[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/news\/amazing-little-trees\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/news\/amazing-little-trees\/","headline":"Amazing Little Trees","name":"Amazing Little Trees","description":"Grover Plunkett with Wendy Burton, founder of World Tree By Loren Howell Grover Plunkett teaches political science and history at Faulkner University. He is also a cattle farmer in North Alabama, and more recently, a tree farmer. Plunkett has been…","datePublished":"2020-05-14","dateModified":"2020-05-22","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/author\/lhowell\/#Person","name":"Loren Howell","url":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/author\/lhowell\/","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/340a870b1aca0e68f5f713f9151b24ae?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/340a870b1aca0e68f5f713f9151b24ae?s=96&d=mm&r=g","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Faulkner University","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/Official-Horizontal-480x128.png","url":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/Official-Horizontal-480x128.png","width":480,"height":128}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/trees.jpg","url":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/trees.jpg","height":148,"width":315},"url":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/news\/amazing-little-trees\/","about":["Community","Highlights","News"],"wordCount":1027,"articleBody":"Grover Plunkett with Wendy Burton, founder of World TreeBy Loren HowellGrover Plunkett teaches political science and history at Faulkner University. He is also a cattle farmer in North Alabama, and more recently, a tree farmer. Plunkett has been busy planting Empress Splendor trees on his family farm in conjunction with World Tree. Tell us a little about World Tree. World Tree is a company that is devoted to trying to mitigate the effects of climate change. Several years ago they started a plan that would get people to plant more trees. This particular tree that they’ve done so much research on, the Empress Splendor tree, they’ve realized can produce a great deal of marketable lumber. So they’re promoting the Empress Splendor tree to, number one, mitigate carbon from the atmosphere and number two, to generate an income from farm land. Faulkner Magazine: How did you find out about World Tree?A gentlemen at our church was telling me about some different ideas he and his son had to do with their property. I had been telling my family, my wife and daughters and son- in-law who make up our family business, I told them that we needed to be looking for additional income streams for our farm because cattle prices were falling. We needed to look for something that would pick up the slack and make our land more productive. We just had so much land that was not producing any income of any sort, so my daughter contacted World Tree.Faulkner Magazine: Did you buy the trees?World Tree gives us the trees for free with the commitment to plant them. We invest our time and labor. At the harvest, we’ll share the revenue with World Tree. Faulkner Magazine: When did you start planting the trees?In the late summer of 2018 we began to plant Empress trees. We should have nearly 300 acres planted at the end of the planting season, which is the end of May. By the end of this year we will have close to 20,000 trees planted. It’s a lot of trees but it’s an amazing little treeFaulkner Magazine: What makes this tree so amazing?This tree is the fastest growing hardwood tree in the world and it mitigates 11 times more carbon than anything else out there. We have some trees that are approaching 8 inches in diameter after two years. You can almost watch it grow. The tree re-grows from the stump once you cut it, up to seven times. There’s an amazingamount of nectar in the blossoms of these trees, and it’s a special nectar thatbees turn into a special type of honey that is low in fructose and sucrose.Because of that’ it’s a honey that diabetics can eat without spiking theirblood sugar. Faulkner Magazine: When will you harvest the trees? Probably the first trees will be harvested in 2025, and beginning in 2025 we will harvest trees every year. And when I say every year, if you plant 20 acres of these trees every year for 10 years, because the tree re-grows from the stump once you cut it, it will generate a perpetual income for 490 years. Faulkner Magazine: What can the lumber be used for? It is 30% stronger than pine, so anything that you would use pine for structurally this is perfectly good for that. It’s great for veneer. It’s used in wall paneling, musical instruments. It’s also used to produce sporting equipment like surfboards, kayaks and canoes. And the folks that use surfboards, kayaks and canoes are usually environmentally conscious people so they want to move away from fiberglass and go with something that’s more environmentally friendly. Faulkner Magazine: Did the environmental aspect of planting these trees play a role in your decision to work with World Tree? We’re cattlemen. We have a lot of cattle on our place in North Alabama. The beef industry has been attacked by environmentalists who claim that our cattle are a detriment to the environment, that we are somehow adversely affecting the atmosphere because of methane gasses that are emitted by cattle. But if we complete our goal by planting 2,500 acres of these trees then we will mitigate the carbon footprint of every cattleman of Alabama. Faulkner Magazine: What’s next?Everything that we do is all about our family, my grandchildren and my children. Proverbs 13:22 teaches that \u201ca righteous man will leave an inheritance to his children\u2019s children.\u201d I try to think generationally and instill in my children and grandchildren a love for the land and the security of having a place that will be home as long as they want it to be. I love these words of George Eliot:            \u201cA humanlife, I think, should be well rooted in some spot ofnative land, where it may get the love of tender kinship fortheface of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for thesoundsand accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that earlyhomea familiar unmistakable difference amid the future wideningofknowledge\u2026 The best introduction to astronomy is to think ofthe nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging toone\u2019sown homestead.\u201dWe’re doing this to create a way in which we can retain theagricultural character of our land and produce an income from it that wouldallow my children and grandchildren to live there and make a good living off ofcattle and timber and honey for a long, long time. The big reason most young people don’t want to be farmers isthat you don’t make a lot of money. You’re working like crazy and you justdon’t ever make a lot of money, and so we’re losing farmers every day. We’relosing farmland at a rate of about 40 acres per minute to development. Somebodyhas got to make farming attractive to young people so that they’ll stay thereand try to sustain an ongoing farming operation. "},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"News","item":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/news\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Amazing Little Trees","item":"https:\/\/www.faulkner.edu\/news\/amazing-little-trees\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]