Sprouting
Business - Modern-day Appleseeds grow trees in Costa Rica
Below is the complete text of the article.
Business First, July 6, 1992
As a youngster, Steve Brunner attended
Johnny Appleseed Junior High School in Mansfield. Brunner enjoyed stories about Appleseed,
a Massachusetts native whose real name was John Chapman and who spent the first half of
the 19th century planting and tending apple orchards throughout the Midwest.
"I remember thinking that what Johnny
Appleseed did was really a wonderful thing," recalls Brunner, now 48.
Over the years, the image of Johnny
Appleseed remained little more than a pleasant memory for Brunner, who spent much of his
adult life building a lucrative residential real estate brokerage bearing his name in
Columbus's German Village neighborhood.
Running that business is still Brunner's
main vocation. But in recent months, he has also started moonlighting as something of a
modern-day Johnny Appleseed.
However, instead of planting apple trees in
the American heartland, Brunner is planting tropical hardwood trees in the Central
American country of Costa Rica. Brunner is operating that enterprise under the name of
Tropical American Tree Farms.
Tropical
American Tree Farms is a commercial operation that grows
trees for eventual harvest. Brunner says cutting down such plantation-grown trees for
commercial uses provides a "free-enterprise solution" to the problem of tropical
deforestation.
"Planting tropical trees for harvest
not only provides a product that's in great demand; it also serves to ease the pressure of
exploitation on natural forests," he explains.
Brunner and his wife, Sherry, are
overseeing the planting of thousands of trees on a 1,200-acre tract they own in Costa
Rica. The land, which they purchased for about $400,000, was once covered with tropical
trees before its former owners cleared it to graze cattle.
"Within a few years, the land will
again be covered with trees," Brunner says. "Only this time, the trees are
carefully selected tropical hardwoods that are being hand-planted in neat rows. As they
grow, those trees will be pruned, cared for and groomed for eventual harvest."
Tropical hardwoods are extensively used to
make furniture, cabinets, decorative panels, interior trim and such specialty items as
cutlery handles and musical instruments. Perhaps the best-known type of tropical hardwood
is teak; other popular varieties include purpleheart, trebol and peroba rosa.
While Brunner's land will include all those
varieties, he says the vast majority of Tropical
American Tree Farms' plantings will be teak seedlings. Brunner
says the three largest consumer markets for those hardwoods are Europe, Japan and the
United States.
To help reach potential commercial
customers in those areas - furniture makers, etc. - the Brunners recently hired Sherry
Poston as the farm's director of marketing. Poston works out of Tropical
American Tree Farms' Columbus office in
German Village.
"As the world's population continues
to grow and more of the world achieves affluence, the demand for these beautiful woods is
expected to accelerate," Poston says.
However, that ongoing demand has a high
price, Brunner says: It has translated into rapid-fire leveling of tropical rain forests.
"Rain forests serve a variety of
important environmental functions, including reducing erosion and cleansing the air of
pollutants," Brunner says.
In 1990, he notes, the World Resources
Institute and the United Nations issued a report which found that up to 50 million acres
of tropical hardwoods are being leveled annually. Some of those trees are being sold to
commercial users, while others are being felled to make room for ranches or other
developments.
"The bottom line is, an area roughly
twice the size of Ohio is being deforested every year," Brunner notes.
Consequently, he says naturally occurring
tropical rain forests face one of two possible fates: they will either be protected from
being harvested, or they'll be leveled.
"We don't know which of those two
alternatives each country containing rain forests will choose," he notes. "But
what we do know is this: No matter which course of action they take, the world's natural
rain forests will soon be unavailable as a source of tropical hardwoods."
Brunner says those factors, coupled with an
expectation that demand for tropical hardwoods will continue unabated, means the trees on
his land should fetch a handsome return. More specifically, he estimates a cumulative
return of $100,000 for every 100 trees tha Tropical
American Tree Farms plants and harvests.
Adding to the attractiveness of those
trees: a growing environmental consciousness on the part of consumers that is causing them
to demand items made from plantation-grown hardwoods, rather than from natural tree
stands.
"Something similar has happened in the
fur-coat market," Brunner notes. "While many consumers still want furs because
they like the way they look, they are increasingly demanding that those coats be made out
of synthetics."
How did Brunner wind up running such an
ambitious enterprise in a small country (Costa Rica is roughly half the size of Ohio)
that's some 3,000 miles due south of Columbus? His first exposure to Costa Rica came in
the early 1970s, when he and a partner went looking for oceanfront property to buy for
investment purposes.
"We looked at land on both coasts of
the U.S., but found it to be prohibitively expensive," he recalls. "As a result,
we expanded our search to Central and South America."
Brunner proceeded cautiously with that
search, aware that cultural and legal norms in those regions can be vastly different from
those in the United States.
"We wanted a country with a stable,
democratic government and a legal system with property rights that were similar to those
found in America," Brunner notes. "Using those parameters, Costa Rica kept
turning up on our list of potential sites."
Indeed, Costa Rica is an oasis of relative
calm in a part of the world that's witnessed a lot of turmoil over the past several
decades. Unlike such nearby countries as El Salvador, Nicaragua and Panama, Costa Rica has
experienced virtually no political or social upheaval during that time.
Consequently, in 1974, Brunner and his
partner wound up purchasing 2,500 acres of land in four tracts on Costa Rica's Pacific
Coast for about $1 million. Brunner still retains a partial stake in that property, though
its ownership was converted to a limited partnership in 1980 that involved about a dozen
other investors.
Over the years, Brunner made several trips
to visit those properties. And during airplane flights into Costa Rica, he noticed that
more and more hillsides throughout the country were turning brown, as loggers and farmers
continued to cut down rain forests at a frenzied rate.
"I realized I was witnessing the
destruction of part of one of the world's richest ecosystems, and I decided to see if
there was something I could do to help offset that loss," he recalls.
That resolve lead Brunner to buy the 1,200
acres for his tree farm. (This tract is separate from the other 2,500 acres of Costa Rican
property that he partially owns. He says the latter land will ultimately be developed in
some fashion.)
The Brunners traveled to Costa Rica to
oversee the first tree plantings on the Tropical
American Tree Farms farm in late May and early June. This year,
the couple expects a total of 100,000 trees to be planted on their land. Eventually, the
total number of trees being grown there may hit 1 million.
Overseeing the farm's day-to-day operations
for the Brunners are an on-site administrator and farm manager. In addition, Tropical
American Tree Farms has
hired about 20 locals to do the majority of its plantings.
The teak seedlings being planted this year
will be ready for their first harvest in eight years. However, not all the trees will be
cut down at once; that process will be spread out over several years.
"Planting and harvesting the trees
will go on in continuous, overlapping cycles," notes Sherry Brunner, who also works
for her husband's Columbus real estate business.
So, even though the term has negative
connotations in some business circles, the Brunners don't mind being labeled "tree
huggers." After all, both admit to shedding tears of joy when they planted the first
tree seedlings on the Tropical
American Tree Farms farm earlier this year.
"This is a labor of love for both of
us," says Sherry Brunner. |
