Department of Environmental Protection

Private Lands Management Program

New Jersey Tree Farm Day

NJTFD is when private landowners enrolled in the American Tree Farm System get together with representatives of the NJ Tree Farm System, NJFS, NJ Approved Consulting Foresters, Rutgers Cooperative Extension, and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service to observe forestry activities in New Jersey. The Outstanding Tree Farmer of the Year is also recognized.
The OTF is a person(s) who have performed various silvicultural activities on their property over the years to improve the timber resource, forest health, water quantity and quality, and wildlife diversity. These activities range from tree planting to timber stand improvement, insect and disease prevention and suppression, wildfire protection, and construction of wildlife food plots, brush piles and nest boxes. NJTFD occurs every year on the first Friday in June.

View a Slideshow of NJTFD 2001 (MPEG 304 Kb : 80 sec.) The Slideshow is a series of 8 digital photos that display for a period of 10 seconds each. The Slideshow can be stopped at any time to view individual photos longer by pressing the stop button on the media player. Press play to resume.

The Slideshow includes:

NJ Approved Consulting Forester educating NJTFD participants on forest management activities - tree harvesting, site preparation, tree planting, forest health and vitality, and thinning
US Army Forester explaining thinning of a white pine plantation on Federal Property to increase growth rates and general forest health
A USDA - NRCS Forester explaining a riparian buffer planting that was performed in 1999 to reduce erosion, expense of mowing, and to increase wildlife habitat diversity.

If you need an MPEG video player the software can be downloaded from one of the following sites.

The Private Lands Management Program fosters and ensures wise stewardship and management on 1.54 million acres of forest lands owned by 88,700 private landowners and the retention of these lands in contiguous and productive forests. This program administers the stewardship, rural forestry assistance, woodland assessment, wetlands and consultant forester projects of the Forest Service. The stewardship and rural forestry assistance projects are designed to provide professional forestry assistance to private landowners utilizing a minimum of public resources by forming partnerships with private consulting foresters. The NJ Forest Service limits its assistance to a single visit for the purposes of motivating landowners to practice forest stewardship, explaining cost share assistance and encouraging private landowners to seek private professional forestry assistance.

A critical component of this program is the administration of the rule and regulations pertaining to farmland/woodland assessment; this requires the review of approximately 3,000 applications and field inspections of a portion of these annually.
This program also administers N.J.A.C. 7:3-2, which deals with establishing and maintaining a list of foresters approved by the Department for the purpose of annually attesting to compliance with the woodland management plan required by N.J.A.C. 54:4-23.3 (Woodland Assessment)
The management and stewardship of privately owned forests is encouraged through various NJFS administrative programs, the Forest Stewardship Program (FSP), the Forest Land Enhancement Program (FLEP) and Forest Resource Management (FRM), which are designed to provide technical and cost share assistance.
Additionally, this program administers portions of the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act (N.J.S.A. 13:913-1 et.seq.) which exempts certain forestry activities when included in a plan approved by the State Forester.

Programs for Landowners

[Tree Farm Information]

Forest Stewardship Program

Farmlands Assessment Program

New Jersey Tree Farm Program

For more information on how and why to manage your woodlot please visit The Forest Landowner's Guide to Internet Resources.

Forest Land Enhancement Program (FLEP) - is a Federal Program established to provide additional financial assistance to State Foresters to encourage the long-term sustainability of non-industrial private forestlands (NIPF). The following two-(2) documents outline NJ Forest Service's intentions and priorities to provide assistance to woodland owners.

For more information about the program please download the following Portable Document File (PDF) NJFLEP.pdf

You will need Adobe Acrobat to view these files