When Katie Burnett, AS ’07, was 6 years old, her stay-at-home dad decided to start his own property management business. As one of the original “Mr. Mom” dads of the mid-1980s, Collin Burnett had been spending his days caring for his daughter, doing the shopping and preparing meals, while his wife, Sue, held a top administrative position at the University of Michigan. But, he also took the time to study botany and learn to identify different trees. His new business would not be purchasing land for development; rather, he was going to buy farmland and turn it into forest.

Through the federal Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), Burnett has spent the past 15 years obtaining farmland to remove it from production and plant trees on it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture established this program to reduce excess commodities such as corn by putting farmland into conservation uses. “The truth is, we have more farm ground than we can use. Reforesting takes it out of farm production and makes it permanent open space. When you put land into this program, you can’t develop it,” Burnett says.

Participants in the program are given a cost share and monthly payment to take farmland out of production for a specific length of time. In Burnett’s case, that timeframe is “probably forever,” he says, because he is planting hardwood trees on the property and may never see them reach maturity. “This is my way of giving back to the future,” he says.

To date, Burnett has planted about 27,000 walnut trees on 56 acres, and will plant another 70 acres over the next two years. He owns a total of 400 acres on the lower peninsula of Michigan, with properties ranging in size from 5 to 111 acres. The land includes both farmland that he is reforesting and some timber property that he selectively harvests.

As the owner and sole employee of his firm, Farm and Forest Enterprises, Burnett enjoys setting his own pace on such tasks as planting, weeding and pruning. He has fibromyalgia, a disease that causes pain in the muscles, ligaments and tendons, as well as fatigue. The pain comes and goes, he says, limiting his physical activity at times. “On good days, I can go out. The trees are patient. Trees can wait for me to do what I have to do,” he says.

Despite his chronic medical condition and the challenges he has undertaken in reforesting large tracts of land, Burnett still finds time to volunteer for a number of forestry organizations. He serves as president of the Michigan chapter of the Walnut Council, an international organization that promotes sustainable forest management, reforestation and the utilization of the American black walnut and other fine hardwoods. He also is treasurer and a board member of the Michigan Forest Association, which promotes good management of forest land and focuses heavily on education. “We have a program that goes directly to schools, and an intensive one-week forestry mini-course for teachers. We also have an educational trailer that we take to places like fairs, farm shows and Boy Scout troops,” he explains.

In both his business and his volunteer work, Burnett strives to address and overcome some of the misperceptions that people have about forest management. “Many people think old growth is forever, but nature allows only pockets of old growth, and it is always changing. Old growth is a stage in the natural cycle of death and destruction in the forest that humans have tried to stop, which is part of the problem with fires in the West,” he says. “If we do not harvest in some situations, nature will do it anyway. Big trees die naturally, wind storms come through and destroy timber and there are fires. And, contrary to popular belief, old growth is not the best habitat for critters. Many animals prefer a disturbed area. They like the young trees. When it becomes a mature tree, deer can’t find any food.”

In planting his acreage, one of the biggest challenges Burnett faces is the unnaturally large population of whitetail deer, which like to munch on his walnut saplings. The solution is to plant extra for the deer, do other special plantings to feed the deer away from the crop of trees and lease the land to deer hunters. “You have to harvest almost one half of the deer population each year to actually reduce the population,” he says. “Nature would not allow such a large deer population on its own. There would be predators and other calamities. When we circumvent the natural processes, we short-circuit the system. People and nature are very intertwined; our actions affect both our forests and our animals.”

Burnett says he hopes that more people will come to understand that conservation is all about the wise use of natural resources. Forests can be improved if timber harvesting is done right, he says. “You can harvest timber in a hardwood woods every 12 to 15 years, and, if you do it selectively, you can actually end up with as much or more good timber the next time. The forest can yield many benefits. You can properly manage forestland for timber production and still get recreational, visual and habitat benefits,” Burnett says. “That is what forestry tries to do.”

Collin Burnett lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., with his wife, Sue, who retired in 2002 as executive assistant to the executive vice president and chief financial officer at the University of Michigan. Their daughter, Katie, is a UD junior majoring in anthropology.