the land.
Davis enjoys reclaiming the land for a wildlife habitat.
“As I became more engaged with foresters and forestry associations, I realized that the great need is to just have better hardwood timber, and 70-100 years from now, there’s going to be economic gain there,” Davis said, adding the gain will be for his grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
“I don’t look at it any different than planting corn,” Davis said. He sees these hardwoods are already producing acorns or black walnuts for animals. “I see wildlife habitat, and it’s fun getting to see some fruit from your labor.”
On the day of the tour, visitors will be able to see a 16-acre clear cut in progress. Davis will sell the cottonwood trees there.
“They’re going to be harvesting those, and they’ll be demonstrating taking them down and hauling them out while people are here on the tree farm tour. So that’s kind of exciting,” Davis said.
He has been working to get all the invasive species killed in the plot so the area will be ready to plant with more desirable trees next spring.
Part of the tour will be an 1890s farmhouse called Martha’s House, after the woman who once lived there. The remodeled home contains four bedrooms and three bathrooms. It is used to house members of the ministry for meetings or retreats free of charge. It is another part of the Davis family mission.
“It’s our ministry to people in the ministry,” Davis said. “We are reclaiming lives for Christ and reclaiming the ground at our Reclaimed Tree Farm.”