2019-04-15 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – April 15, 2019 GC: There will be probably as we plant – we will likely use a pre-emergent just to hold the weeds down while the trees get a start but it the trees – most of the cypric is simply plowing a bed about as big as this table I’m sitting at – a bedding plow will come and build a mound of earth – in a row – and, um, we turn the soil, cultivate it and then put down one herbicide and at planting about a – we always said \[unclear\] it hasn’t changed about a Vienna Sausage can full of fertilizer and that’s just to give the trees a start. But they will grow on their own with this – with what’s in the soil – it’s just one... GH: Are you guys testing the streams during this process? GC: What stream – I’m not quite – I don’t understand the question that – it would depend on where the streams are. We’re testing them for? Are you implying for runoff or what are we testing for? GH: Possibly runoff. We used to go catch river opae or hoopu in a lot of those streams and so I’m curious what kind of impact that might have on the streams? GC: There are quite strict regulations that we don’t plant up to or through streams – so in general the trees filter the rain and stop soil runoff, if that’s the answer – no, we haven’t tested but I don’t see the amount being enough to, you know, it’s not like a gold course – we don’t apply chemicals like that – it’s a small amount of fertilizer in the hole that you put the tree into. GH: Thank you. TN: I’m not a forester and I don’t understand cultivation and replanting but after you cut down the trees there’s the stumps to deal with so what happens to the stumps? Are they just cultivated back into their... GC: Traditionally what happens with eucalyptus is it’s in that bedding – the soil is piled back on to the same row and that will smother any regrowth. Now – eucalyptus have the ability to regrow out of the stumps so that’s almost the preferred way because if the – if there’s good regrowth than we don’t need to plant - we don’t need to do anything – we just let it regrow – and it would grow like a bush – there might be five or ten saplings and we would leave one or two and just break the rest so it’s a very minimal – there’s no – it’s very – for us it’s economically good because we don’t have to use any chemicals – so regrowth is good. Where we only have a few stumps then we would replant as well, but the stumps – when we have in the past we’ve done – there was concern some years ago about stumps remaining on the ground and so we did some experiments where we killed the stump – we did spray it with a herbicide and the smaller stumps were gone in about two to three years and the bigger ones were four or five years. And they rot away, 21