Students in the University of Northern British Columbia's Forestry Club have come up with a way to raise funds to help pay for their education while bringing a little Christmas cheer in the process.
They've secured a 3.4 hectare piece of forest about a five-minute walk away from the campus' main buildings where they'll start growing Christmas trees next year.
The work will start small but over time the goal is to have more than 10,000 stems of Douglas fir and spruce planted across the entire area and to have trees suitable for dorms and apartments ready for sale in about seven years.
In part, revenue from the Christmas trees will help students defray the cost of attending a two-week field school they must attend one summer in order to graduate. It costs about $1,200 for room and board and takes away from the time they have to earn money for the school year.
It's part of a larger 17.4-hectare plot and the remaining area will be set aside for students to run research projects. A signing ceremony to hand over the land was held Monday at the site.
Among the next steps will be to get sections cleared and ready for planting.
"That's going to be one of our big obstacles starting off," said Anna Tobiasz, one of the students involved in the initiative. "We're going to get lots of students out here and do some manual brushing."
The initiative is the brainchild of three UNBC natural resource management students - Ian Petersen, Brian Sye and Jeremy Seiwert - who came up with the idea three years ago while searching for a project to complete their degrees. The work included drafting a land-use management plan and a business plan.
So-called agroforestry - looking at such non-timber forest products as berries, mushrooms and sap - will be among the subjects students will investigate around the rest of the site.
"It's just brings out so many other avenues that students can take to gain more experience in all aspects of forestry," said Petersen.
The experimentation will include the Christmas trees.
"We're going to try spacing, different densities," said tree farm manager and fourth-year forestry student Marc Howard. "We're going to try rows, we're going to try putting them in tight little groups."
UNBC president Daniel Weeks said the initiative continues the school's tradition of experiential learning.
"It also ensures our students are learning about the good stewardship of the resources we have here, right next to our campus," Weeks said.
