Keystone Cooperator Profile
Forest Land Owners United
Massachusetts Woodlands Cooperative.
Coverts Cooperator:
Arthur Eve
"Coverts helps you see how each person's talents can mesh with the needs of the forest."
Arthur Eve (center) and other Coop members accepting
Green Certification Grant.
In January 2004, after many years of hard work and collaboration, Arthur Eve and the other 24 members of the Massachusetts Woodlands Cooperative accepted nearly $500,000 awarded to the Coop by the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development. The Cooperative is an organization dedicated to coordinating the efforts of Massachusetts forest landowners in the management, processing and marketing of forest products in ecologically sound ways.
Due to connections he made at the Coverts Workshop, Arthur Eve has been part of the Cooperative since its inception. He has been a driving force behind making it a reality, utilizing his skills at public speaking and his business acumen from the many years he spent as a member of the faculty in the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and as Executive Director of the UMass Donahue Institute. But it was his experiences as a private landowner that have spurred him on to collaborate with other land owners, forestry professionals and conservation researchers to help create the Coop: an organization dedicated to make holding forest land in Massachusetts more viable, productive and environmentally sustainable for the small private landowner.
Arthur Eves' grandchildren on the land.
Cross country skiing.
When Arthur Eve and his wife Barbara bought 163 acres in Deerfield, Massachusetts they did so to create a retreat from the development they found around their home in Amherst. With this act they joined the ranks of private woodland owners, who as a group own 78% of Massachusetts forests. Their land, which they have expanded to encompass 375 acres over the years, has been beloved by succeeding generations of the Eve family. Their children grew up spending much time there, camping, hiking and sharing it with their friends. Neighbors were welcomed to use the trails for cross-country skiing and snow-mobile rides. The Eves enrolled their land in Chapter 61 and made the acres into a productive tree farm managed by their son-in-law Bob Cowles for firewood and timber. Over the years, they took advantage of SIP funds to build roads and create wildlife habitat improvements. They incorporated in 1995, relieving their tax burden further. However, the impediments to the small forest land owner are many: high costs of maintaining the land, difficulty in finding the best value for your timber and a common history of the land being high-graded.
Most forest in Massachusetts has had the best trees cut, leaving poor-quality cull trees behind, creating a forest that needs many years, perhaps decades of management before it may become financially productive. Working as a family unit, the Eve-Cowles family did all that they could to keep this land for their children and to preserve it for the natural communities living there, but still there were many obstacles that were too difficult to overcome alone.
Coverts group in brush
In 1993, Arthur Eve took part in the Coverts Workshop. Coverts gave him a base of knowledge about his land: information about protecting vernal pools and promoting wildlife habitat, tree species and their relative market value and the impact of high-grading on a forest. It brought him into contact with other landowners and forestry professionals and gave him a sense of confidence to talk about forest management with others in his community.
In 1999, through contacts he had made at Coverts, Arthur was invited to attend a Conference on landowner cooperatives, opening up his horizons to include the concept. Forestry cooperatives have been created worldwide to help communities pool their resources to be able to more productively and responsibly manage their land. A movement was beginning in Massachusetts to begin one here.
Shortly after the conference, the University of Massachusetts and the MA Department of Environmental Management organized a meeting for landowners in Massachusetts interested in exploring the issue. Arthur Eve became chair of the Steering Committee and began the work of organizing to create the cooperative.
Arthur had a wealth of experience as a grant writer at UMass, and this experience was crucial for the success of the Massachusetts Woodlands Coop. It was vital in securing grants necessary for research into organizing the Cooperative, finding new products and, most recently, obtaining Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) green certification for their members' wood products. Many people he met through the Coverts Project have been fundamental to the creation of the Coop, and many of the members of the cooperative are former coverts Cooperators. Arthur says that the key has been to find what skills each person may bring to the process, to see how each person's talents mesh with the needs of the forest. It has been Arthur's own ability to see the talents of others and motivate them to work together to focus on a project, along with finding support and funding for these projects, that have helped make this project the success it has become.
At this time, with the new grant in hand, Arthur and the other members of the Cooperative are working hard to make this project bear fruit. Research into what products their members can best produce have yielded the objectives of hardwood flooring, lumber for timber framing and understory crops such as maple sugar and mushrooms. They are researching the creation of new markets for the abundantly available red maple. Creating a high-end, environmentally conscious market for Massachusetts' wood products could lead to area brand-recognition such as Vermont products enjoy. The Coop has advertised lumber products on the internet which have all sold, some to buyers as far away as Boston. Future projects include obtaining FSC Chain-of-Custody Certification so that the Cooperative can market value-added products to end users or as close to that as possible, allowing the forest owners to clear more profit which is lost when logs are sold to mills.
As a group, the Cooperative has access to resources beyond the reach of any individual. Databases quantifying landowners' timber and land qualities are continuing to be added to and improved, with the goal of incorporating this information into ArcView GIS maps. The Cooperative is creating interactive maps of land with up to date information about timber integrated with wildlife and ecosystem data. This would be made available to members via the web, allowing them to have a better overall view of their land, and to make decisions collectively with other members. These and other tools are the leading edge of innovation available to land owners working together to create a future where the forest can be owned and protected by individuals and families in perpetuity.
