Tag: environment

Some of the ingredients for a Prescribed Burn Association in Appalachian Ohio?

~ Badger Johnson

For the last few years, I have volunteered to teach people about prescribed fire. I am an Ohio Certified Prescribed Fire Manager, so part of my motivation is develop a client base, as well as a pool of gig workers to staff my fires. The teaching is pretty straightforward. We spend a few hours in the classroom looking at maps, plans and slides, and then I host several “learn and burn” events to get peoples feet wet. I am happy to say that as of yesterday, there are (144) people who have participated and are on the Google Group. My hope is that one day, people from this mailing list will coalesce and help found a Prescribed Burn Association (PBA) in Appalachian Ohio.

What is a A Prescribed Burn Association (PBA)? It’s a group of landowners and other proactive, ordinary people that form a partnership to conduct prescribed burns. Association members pool their knowledge, labor and equipment to help other people in their association conduct prescribed burns. I think at some point, the people in Appalachian Ohio should start a PBA. Why? There is safety in numbers when it comes to staffing a fire. Mutual Aid between land owners/managers/stewards is a powerful force. The more resources on a fire, the less likely something will go wrong. If people are willing to play tit for tat, it can keep the labor costs down.

Where are PBA’s a thing? At the time of writing, states that have at least one regional PBA are Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Washington, Oregon, California. None of these states have complete coverage. PBA’s are usually at the county or multi-county level, sort of sub bio-regional.

One of the slides for the classroom portion of my intro workshop includes a national map of Prescribed Burn Associations (PBA’s). I make it a point to check the Great Plains Fire Science Exchange website annually, to see what has changed for PBA’s nationally. Here are the changes I saw this year:

-Between this time last year and now, Washington and North Dakota both picked up a PBA, whereas these states had zero before!

-But in that same period, Colorado and Mississippi went from having one PBA to zero, not sure why.

-Illinois picked up one PBA, but lost another.

-Coverage of Missouri and Texas improved.

Notably, there are currently no PBA’s in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania or New York. I will tell you this. The oak, hickory, yellow pine and chestnut (such as it is) in these states misses the fire that a PBA could offer. The nut trees will continue to fade away without prescribed fire, replaced by other species. As a habitat manager, the slow decline of trees that produce hard mast for wildlife is a huge concern. This is part of my motivation for helping people learn prescribed fire. If you’d like to connect to the people who have taken my class and learn and burns, and now help each other burn on each others properties, I’d like to introduce you. Please contact me.

Agroforester’s Tree and Log Measuring Stick with Cruising Prism

~ Badger Johnson

I have a tool to share. It is used in a similar way as the classic forestry tools known as the Biltmore stick and the cruising prism. But it is used for different purposes. My adaptations are designed with other agroforesters in mind, as well as consulting forestry clients managing their private non-industrial forest.


These tools are for people who do forest stand improvement, & for whatever reason want to measure “waste wood” from these treatments. For agroforesters pursuing forest farming, this tool is handy. You might find yourself thinning overstocked oak woodlands in order to better cultivate sun-adapted NTFP herbs, such as black cohosh. Cutting trees out without selling to a logger means cutting small diameter trees to make growing space for healthy larger trees. These cull trees may be suppressed, they may be of a species that isn’t part of the plan, or maybe there are just too many trees and competition between them has grown fierce. Either way, logs from this light-on-the-land management have many uses. Timber-framing elements are useful in green building, with the smaller logs useful for mushroom bolts, and the even smaller poles useful for various crafts and as fuelwood.


This was manufactured by me and friends working together at the Athens Makerspace, with design sessions happening in our homes. Special thanks to Asa Peller (A-STUDIO) and Henry Hellbusch, as well as Pauline Phillips (our Makerspace guardian angel). It is because of these specialized uses for small roundwood that we started this project, because now the board foot scale on both sides of the measuring stick goes down to half a 16′ sawlog, and uses the International 1/4 Rule- rather than Doyle Rule. Thus we avoid underestimating timber volume from the narrower & shorter logs, which is a classic problem with tree measuring sticks. Because we didn’t need our stick to be 36″ long to measure the diameter of small roundwood, we made it 25″ long. This allows us to attach a 3-D printed angle gauge (a type of crusing prism), for variable radius plot cruising.

The 25″ length of the stick is the same distance that the angle gauge must be held from one’s eye. Thus you can hold the stick up to your face and look through the angle gauge, at the precisely correct distance from your face for conducting forest inventory.

I hope users will find adapting and combining these inventory tools to be very useful. If you would like to purchase one of these, please reach out to me through this website.



Badger Johnson for Paradise Ecological Services LLC