BOARDMAN – When the Potlatch Corporation established its hybrid poplar farm near Boardman in 1992, its goal was to send all the harvested wood to its pulp mill in Idaho.

But now 10 years later, not a single one of those trees has ever made it there.

Potlatch began planting the fast-growing poplars here in 1994, after changes in federal law reduced the amount of timber cut on national forest lands. Worried about maintaining a steady supply of pulp for its mill in Lewiston, Idaho, Potlatch decided to go into the tree-farming business.

“We were thinking there would eventually be limits on how much pulp we could get, so we figured the best option would be to plant and harvest our own,” said Greg Uhlorn, project manager at the Boardman tree farm.

But when the anticipated wood pulp shortage failed to materialize, and the bottom dropped out of the pulp market, the company began to research new uses for its crop. Several Northwest mills have provided a market for wood chips from the farm, but most of the poplars grown at the farm today will be turned into lumber and plywood.

Switching over from pulp to solid wood production meant the farm operation had to take a new approach. When the first crop was planted from cuttings in 1992, the first harvest was expected to take place in seven years, after the trees had reached a height of more than 70 feet and about seven inches in diameter. But wood from the the slender trees isn’t big enough for use as lumber, so the company began to plant the trees further apart and is giving them another four years to grow large enough to cut into boards. And to improve the appearance of the final product, workers prune away the lower branches to reduce the number of knots in the wood.

“Clear lumber opens different markets for different products,” said Uhlorn, noting that the light-colored hybrid poplar wood is being used for interior building trim and furniture, among other uses.

Wood produced at the farm will be processed into lumber at the Kinzua plant at Pilot Rock, with each tree yielding about 100 board feet. With the market for new wood species like poplar still somewhat uncertain, Potlatch has opted to sell 5,000 acres of the original 22,000-acre farm, Uhlorn said. The land will be purchased by local farmers who have been leasing it to farm more traditional crops like onions, potatoes and wheat.

“We were looking at the value of the land for circle ground versus the cost of putting in the drip irrigation for trees, and thought it was a good economic decision to sell,” Uhlorn said.

Hybridized from species that thrive in a streamside environment, the poplars are thirsty trees. As a result, the farm could not succeed in semi-arid northeast Oregon without the availability of plenty of water. With close to 300 trees per acre, the 17,000 acres in production use as much as 100,000 gallons of Columbia River water per minute during the peak of the dry season, all delivered through an elaborate computerized drip irrigation system designed to deliver water with minimal waste. According to Uhlorn, water loss through evaporation is only about 5 percent.

The elaborate pattern of drip irrigation pipes also provide a side benefit. If anyone ever got lost in the miles of towering poplars, the pipes could lead them back to safety.

“It can get almost dizzying to be out there in the middle of the trees,” Uhlorn said. “But if you ever got lost in there, you could always find one of the drip tubes and follow it out to the road.”

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Reporter Kasia Pierzga can be reached at 1-800-522-0255 (ext. 1-303 after hours) or e-mail: kpierzga@eastoregonian.com.