Missouri
Harlan Palm, President

The Missouri Chapter will have their fall tour in Caldwell County about 50 miles NE of Kansas City. Jim and Schatzi Ball have an assortment of native timber that has had considerable timber stand improvement done to it, thousands of various hardwood species have been planted on open fields with various soil types, and a trickle irrigated grape vineyards. A few miles away, there is a large walnut and oak log aggregation and sorting yard. We hope to gain permission and cooperation from that establishment to discuss log quality and value. As soon as the date of the tour has been selected, it will be posted on the Walnut Council website.

Wisconsin
John Ouellette, President

Since our last report in November, we have had our usual beginning of the year board meeting, took care of all the major committees with appropriate board members and have scheduled our events of the year. Many of our WWC members are also members of the Wisconsin Woodland Owners Association (WWOA). Because of the dual membership, we are able to have quality meetings that are very well attended. We attempt to recruit WWOA members to our WWC at these meetings.

The WWOA members have a much broader approach to tree farm activities such as bird watching and other hobby farm activities but also share many of the concerns of the private land owner. The WWOA has a strong active political action group that deals with legislative issues such as Managed Forest Law rule changes. The WWC primary mission relates more to the scientific approach to tree selection, planting, pruning, thinning and all the steps that it takes to end up with valuable marketable hard wood trees. The two groups complement each other very well and share many common needs.

One of the other projects that we have been working with is the WWC exhibit tri-fold and website. We have added a monitor to our exhibit which allows us to use our laptops for quick reference to questions that may come up when we are attending meetings that relate to our WWC subject matter. We have a website at the moment, but there is always the need for improvement. We believe that the website can be a great source of information to those interested in what the WWC has to offer.