Authored by Drew Fasano
Drew Fasano is the Reforestation Advisor for South Carolina and Northern Georgia
Drew has been a significant member of the ArborGen team since September 2024. Before joining ArborGen, Drew was a District Forester for RMS for over nine years.
Seeing the value in your long-term investment can be challenging, especially when it’s a pine plantation. The decisions you make at the beginning will determine your return at harvest, and it all starts with genetics.
So, where do you start? Return on investment is the primary driver for most people when evaluating investments—not the initial cost. However, the first question most landowners ask when shopping for seedlings is: What do they cost?
When starting the reforestation process, it’s easy to focus on cost, but what you really need to consider is what you are planting. What is the PRS score? Where does your seed come from? How is seedling quality assessed? What is the sawtimber potential? Doing a little homework before purchasing your seedlings can pay dividends—better genetics yield better quality.
We measure quality based on several factors, including volume production, straightness, rust resistance, and reduced forking. All these attributes contribute to value, which becomes increasingly evident as your investment matures. Your most valuable products are produced from solid wood—Chip-N-Saw, Sawtimber, and Poles. What do these products have in common? Stem form. They require straight stems free of defects.
MCP-2.0 container seedlings were recently planted in Horatio, South Carolina.
12-year-old thinned MCP stand in Estill, South Carolina.
Rust galls, sweep, and forking are defects that can quickly reduce the value of a tree, causing it to be downgraded into pulpwood—a product that generally sells for 70-75% less than higher-quality wood products. When walking through your pine plantation, long, straight stems are what you want to see, as they will yield the greatest value when selling your timber.
While ArborGen produces many categories of seedlings, Mass Control Pollinated (MCP®) families offer the best stem form attributes, coupled with higher volume production. Stand uniformity, shorter rotation ages, and rust resistance are also significant advantages of planting MCP. With over 20 years of field trials, MCP families represent the top 1% of over 8,000 tested families. The combination of these attributes makes MCP the ideal choice for landowners who want to see what value looks like.
Depending on your goals and objectives for the future, we can provide the ideal families to help you achieve your investment goals.
