LEGISLATIVE AFFAIRS


Dear Senators Lincoln and Pryor and Congressman Berry,

  I am writing you to instruct to you to find a way to reverse the economic harm you have done to
the nation's 10 million private forest landowners in HR 6, and urge you to not compound your error
as you and your colleagues finalize the Farm Bill in joint conference committee this month.  In the
bill's definition of renewable biomass, you have adopted a series of restrictive phrases that
disqualifies federal forestlands and casts doubt on most other state and private forestlands'
ability to contribute renewable biomass to this nation's need to meet the renewable fuel standard
you set in the same legislation.  We all know that this definition is important because biofuels
producers cannot not use any "nonrenewable biomass" to make renewable fuel that would be
eligible for the various production incentives passed and proposed in the related energy and farm
bills.

  First, let me introduce myself.  I am an American Tree Farm System/Arkansas Forest
Stewardship Program certified hardwood tree farmer, with a current management plan and
forests that, after having been harvested three times in my lifetime, are healthy, productive, and
completely renewable in their entirety so long as proper forest management practices are
followed. Having specialized in keeping abreast of the farm and energy bill provisions dealing with
forestry, conservation, and renewable energy, I was asked to lead  the Arkansas Bioenergy Task
Force working in 2006 under the guidance of the Arkansas Bioenergy Policy Council, an ad hoc
group of legislators and agency heads, who tasked my group with developing legislative
recommendations related to development of a state bioenergy program  for consideration at the
2007 legislative session.  In order to build public and legislative support for that legislation, I spoke
to groups all over the state of Arkansas that year, was the planner and moderator for two of the
three state level renewable energy conferences held in 2006 and 2007, and was the director who
helped our local RC&D council finally break the code on the current farm bill Section 9006
renewable energy grant/loan program. During the legislative session, I was one resource that
individual legislators turned to for advice on the two most critical pieces of renewable legislation
to come out of that session.  One of our greatest accomplishments was keeping a feedstock
neutral playing field for all producers.  Because of this experience, I am one of the "go to" guys
who groups turn to when they want a speaker to decipher legislation in the above areas and help
them identify the economic opportunities such legislation promotes.

  Now, let me tell you what I find disturbing about your definitions of renewable biomass in your
energy legislation.  Since I depend on natural regeneration and don't plant my trees in rows; and
since my ancestors and I were intelligent enough not to clear-cut our hardwood forests and
replant them with environmentally inferior and commercially worthless stands of pine, my forests,
while actively and intensively managed, do not appear to qualify as a renewable feedstock under
subparagraph (ii) of your definition of renewable biomass because they are not a plantation,
planted in rows, on previously cleared land.  However, down in subparagraph (iv) you appear to
generously allow me to classify from my particular forests "slash and precommercial thinnings",
but not the rest of the trees and trunks as renewable biomass.
If these restrictions were adopted to ease environmental concerns, I assure you from my personal
experience in harvesting my timber and managing my forestland environment, that you have it
completely backwards in that retention of the slash and thinnings is far more beneficial to my
forest than my logs and pulpwood stems.  
If these restrictions were adopted to force forest landowners to remain captive suppliers solely to
the pulp and paper industry, why do you uniquely force me and other hardwood land owners to
remain in that relationship, but not our counterpart softwood plantation owners?    Isn't it time to
make public the forest products industry's dirty little secret that, having destroyed all the
hardwood forests in their possession, conducting industrial scale strip mining of hardwood
forests belonging to surrounding private landowners, and converting that acreage to pine, they
have created a national softwood glut, a national hardwood shortage, and now want you to protect
them from the free market consequences of having done so?
If these restrictions were adopted to establish a greater policy goal of avoiding economic hardship
to existing industries, why did you not place that same restriction on cropland farmers by
restricting from eligibility those croplands having a prior history of producing food grains to feed
our nation’s consumers?  I’m sure our east Arkansas rice farmers would appreciate the fairness
and equity of such a position!  

  Now let me tell you how you have personally harmed me.  My forests are located four short miles
from Arkansas' only commercially viable biorefinery and they were planning to use wood, along
with other agricultural products, in an integrated feedstock stream to produce cellulosic ethanol.  
Because my wood, as opposed to my fellow row croppers' wheat, rice, and milo stubble, will not
be considered  "renewable biomass” under your definition (despite the fact that I grow mine
without the benefit of fertilize and consumption of massive amounts of fossil fuel and scarce
ground water), I am initially placed at about a $20 per ton price disadvantage because that is how
much less my biorefinery will have to pay me to offset the loss of financial incentives they would
receive if they use my feedstock.  If you provide additional incentives to renewable biomass
feedstock growers, transporters, and processors, in the Farm Bill, that disadvantage will grow
larger and larger. Is this economic disadvantage you have deliberately set out to create for me and
my fellow forest landowners?  

  Now let me tell you about the harm you have caused to Arkansas' only commercially viable
biorefinery.  Within the biorefinery's planned 70 mile radius feedstock procurement zone, 2.4
million acres of privately owned hardwood forestland comprise most of that feedstock zone.  The
biorefinery's management team was counting heavily on drawing a substantial portion of their
feedstock stream from those forest lands.  By excluding their most abundant, readily available,
and least expensive form of biomass from your definition, you have placed in jeopardy their ability
to execute an economically viable cellulosic ethanol production plan.  Did you set out to
deliberately destroy this business opportunity for our biorefinery?

  Now let me tell you about the harm you have done to our community.  Batesville has lost well over
1000 manufacturing jobs in the least three years.  As one of the three remaining major employers,
and the only one introducing cutting edge technology to our area, we were counting on the growth
in biorefinery jobs to restore us to some semblance of economic health. You have now damaged
our community's ability to recover from those job losses, and you have destroyed the new market
opportunity presented to our region's 30,000 private forest landowners.  Did you deliberately set
out to destroy this region's economy and punish all the private forest landowners of the region?

  Now let me tell you about the harm you have done to our state's economy.  The state's 18 million
acres of forestland, owned by about 289,000 forest landowners, covers approximately 52% of our
state's rural land mass.  By excluding the Ouachita and Ozark National Forests, and all but the
pockets of increasingly worthless plantation pine in south Arkansas as areas capable of providing
renewable biomass in your definition, you have placed in jeopardy our state's ability to attract
additional cellulosic biofuels producers because of the difficulties they will face in identifying
feedstock zones of sufficient size which would be eligible for the federal production incentives
previously described.

  Not only have you diminished our state's potential for biofuels investment, but you have
effectively "redlined" the entire northeastern 1/3 of our nation containing our nation's hardwood
belt and all of our western national forests. By defining forestland in those regions as areas
incapable of producing significant renewable biomass, you have now planted another legal
fencepost that all environmental groups, who wish to do so, can hang their lawsuits on.    Looking
at the legal and financial uncertainties of building commercial biofuels plants in those areas,
investors will shy away, thus effectively eliminating those states' abilities to develop a cellulosic
biofuels industry.  I am sure when your fellow legislators and their constituents figure that out;
they will want to thank you profusely. I'll be sure to point out to them what you've done for them. I
hope they remember that when it comes time for committee appointments in the next Congress.  

Finally, let me tell you how you have harmed our nation.  Wood, in all its forms and from all of its
sources, is now a strategic, national, renewable resource.  It can either be used to contribute to
our national security by being used to produce renewable liquid biofuels, or it can continue to be
dedicated solely to prolong the financial agony of an obsolete, dying, pulp and paper industry using
increasingly obsolete, inefficient plants to crank out surplus supplies of toilet and typewriter paper
at uncompetitive prices on world markets.  If the American people were given the choice of having
to continue buying oil from Hugo Chavez, one of our nation’s mortal enemies, or buying reams of
paper from Brazilian paper companies which do you think they would choose?

  Occasionally our government, through bad legislation, policy, and appropriations, acts in such
egregiously bad ways that it shocks the conscience of our nation.  When that happens, citizens of
good conscience are forced to stop what they are doing and work tirelessly until the damage is
repaired.  I am going to be one of those tireless workers.  Rest assured that, beginning today, as I
speak at the Missouri Woodland Owners Conference in February, the North Arkansas Woodland
Owners Training Conference in March, the Oklahoma Woodland Owners and National Smallwoods
conferences in May, and at the other various  conservation, forestry, renewable energy, political,
and economic development events to which I am invited to speak throughout the year, and in all
the associated press interviews, I will pass up no opportunity to explain to those audiences how
they are affected by your decision, explain the damage you have done to their economic interests,
and encourage them to communicate with you about it.  I think a front page headline reading
"FORESTS NOT RENEWABLE"  with a lead off sentence that reads "Arkansas' federal legislators
declare Arkansas forestlands a nonrenewable resource!" will make quite a nice, eye catching,
eyebrow lifter, don't you?

  In closing, I would like for you tell me how you plan to clean this mess up and repair the damage
you have done to me, my community, my local industry, my state, and my nation.  I await your
response.

Sincerely,



Ron Bell
A Mad Tree Farmer