Word: forester
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...past nine years, under a veil of semisecrecy, Ludwig has spent more than $200 million on his Amazon company, Jari Forest Products, and he plans to lay out another $300 million in the next two or three years. Jari, named for the muddy, winding Amazon tributary that runs through the Ludwig property, is engaged in transforming a vast stretch of virtually unpopulated jungle into a self-contained commercial kingdom. Already it has half a dozen airstrips serviced by Jari planes, hundreds of miles of roads well traveled by a fleet of more than 500 Jari cars and trucks...
Jungle Crushers. Starting a timber business has involved Ludwig in a coals-to-Newcastle operation: cutting down jungle in order to plant new trees. The native forest contains far too many species of trees?more than 300 different kinds on any given acre?for profitable lumbering. At a cost of $250,000 each, Ludwig imported giant Caterpillar "jungle crushers," overgrown bulldozers designed to pull down the natural jungle growth. But these machines proved useless because they damaged the unexpectedly delicate Amazon topsoil. Today one of the jungle crushers stands abandoned and rusting on the outskirts of Monte Dourado...
...Time Wasted. The jungle crushers were not Ludwig's only costly miscalculation. In place of the native forest he planned to plant broad tracts of Gmelina, a fast-growing Asian tree that takes a mere ten years to reach the age when it can be cut for lumber and pulp. In contrast, American cottonwood, which is similar to Gmelina in quality and yield, requires at least 30 years to reach maturity. But again the Amazon proved more complex than Ludwig's experts imagined. His property contained at least two distinct types of soil, one unsuitable for Gmelina. Now about...
...super dredging machine that got hopelessly mired in Amazon mud?the progress at Jari is extraordinary. So far, about 185,000 acres, an area more than ten times the size of Manhattan Island, have been cleared and planted with Caribbean pine and Gmelina. Viewed from the air, the new forest looks as thick and lush as the sections of old native jungle left uncut along the riverbanks. A wild array of undergrowth, burnt away in the initial clearing, quickly grows back among the newly planted trees...
...forest work has yet to produce a penny of earnings for Ludwig. The first lumber income will not appear on Jari's books any earlier than late 1979, after a $275 million wood-pulp mill, now being constructed on two huge barges in Japan, has been floated up the Jari River and set down on 3,900 wooden piles. By that time, Ludwig's first quarter-million-acre forest will be fully planted, and sections of it will be ready for clearcutting and reforestation. A second forest of the same size has already been mapped...