Log Characteristics and Sawn Timber Recovery of Home-Garden Teak from Wet and Dry Localities of Kerala, India

Abstract

There is a widely held view among smallholders that teak timber produced from small-scale agroforestry systems, especially home-garden forestry, fetches a lower price than that from conventional plantation forestry. To examine the veracity of this view, the wood quality attributes of teak from two home gardens in the district of Ernakulam (wet site) and Palakkad (dry site) in India were compared to those of forest plantation in Nilambur. The logs were graded using standard timber trade practices into high, medium and low quality as determined by the potential sawn timber grade-yield recovery pattern. Of 96 home garden teak logs (aged 35 years) from wet and dry sites, 59% belonged to timber Grade II–IV and the rest were classified as poles. Grade I logs (export quality) with a girth above 150 cm were not available from either of the homesteads. Faster-grown teak in the wet site produced large diameter logs (dbh 1.37 m) with average diameter of 39.6 cm, which is comparable to that of best site quality in India. In contrast, the average dbh for teak grown in the dry site was 24 cm as compared to the average dbh of 31 cm recorded from the same aged forest plantation in Nilambur. It was found that only 10% of logs belonged to Grade II timber and the rest fell under grades III and IV with more frequent visual defects. The sawn timber recovery percentage was lower for the dry site (66.8%), whereas there was no significant difference in grade from the wet and forest plantation sites, with recovery rates of 76.5% and 78.8%, respectively. The general notion that home garden teak has a large proportion of sapwood seems to be baseless, no significant difference being found between the heartwood-sapwood ratio of home-garden and forest plantation teak. Lack of appropriate silvicultural practices in home-garden forestry caused the production of more defective logs, adversely affecting the market price of timber.