It would be a complete understatement to say that German-born, British Columbia professional forester Rainer Muenter has worked for some interesting clients throughout his career. Take His Royal Highness Duke Carl Herzog von Wurttemberg, for example.

The Duke owned a private managed forest in British Columbia called the Darkwoods Forest consisting of about 55,000 hectares in the West Kootenay area of the province.

Acquired in 1967, this remote parcel of land was sold in 2008 by the Duke to the Nature Conservancy of Canada to conserve its multitude of ecological values including important caribou habitat.

Muenter worked there as a forestry intern in 1980, helping to manage this private forest for the Duke.

“Like many visitors, I was just in awe with the scale and wideness of the country and the forest,” says Muenter, speaking about his first forestry experience in Canada.

He obtained a Bachelor of Forestry degree from Goettingen, Germany and then a Master of Science Degree in Forestry from the University of Idaho, becoming an expert in management of both uneven-aged and even-aged forest stands.

German-born, veteran B.C. forester Rainer Muenter (above) has focused exclusively on professional forest management through his company, Monticola Forest, for private forest holdings in B.C. owned by prominent German families.

Muenter’s first job after university was working in Germany as a forest manager at Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg’sche Kammer, which is a private estate that harvests about 70,000 cubic metres annually. His main job was to convert plantation forests into multi-story stands by applying even-aged and uneven-aged forest management techniques, with the goal of creating a long-term, sustainable, commercial forest for the estate owner.

Muenter returned to Canada with his wife, Maureen Muenter-Anderson, and their family and became a permanent resident in 1990. They established Monticola Forest Ltd. in Fruitvale, B.C., offering comprehensive forest management and consulting services to private forest landowners, woodlot licensees, Community Forest licensees, and ski hill operators, while also managing their own woodlot license areas. Among their clients were—and continue to be—several prominent German families with land holdings in the province.

Over his career, Muenter has worked steadily as a forest manager on various projects in B.C., such as managing the grassland-forest interface on the massive Douglas Lake Ranch, managing the Texada Island Forest Reserve, and managing the Kaslo Community Forest. But for the past five years, he and his wife have been focused primarily on managing about 30,000 hectares, with 90 per cent of their business being with private managed forest owners with holdings ranging from 400 hectares to 15,000 hectares. The forests are located primarily in the Nelson, Creston and Rossland areas of B.C.’s Kootenay region.

Beyond Monticola’s own forest holdings, the company only has 10 clients. All are German families and indeed, some are German aristocrats. They came to acquire various sizes of private commercial woodlots in Canada primarily because of the Cold War.

According to Muenter, Canadian
railway companies in the past were deeded thousands of hectares of private land by the government to provide rights-of-way for track.

“When the gold and silver rush was going on in the Kootenays, the government had no funds but wanted to put in infrastructure to develop it,” he says. “So they commissioned railroads and paid them with 10,000 hectares per mile, and that created the private land on Vancouver Island with Mosaic Forest Management, as well as in the Kootenays and a strip of land from Revelstoke all the way to Hope. This area (in the Kootenays) has the highest concentration of private forestland in the province.”

One of the chronic challenges Monticola Forest faces is actually finding contractors with the right combination of specialized equipment and operator experience to achieve their harvesting objectives. One reason for that is that until recently, there was little interest in commercial thinning in B.C. “It’s still a niche market,” says Rainer Muenter.

A significant amount of that private land was purchased in the 1960s by German families, the sales pitch being that they’d have a safe place to escape to in case Germany was attacked by the Russians during the Cold War and Cuba Missile Crisis. However, the Russians never attacked and they remained German residents, leaving them with ownership of all these parcels of private land consisting of many hectares of merchantable timber.

Given their European background and how private forests are managed in that part of the world, they understood the value of this forest resource, knowing that if it was managed in a sustainable manner, it could be passed from one generation to another as a valuable asset. But they needed professional forest management and given his German background, his experience in forest management in both Europe and North America, residency in B.C., and experience managing his own private woodlot, that’s where Muenter and Monticola Forest entered into the picture.

Muenter himself understands the value of private woodlot ownership, going so far as to sell the family’s SUV to come up with the $10,000 down payment to purchase his first 32-hectare woodlot with a family friend in 1997.

“The idea of wanting to own a forest is every forester’s wish, but also to build a family asset,” he says. “It had very humble beginnings.”

B.C. requires that an individual be a private landowner before applying for a woodlot license, which Muenter finally purchased on his own in 2010.

The private managed forests under Monticola’s management are part of a group of private forests operating under the provincial government’s Private Managed Forest Land Act passed in 1988.

The goal of the act is to encourage private landowners to manage their lands for long-term forest production, the carrot being that they can qualify for a special tax assessment category that provides them with favorable tax treatment if they meet certain management criteria.

B.C. has also established the Managed Forest Council, consisting of two government appointees, two private managed forest operators and an independent chairperson agreeable to both parties. The council provides the administration of the private managed forest regulations, which essentially ensures that members qualify and maintain regulation management standards through annual inspections. A managed private forest under this program must be at least 25 hectares.

The organization began with about 60 managed forests and now has several hundred. Private managed forests only represent about five per cent of the total commercial forest in B.C., but in some areas, the wood fibre harvested from them represents up to 20 per cent of the annual harvest for that area. Owners of private managed forests also market logs to buyers on the export market, although this is strictly controlled by the province.

The West Kootenay wood basket under Monticola’s management consists of 12 different coniferous species and three hardwood species. In their Coastal management holdings, there are four different commercial species. They export about 25 per cent of their logs to U.S. and international markets, while selling the rest to local sawmills.

In addition to providing professional forest management to private woodlot owners in south-central B.C., Monticola Forest is also the professional forest manager for the Texada Island Forest Reserve, on the B.C. Coast. Over his career, Rainer Muenter has worked steadily as a forest manager on various projects in B.C., such as managing the grassland-forest interface on the massive Douglas Lake Ranch, south of Kamloops.

Muenter says that the motivation initially for many landowners who joined the Managed Forest program was financial because of the favorable tax treatment they received from the province. But over time that benefit has dwindled, he says, adding that local land assessment has evolved so that the tax break is not so favorable as it once was.

“There still is an advantage but it’s not a huge advantage compared to being just a rural residential taxpayer,” he says, adding that having protection under provincial legislation against local political decisions that could negatively impact sustainable forest management on these private woodlots is actually, in his opinion, the biggest benefit for landowners at present.

In terms of his forest management approach, Muenter says, “I’m actually as much influenced by my education in the U.S. as my German education because of the ecosystems I studied at the University of Idaho. The forests in Idaho are the same as in southern B.C.”

However, a fundamental ideal behind his approach is multi-generational ownership and having an asset to turn over to the next generation, and maybe even passed on in a better state.

“That is inherent in the European idea of owning land and forest, and that’s what our clients and investors demand in Canada,” he says. “That inter-generational wealth aspect is what really drives our management and allows me to do things that are not common.”

For example, he prescribes a considerable amount of selective logging and commercial thinning, with half the trees and the best trees left standing in many cases to maintain the long term health of the forest. Doing this—if he only had a profit and rate-of-return target—wouldn’t be the best approach since it significantly reduces cash flow, he says. But with a longer term vision, there is an economic justification to pursue that approach and private landowners have an advantage in that they have valuable assets worth preserving in both the land and standing trees.

Muenter is not opposed to clearcut logging, which he calls “final harvest” and it is applied to about 50 per cent of their annual logging activities using conventional feller bunchers. But Monticola takes a different approach compared to other large leaseholders, choosing to leave significantly more younger trees standing, if they are vigorous enough, in their prescriptions.

Another 50 per cent of their annual harvest is selective logging in forests deemed vigorous and healthy enough to respond well to this approach. Muenter says that it takes some skill to be able to identify these opportunities.

Since they also put a priority on maintaining soil productivity as an asset, this influences their logging approach. A considerable amount of their merchantable timber is on steep ground. So they use cable logging as much as possible, which also contributes to maintenance of soil productivity.

About 10 years ago, they switched to employing contractors with harvesters and forwarders in selective logging to replace a fleet of small Cat skidder owner/operators who eventually retired. One of the chronic challenges Muenter faces is actually finding contractors with the right combination of specialized equipment and operator experience to achieve their harvesting objectives. One reason is that until recently, there was little interest in commercial thinning in B.C., where most harvesters and forwarders are used.

“It’s still a niche market and the three contractors we work with have a hard time finding operators,” Muenter says. Most are actually owner/operators or hire operators who come from Eastern Canada or Europe, where many operators have two or three years of formal training in forest machine operation.