Burning Acres of Trees North of Woodstck? There Must be a Better Way

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TWI Columnist Lisa Haderlein

Change is hard. And, every change is for better or worse, depending upon your perspective. Change is particularly hard when it happens quickly. Im sorry, but telling me its easier if you just rip the bandage off quickly doesnt lessen the pain.

I have no doubt the 400 acres of trees and shrubs bulldozed and left burning in giant brush piles certainly looked worse to the hundreds of neighbors on the north side of Woodstock.

To the landowners, the end result of the land-clearing looked better after getting rid of the over-grown, unkempt nursery stock and opening the land up for row-crop farming. I have no doubt the phrase were making progress was used during the operation.

Thats right, 400 acres of nursery stock were bulldozed and burned north of Woodstock in recent weeks. Thousands of trees are gone forever. Some were quite mature decades old. The nursery had become a wildlife area in a way, with many birds and other critters finding homes there over the years. Now there is just open, bare ground.

The land will be farmed. Well, technically, the nursery was always a farm, so the land will still be farmed its just that a perennial crop of trees and shrubs that were harvested over the years based on the publics desire for landscape material is being replaced with an annual crop that will likely rotate between corn and soybeans.

Nothing to see here was more-or-less the official response from the county officials I contacted. It is farmland, and state law gives farmers a lot of latitude in managing their land. The owners have all their permits. They are following all the proper regulations. There is no law that says a farmer has to tell anyone about his plans to change crops.

The city of Woodstock had no notice either. The land is in the countys jurisdiction, and the affected neighbors live in the city.

The neighbors knew the nursery was private land. Some even remember when the nursery actively managed the trees and shrubs before the housing crash. They just never imagined that new owners could bulldoze thousands of trees and shrubs and burn them in giant piles, day and night, without telling the neighbors.

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Burning Acres of Trees North of Woodstck? There Must be a Better Way