Thought some of you MI guys might be interested in this.


The Michigan Department of Natural Resources is offering $75 for bushels of pinecones for the month of September. The DNR is in need of these for replanting purposes, refilling forests with new conifer trees.

.
The DNR is requesting a specific kind of cone, however. The red pine cone is the one they want, marked by its craggy, reddish bark and 4-6 inch needles that grow in pairs. The DNR notes that Scotch and Austrian pine cones will not be accepted. Scotch cones are marked by their flayed and thick bark, while Austrian cones are more orb-like than red cones.


https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/08/18/dnr-cash-pinecone-collectors/8185908002/

My first read of this is that the state people would want them with the seeds still inside so picking up cones off of the ground won't work. The article did say so in sort of around about way--need to pick them off the tree and still somewhat unopened/green. If so, hasn't the collection season already happened this year or don't red pine cones open and scatter the seeds until the fall...?

Some pine cones require fire to open up and disperse seed.

Here acorns and tamarack cones are worth more. Too bad oak seedlings are so hard to transplant. Thousands of them sprouting in my woods from two bumper crops of acorns. Last year it was raining them.

Red pines feed little the paper company plants the heck out of them why would the DNR plant them when better wildlife trees would be better in the long run.

I picked ponderosa pinecones right out of high school in 1975. Made pretty good money but i don't remember a price per lb. Weyerhaeuser was the employer. We had to climb the trees and pick them green. We got paid on the % of good (not buggy) cones. They would take a machete and slice a couple of random cones in half per sack and count the % of good white seeds that the knife had sliced though.

Some of my fellow pickers would watch squirrels and raid their caches. I remember some of the guys getting 2-3 bushels out of one single cache.

Down here the Georgia Pacific, Kimberly-Clark and Weyerhaeuser grow Improved Loblolly, Slash and Longleaf by the hundreds of thousands in multiple strains and lines. I've personally planted thousands of loblolly and longleaf.

Around here they go to the power companies for poles...high dollar. If any go to the paper mills, its the ones taken during the first thinning.

Here I have harvested Tamarack cones for 150 a bushel, decent money.
I have also done balsam for 75, never again.
Here the only possibility of harvest is with trees that have been felled.

When I first started in the supply business many years ago in UP mich I paid many an electric bill with pine cones, princess pine and wreath material. It was an activity that a family could do and spend time in the woods when it was not trapping season. Having a great trapping show in Evart michigan this weekend nice to see all trapper friends after a year of covid.

answered your own question our state land is mostly red pine planted by the dnr when the stand starts to mature they burn it off killing any shrubs ,saplings or underbrush our dnr is more interested in timber management and selling real estate then wildlife

As a forester we planted Loblolly's in the highlands of Ecuador and they did great there.

I, too, have planted many many thousands of conifer seedlings in my younger years. Mostly Douglas fir.

I'd have to see if I could find it, but I remember reading a short USFS report that came in 2002 that estimated the volume of the tree species in the U.S. or at least the CONUS. I may have them reverse but about 20% of the total was in loblolly pine and Douglas fir. Gee whiz, the two most important commercial softwood species in the country!! Imagine that. I remember showing one of my colleagues, who grew up in Vermont, and he just couldn't fathom it with all the hardwood species out there. Then again, he was a good scientist in his specialty but he didn't study or probably know a huge amount about American land use. I wasn't surprised, but they pay me to know such things or at least I think they do...