North Carolina State University will soon be without one of its forests.
The Board of Trustees of NCSU’s Endowment Fund has agreed to sell the 79,000-acre Hofmann Forest to an Illinois-based agriculture business company for $150 million, the university announced last Tuesday.
“It just wasn’t a great investment anymore,” said Robert Brown, former dean of NCSU’s College of Natural Resources. “Our income from the forest has dropped almost 60 percent.”
According to a press release by the university, the sale will generate an annual return of interest estimated at $6 million for the benefit of CNR. This is more than three times the current annual yield from the forest, which has been approximately $2 million annually but dropped to $861,000 last year.
The benefits generated from the sale will go toward promoting research and academic resources within CNR, Brown said, and will be the largest endowment the college has ever received. It will also replace previously lost money in salaries, scholarships and student clubs. He added that there has been discussion about spending $10 million of the endowment on a new building for CNR on the NSCU campus.
Too far to use
The Hofmann Forest, located near Jacksonville and about 118 miles away from NCSU, was gifted to the N.C. State Endowment Fund in 1977 specifically to aid the CNR.
“The Hofmann Forest was intended to be a teaching research forest and at one time it was used for teaching,” Brown said. “But it was just too far away for the researchers to use much.”
Because it is not frequently used now, Brown noted that the sale of the forest will not affect future research. The majority of the university’s outdoor education is currently conducted at Hill Demonstration Forest and Carl Alwin Schenck Memorial Forest, where the university has facilities including dorms, air-conditioned classrooms and dining halls.
Hill and Schenck are approximately 33.4 and 4.8 miles away from the university, respectively.
“Only 2 percent of research was done in Hofmann,” Brown added. “It became strictly an income generator.”
Brown noted that the three criteria for the sale of the forest were protecting the legacy of the Hofmann Forest by preserving the name, ensuring access to long-term research projects in the forest for students and professors and guaranteeing that the forest would be a working forest. The Illinois-based agri-business that is buying the forest was the only potential buyer that agreed to all three terms, Brown said.
‘An irreplaceable asset’
CNR forest manager Joe Cox said that the university’s decision to sell the forest has upset quite a few people, including himself. He noted that the decision has affected faculty who are attached to the forest and see the forest as part of their identity.
“This upset me so much that I am going to retire at the end of this year,” he said. “It turns me off in the way that they manage their fund. It raises the question of what the future of forestry might be in this university.”
Students will also be affected by the sale, Cox said, noting that fewer opportunities will be available in forestry training as a result of the sale.
“When the forest was owned by the university, students were given projects down there and were hired to do work,” he added. “But this is less likely to happen since the forest is no longer a university property.”
Ron Sutherland, Nicholas ‘13, a conservation scientist at the Wildlands Network, said that even though the buyer has guaranteed researchers access to the forest, this condition might change in the future if the forest is sold to a subsequent buyer.
NCSU’s press release noted that the agreement with the Illinois company recognizes the U.S. Department of Defense interest in obtaining a 70,000 acre military easement for aviation training.
Sutherland pointed out that the sale of Hofmann Forest could have a huge environmental impact. The forest connects natural forests in the West and large game lands to the Southwest, and needs to remain intact to preserve this continuity. Increased agribusiness in the forest could also have a negative impact on the water quality of rivers flowing out of the forest, he said.
Sutherland started a petition to stop the sale in January, which has garnered 1,331 signatures so far. He noted that selling the forest, a public property, without any protection is a violation of the State Environmental Policy Act and the state constitution.
Both Sutherland and Cox complained about the lack of transparency in the university’s decision process.
“This whole thing is being handled in a very non-open air,” Cox said. “They haven’t given [faculty] any detail of who the buyer was until the official announcement.”
The university could have improved the process by asking faculty for opinions before the sale, Sutherland added.
“They are losing an irreplaceable asset,” he said.
Hitting close to home
Sutherland noted that the Hofmann Forest sale can serve as a lesson for the Duke Forest as well.
“I don’t think the Duke Forest is any more protected than Hofmann Forest,” he said. “If people start to look at one of their tracts of land as fairly dispensable and say, ‘Hey, we can make x hundred million dollars selling five acres,’ and if somebody high up in the administration wants to push that, it’d be pretty hard to stop.”
He noted that part of the reason why response to the sale at NCSU has been muted is that the Hofmann Forest is fairly remote and many undergraduates have never been to it.
“Hopefully the Duke Forest is used enough that people are pretty attached,” Sutherland said. “The big take-home is that people need to be ready to do something quick if something like the sale comes up.”
Duke Forest Resource Manager Judson Edeburn said that the situation at Duke is very different from that of Hofmann Forest.
“Our students are quite attached to it,” Edeburn said. “Duke Forest is a teaching and research laboratory with benefits for students and faculty who need an outdoor experience for exercise or for conducting research.”
Edeburn added that in the 1980s some sections of the forest were deemed not vital and sold in order to allow for the purchase of other beneficial pieces of land. He said that there is no plan to sell the forest in the future.
“Having 8,000 acres of forest in one block is very unique,” he said. “As long as it is meeting our goals for research and the University deems it important, the future is well-assured.”
Correction: This article has been adjusted to reflect that Hofman Forest is only one of NCSU's forests and that 1,331 individuals have signed Sutherland's petition, not 216.
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