(Last Revised 10/31/2002)

As a matter of background, most of the lands owned by Mendocino Redwood Company were fully clearcut from the mid-to-late 1800's into the early 1900's. Logging practices at the time consisted of burning, clearcutting, dragging the logs down to the nearest river (often through the streambeds), and burning again. There have been a number of harvests since then that have concentrated on removing the highest value species of the day. The forests and streams are recovering from these past practices. Through responsible management, guided by a goal of restoring the conifer forest, this recovery will be accelerated.

MRC expects the health of the forests to improve significantly under its stewardship. To achieve this, we are using a significant amount of selection management in our silvicultural prescriptions (taking some trees while leaving others), and a significant amount of cable yarding in our harvesting (which minimizes ground disturbance). MRC harvests in some manner only about 3% of its total acreage each year, and expects to annually harvest under 2% of its merchantable inventory in the next several years (harvesting 2% of inventory is generally deemed to be a conservative harvest rate). MRC has practices in place to protect endangered species on its land and expects to demonstrate the wildlife habitat on its lands will improve over time as well.

Learn more about our protection guidelines:

• MRC's Management Plan
• Option A Report

MRC policies are intended to substantially improve the health of the forests and the standing inventory of trees over time. Since MRC is harvesting less than the growth of its forests, MRC's lands will evolve into a better stocked forest over time. In fact, we expect our standing volume of inventory to double within five decades.