Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - This has been the Cortes Community Forest’s most profitable year, but that is not the Cortes Forestry General Partnership’s only objective. “I always start with what areas do we want to keep,” explained General Manager Mark Lombard. He used a recent conversation to illustrate how Cortes is taking a different approach than the industry at large. A well respected logger from Quadra Island asked why the General Partnership was leaving two healthy stands of cedar untouched. “Why aren't you going to harvest the cedars? Cedar prices are really good,” the fellow said.“How much of that is there on Quadra Island?” responded Lombard. “There's none. There's not even one stand like that.” “And I said, “That's why we're not going into that area.’” The General Partnership set a goal of cutting only 15-20% of the forest’s mean annual incremental growth (MAI) in their harvest area. If allowed to continue, the part of Cortes Island under their control will eventually be populated by an old growth forest. Lombard emailed the statistics after our interview. The Ministry of Forest allocates the cut on a five-year basis and the community forests first year control period ended on March 31 of this year. At that point, the partnership has harvested 15.8% of the forests mean annual increment of 68,000 m3. There is a year by year breakdown of this figure in the written version of this broadcastBreaking the cut rate down into individual years: 2017 - 429 m3, 2018 - 1,783 m3, 2019 - 650 m3, 2020 - 1,012 m32021 - 2,500 m32022 - 4,400 m3The cut was larger than initially planned for 2022 for a number of reasons, but the primary one is root rot. “The thing that caught my attention when the first time I went through the forest was, ‘why are so many fir trees down?’ Everywhere you walk there were a lot of 100 -120 year old trees down on the ground,” he explained. “It turns out that there was a really high concentration of Armillaria ostoyae and Phellinus weirii , the root rots that are most prevalent on Cortes.”“We have a chance to reforest it, and leave a healthy forest for the next generation,” said Lombard.Log markets are strong right now. The General Partnership received about $900,000 in revenues for the 6,900 cubic metres of timber harvested in 2021 and 2022. This will replenish the partnership’s bank account.