In December 2025, New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) received a $32 million USDA Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) award to support improved forestry, with 65 percent of those funds needing to be passed to working forest landowners as incentives. Specifically, the incentives fund the implementation of forest management practices that support long-term forest health, ecological integrity, and timber productivity. Since NEFF received the award, our forestry staff have been busy getting the word out to landowners, consulting foresters, state agencies, and loggers on the incredible opportunity the region has to take advantage of these funds. Our recruitment efforts have paid off.
We now have commitments from more than 20 landowners to enroll approximately 46,000 acres across the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut. If all these acres go on to have new forestry practices implemented on them as part of NEFF’s program, that would mean we’re 92 percent of the way toward our goal of incentivizing practices on 50,000 acres across New England.
Getting here has been no easy task. With incentive funds guaranteed until March 2028, forestry staffers knew they would have to work fast to be successful. There is an incredible amount of planning and paperwork that needs to go into getting each landowner enrolled in our program. Once a good project lands in our inbox, we usually hold a virtual meeting to explain the finer details of participation and then an in-person field visit to ensure that the planned practices and baseline condition of the forest meet the requirements of our award.
Those visits have taken staff from the central hardwood forests of Connecticut to the northern hardwood forests of Vermont and New Hampshire to the Acadian Spruce-fir forests of Northern Maine.
“You could say we’ve embarked on a Great New England Road Trip,” said Dan Hohl, NEFF’s Commercial Lands Forester, “but instead of my phone being full of pictures of covered bridges and historic markers, it is full of forest stands that desperately need costly forest stand improvement treatments.”
Forest stand improvement is one of the most common forestry practices being implemented under NEFF’s AMP program, and it manages the health, composition, and density of a forest by selectively cutting down unwanted, less healthy or less well-formed trees to free up space, sunlight, and nutrients for more desirable trees. This results in healthier forests, higher-quality wildlife habitat — and higher-value timber.
This kind of increase in value is part of where NEFF’s AMP award shines. Since our incentives help fund the treatment of these stands, with landowners covering 30 percent or more of the cost, landowners are excited to bring projects to us that have been accumulating in their land portfolios for the last 15-25 years. Once treated and allowed to grow, these stands will have trees that are bigger and better formed. That means once the trees are eventually harvested and processed into logs, the logs will sell into higher valued markets. Every acre treated now is one more acre that becomes more profitable for the landowner to harvest in the future and therefore meeting the purpose of the Advancing Markets for Producers program.
Recently, NEFF staffers have been submitting projects to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service for environmental review.
“Our projects are highly scrutinized to make sure they have minimal impacts on a long list of special environmental concerns that the federal government is required to analyze,” said Dan. “Environmental impact also matters to New England Forestry Foundation, so we’re happy to collaborate. We want each of these projects to not only result in productive forests, but also ecologically healthy ones.”
Once the reviews are completed, the landowners we’ve enrolled will begin implementing forestry practices on the ground. According to Dan, that day can’t come soon enough, as this is a major achievement for the forestlands of New England.