A Story of Sustained Yield of Forest Resources
Nelson P. Wheeler
1841 - 1920
James P. Soper Jr.
1888 - 1979
Soper-Wheeler Company LLC, has been a part of the California forest management scene since early in the 20th Century when the Soper and Wheeler families shifted their activities from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to the West Coast. Soper-Wheeler Company LLC now operates in the counties of Butte, Humboldt, Mendocino, Nevada, Plumas, Santa Cruz, Sierra, Sonoma, and Yuba where it manages 97,000 acres of forest land.
This working forest is dedicated to maximum perpetual productivity through superior management. It is currently harvesting enough wood for the construction of 2040 homes per year while growing enough for 3000. By the year 2010 when full growth is attained Soper-Wheeler Company LLC will produce enough for 3800 homes per year. If considered in terms of paper and other forest products that production would be enough to meet the needs of 80,000 people per year or if converted to energy that would be enough to heat 15,000 homes per year every year forever.
In the course of building its sustained yield capacity Soper-Wheeler Company LLC has acquired a variety of lands and engages in a number of related activities. Soper-Wheeler Company LLC leases some of its property for hunting, mining, grazing and even rents bee range for which it gets paid in honey. Soper-Wheeler Company LLC maintains several rental units, operates a vineyard and has a Christmas tree program part of which is operated in cooperation with local Boy Scout troops.
Because of the unique conditions in its West side Sierra locale – deep fertile soil, aggressive invasion of timber land by tanoak brush and very high rain fall averaging 80 inches a year – Soper-Wheeler Company LLC has used aggressive and expensive techniques to advance the program of silviculture to which it is dedicated. Where stands are producing poorly due to low stocking and regeneration is choked by brush or hardwoods; the area is clear cut, the brush or hardwoods rooted out and new trees are planted. This is much like nature might do with wildfire except that we take greater pains to protect creeks and wildlife than nature usually does. In better stocked stands, we use thinning or selection cuttings, depending on the age of the stand, to maintain a healthy growing forest while capturing growth which might otherwise be lost due to insects and disease. All logging is done under the careful supervision of company foresters by company or contracted logging crews. Close attention is given to protection of the soil, the key resource, from erosion.
The operation of Soper-Wheeler Company LLC is based upon two fundamental rules evolved by the original founders. James Soper’s philosophy on land management has been phrased into Soper’s First Law: “ When maximum profit goals appear to be in conflict with established conservation principals and sustained yield, then in all probability the profit projection needs re-examination.”
That is bolstered in financial activity with Soper’s Second Law: “Buy what you need but always pay cash.”
Through years of experience, the application of these conservation principals to resource management have never failed to produce a high dollar return over the long run.
The formula has maintained the basic objective of Soper-Wheeler Company LLC to manage its lands in a responsible fashion, to provide a reasonable profit to the firm, to contribute materially to the productivity of the nation and to augment the economy of local communities.
Small companies are struggling in the current American society but there is evidence that a philosophy of survival can be derived from management policies that recognize responsibilities to their product, to their customers, to their employees, and to their community, and, in the special case of Soper-Wheeler Company LLC, to the forest itself.
The story of Soper-Wheeler Company LLC goes back to 1859 when The Soper Lumber Company was founded in Chicago to harvest trees in the Midwest. Fifty years later it concentrated its efforts at Soperton, Wisconsin, about 75 miles Northwest of Green Bay.
In 1904, the Soper family joined forces with another timber-oriented family, the Wheelers, with operations in Pennsylvania. Individually and in partnership, the two families acquired extensive tracts in California and Oregon, including a 14,000 acre tract on the West slope of the Sierra, straddling the divide between the Feather River and Yuba River watersheds.
This small tract could not be logged economically in the early part of the century when logging was done by railroad but, when truck logging came into its own during World War II, it provided the nucleus for a production area that has spread into eight counties.
In the 1930’s and 1940’s, under the leadership of former president James P. Soper, Jr., the company’s program of sustained yield and conservative operations was raised to a high level which continues today.
Soper-Wheeler Company LLC is not only a forest products company. It is a part of the forest. Its headquarters is not in a financial center, but in the heart of the forest. There it strives to understand the land, the trees, and the workers and to bring them together in a shared and full life.
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