MRES Board Meetings

August Board Meeting

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Schedule:

5:30 Pizza and Networking

6:00 Expert Guest Speaker

7:00 Board Meeting

Location:

UAW-Ford-MnSCU Training Center
(at the Ford Plant)
966 South Mississippi River Boulevard
St. Paul, Minnesota 55116

For Map - click here 

Parking is available in the lots on either side of the Training Center.

"Energy equal to 6,000 times the world's electricity use constantly shines on the Earth"  (National Geographic Magazine Sept. 09). Minnesota's forests are solar powered and should be managed with this in mind.

Greg Nolan’s Bio:

   Currently I co-own, with my wife Marcia, a small family forestry and wood products business. Since 1979 Snowy Pines has planted over 4 million trees. We work to integrate the forestry services we provide (tree planting, thinning, small scale logging, deer browse protection and consulting) to private well managed forests, with the processing of valuable wood products that are sold as installed flooring, paneling, siding and trim. 

   To get this wood we manage our 40-acre family forest along with many other neighboring lands. We mimic nature by working with windstorms, bug kill and natural decline to acquire most of the timber we process.

   We run a small logging operation, a sawmill, a solar powered dry kiln storage facility and a milling operation to get our building materials. Our end products include installed hardwood flooring and trim, installed wood paneling and installed wood siding. Installing wood products creates jobs and carries our product over the wholesale threshold into the retail market.

   There is up to a 50 to 1 economic multiplier on solid wood products taken from standing timber to a retail finished installed product. We capture all of the profit centers with this approach. This enables us to pay ourselves well for tree planting, careful logging and investing in the future.

   We power our warm room kiln and milling operation with a 3.5 kilowatt solar electric array (28 solar electric panels on 3 trackers) that is intertied to the electrical grid. This provides almost all of the electrical power we need to run our business and provides a 4% return on our investment. The warm room kiln gathers energy through the abundant south glazing and solar hot water panels that are piped through the masonry floor. A wood boiler burning slab waste wood from the milling operation provides back up heat. A warm room kiln is a low energy kiln that allows for storage as well as the slow drying of the high value air-dried hardwood products that we harvest and process. By keeping the inside temperature above the outside temperature we keep the humidity in the building very low which in turns draws moisture out of anything put inside the building.  

   As a business we have created an atmospheric carbon mining operation. Through the careful harvesting of well managed forests, the processing of those wood products via a solar powered milling operation into long lived high value wood products creates high paying jobs for our family and friends, and by planting working trees that cool houses, break the wind, clean the air and water and provide recreation.

  Creating well-managed forests in our area means you must inspire the private landowners. Almost all the forestland in our area is in small privately owned blocks. We make ourselves available for conversations and have organized workshops to discuss topics such as the value of red oak timber, riparian plantings, TSI to establish high value long-lived species, light intensity management to establish red oak and high value hardwoods, and establishing and managing eastern white pine

   A portion of my knowledge comes from workshops I attend and reading, but most of what I know I learned by doing and from conversation with people on the land. I am passionate about trees and forests. My wife and I have lived and raised our family for 30 years in a home powered by a stand-alone solar electric system.

   Some of my current projects include building a wood products community in the tornado blow down near Wadena Minnesota, possibly to help rebuild the town and developing green jobs in the area of forest management and wood products in conjunction with long range planning the Minnesota Forest Resource Council has sponsored in our area.