Bought 90 acres of cutover and replanted. Lost a whole planting season doing it.

$1,150 an acre with county road frontage is the kind of number I've been hunting in rural listings for a year and never see. Was it listed publicly or did the forester bring it to you? I suspect the answer is the second one and that's the actual lesson.

So your whole return is 20 plus years out, with a thinning somewhere in the middle. How do you think about that against just buying a rental? I'm asking honestly, I'm planning a first purchase and this feels like the opposite of what I've been told to do.

The seedling ordering thing is such a specific piece of knowledge. What else is on that list of "things everyone in timber assumes you know"?

@wren burn permits and burn windows. You can budget the chop and the burn and then get three years of drought where the county won't issue anything, and your site prep plan changes to chemical only, which costs more.

@cobalt your forester earned his fee telling you to skip a season rather than plant bad stock. Poor genetics show up as crooked stems at year 15 and you can't fix it then. The lost year is cheap by comparison.

605 trees per acre is on the lower side of what I've been reading, some plans run 700 plus. Is that a deliberate choice about thinning later, or just what the planting crew does around you?

@quill it isn't either/or, it's what the money is for. Cobalt's 90 acres will produce nothing for a decade and will also never call him about a water heater. The trees add volume every year whether or not anyone wants to buy lumber that quarter, and he chooses when to sell into that. A rental gives you cash now and a tenant.

@cobalt the thing I'd nail down early is access and the boundary. Did you get a survey or are you relying on the deed description and old blazes? Timber trespass across an unmarked line is the single most common way small tracts turn into lawsuits, and how it gets resolved depends on the state.

The hunting lease covering taxes keeps showing up in these threads. Is that a real market everywhere or a southeast thing?

@lantern it's regional. Where I bought, recreational demand is a real part of why bare land prices have held up, and the lease income is small but it's the difference between a tract that costs you money every year and one that doesn't.

@cobalt did you write a written management plan? Ours was required for the tax classification and it also turned out to be the document the bank actually read.

Reading this as somebody with no land at all, the interesting part is how many different paid specialists are in it. Forester, planting crew, spray contractor, nursery. Is there a shortage of people doing that work?

@plumb yes, in a lot of rural counties. The planting crews are seasonal and booked, and the consulting foresters near me are mostly over 55. If you want a service angle on land, that's where it is.

Cobalt, one question. Your $23k of establishment cost, are you carrying that as basis or expensing it? That's an accountant question and the answer changes your after tax picture more than the $3,000 you lost on brush.