Our Take on the 2026 Updated UVA Standards

by David Brynn
VFF Executive Director

At VFF we have a saying—”If it isn’t complicated, it isn’t conservation.” On May 31, the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation (FPR) put into effect its updated standards for forest plans and forest management for lands enrolled in Vermont’s Use Value Appraisal (UVA or Current Use) program. The first update since 2010, these new standards involve many new requirements for the planning process. Below, I’ll share my thoughts about these revisions and how they’ll affect forest landowners and VFF’s planning process. But first, I’d like to take a step back and look at the social, economic, and ecological context in which these UVA revisions are unfolding. 

As I see it, there are two fundamentally different ways to view our relationship with forests. One sees through the lens of forest resource management and the other through the lens of forest ecosystem conservation.  In A Sand County Almanac (1949), Aldo Leopold described these two perspectives as the A-B cleavage:

“Conservationists are notorious for their dissensions. Superficially these seem to add up to mere confusion, but a more careful scrutiny reveals a single plane of cleavage common to many specialized fields. In each field one group (A) regards the land as soil, and its function as commodity-production; another group (B) regards the land as a biota, and its function as something broader…. It worries on biotic as well as economic grounds about the loss of species like chestnut, and the threatened loss of the white pines. It worries about whole series of secondary forest functions: wildlife, recreation, watersheds, wilderness areas. …“

Within the realm of forestry, forest resource managers (Leopold’s Group A)  see forests as working when and if they produce commodities like timber and maple syrup. Forest ecosystem conservationists (Leopold’s Group B) see forests as working when they produce high quality water, diverse wildlife species, abundant CO₂ sequestration and storage, and flood and drought resilience in a rapidly changing climate. Moreover, Group B sees those forests as worked if commodity extraction comes at the expense of ecological health.

There are many players with stakes in how we relate to Vermont’s forested landscape—forest landowners, consulting foresters, FPR, the recreation industry, recreationists, the timber industry, woods workers, and every Vermonter who interacts with the rivers, lakes, roads, and community infrastructure affected by forest management practices that impact soil stability, stream sedimentation, and flood resiliency. The list goes on. We have public, private, and common interests, and many times these different interests involve very different strategies and perspectives while serving very different populations.

These diverse players and their differing priorities often come into conflict. Their differences need to be sorted out through a system in which all input is welcome and encouraged—a system in which that input is received by a body that is not weighted to Group A or Group B forestry, but is dedicated to finding solutions that are sustainable and good for Vermont in general and forest landowners in particular.

Back in the old days (i.e., the mid-1990s), the legislature empowered the Forest Resources Advisory Council (FRAC) to delve into and sort out these complex issues. FRAC’s board represented a variety of public, private, and common interests—forest commodity production, forest ownership, recreation, ecological health, ecosystem services, and more. Somewhere along the way, FRAC ended and Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources (ANR), with its Group A focus, became the primary arbiter of these issues. This has not worked well for many of the players and interests involved, including landowners. 

ANR’s decision-making is being guided primarily by the forest industry, which now includes many licensed consulting foresters. What is needed is a new decision-making organism that includes all the interests in some balanced representation, with a commitment to sustainable forestry. 

Sustainable forestry is much more than a flow of commodities into the market. It is, by definition, concurrently economically feasible, socially responsible, and ecologically viable. Some would say that, in terms of how we manage the land, more housing and taking better care of people is job one. Others say that stimulating the local economy is the top priority. Others believe ecology is job one—they remind us that without ecology there is no economy or community. 

The groundswell of opposition to Act 181 shows that our approach to land use and conservation must be socially responsible, economically feasible, and ecologically viable all at once! No small task, but a task that must be shouldered if the outcome is going to be effective and lasting. One of the opportunities that emerged from the recent rollback of Act 181 is to reimagine the processes by which we arrive at the roadmap forward. We are in a rapidly changing and unpredictable climate that will make us even more dependent on healthy forest ecosystems to help us weather the storms. Everyone has a role to play. No one has all the answers. There are many paths up truth mountain. All sustainability is local. Vergennes is different from Barre.

Revisions to the UVA Standards

So, that’s the backdrop for the recent revisions to the UVA Standards. Adopted into law in 1978, the UVA program began providing property tax relief in 1980. At that time, the decline of the forest industry was underway, but there were still many small mills dotting Vermont’s landscape. Many—most—of those mills are now gone, as most recently seen in the closing of A. Johnson Company in Bristol. Much of the high-value timber produced now in Vermont is exported as logs. Local value-adding opportunities available directly to landowners are few and far between. Consulting foresters have been inserted between landowners and the market to a great extent. 

At present, forestland in Vermont (when managed as forestland through UVA) is valued at $200/acre. This valuation makes clear that economic returns to owners of forestland pale when compared to housing developments and high-grade exploitation. It does not reflect the immense ecological and social value of healthy, intact, forests to our local communities, in terms of the many benefits of a landscape blanketed with healthy forests. These values are externalized—there’s no way for forest landowners to financially benefit from the ecological and social values of their land. 

UVA is heavily weighted toward timber production, and most landowners have little choice but to sell their trees into an undifferentiated commodity market—the only market  readily available to most family forest holders in Vermont—in which landowners generally see minimal financial return after paying all of the associated harvesting costs. 

UVA and VFF

At Vermont Family Forests, our clients are forests and forest landowners. We work with landowners to plan and carry out conservation and management of their forests. Much of that work involves creating or updating forest management plans (what we call conservation plans) for the UVA program. We focus on health and resilience of the ecological commons—water, wildlife, and atmospheric carbon—while helping landowners achieve their ownership objectives for their forestlands. We aim for long maturity ages and light, infrequent harvests conducted very carefully in substantial compliance with Optimal Conservation Practices. For many landowners who have a lot of their resources tied up in their lands, participating in Current Use is essential. As a result of their participation in UVA, Vermont’s landowners collectively receive about $75 million per year in property tax reductions.  

UVA continues to focus on timber procurement for the timber industry, despite the evidence that 50 years of this focus have not stemmed the demise of Vermont’s sawmills. UVA’s aim is to see products flowing out of forests and paying bills. The increasingly complex requirements of the UVA plan standards certainly ensure increased billing for consulting foresters.  Let’s say each acre grows about 0.66 cords per acre annually. At $30 per cord on the stump, that cord of wood has a gross stumpage value for the landowner of about $19 per acre per year. The net stumpage value might be $10 per acre per year or less for the landowner after paying the associated forestry costs. At $70 per hour, every hour a forester spends in the forest represents roughly the stumpage value to landowners for the annual timber production of 7 acres. This is one example representing returns from low-value products. Returns are higher for higher value sawlogs and veneer.

For landowners, actively managing their forests for timber as encouraged by FPR while carrying out practices that conserve ecology is a big challenge. The recent changes to the UVA plan standards have added layers of data collection and reporting, which means consulting foresters will be spending more time developing forest plans, which means higher costs to landowners. 

Here are some of the more significant changes:

• UVA forest management plans now need to report on the landowner’s compliance with the previous management plan—what the previous prescribed treatments were and whether or not the landowner complied with them.
• The plan needs to offer detailed, quantified assessments not previously required, including
  • Intensity of deer browse, by stand. 
  • Intensity of invasive plant presence, by stand.
  • Assessment of compliance with Vermont’s Acceptable Management Practices. Formerly this was on a complies/doesn’t comply basis. Now there is a murky middle ground: in process of compliance. 
  • Assessment of tree regeneration, by stand.
• The new UVA plan standards have watered down the Acceptable Management Practices. Natural regeneration of skid trails and truck roads can now be considered as complying with the AMPs.  This is not the way they were originally constructed and conceived. Actual erosion control structures for skid trails and truck roads had to be installed at specific intervals and maintained to achieve full compliance. 

At the same time as requiring detailed assessment of invasives, the UVA standards still promote industrial timber harvesting practices and the associated disturbance by logging machinery that is getting bigger while woodlots are getting smaller. Site disturbance and canopy openings roll out the welcome mat for invasive plants, as well as soil erosion, carbon release, and increased overland flow while disrupting habitats, reducing infiltration, and speeding and concentrating peak storm flows. 

At the end of the day, there is little evaluation within the new standards of the actual economic returns from tree farming, which focuses on timber production and stumpage, as compared with allowing forests to be more self-willed, doing their essential work of sequestering and storing carbon, mitigating flood and drought conditions, improving air and water quality, providing diverse wildlife habitat, and more—all without sending an invoice (aka Proforestation).

 The bottom line is that the new standards will require more time gathering forest data and more time documenting that data within the forest management plans. More hoops to jump through. That will likely translate into higher costs for landowners. Within these new parameters, Vermont Family Forests will continue to do our best to help forest landowners manifest their ownership objectives and safeguard the ecological health of the forest community while meeting the spirit and intent of UVA and hopefully without going broke.

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