Forestland owners' willingness to plant pine on non-forested land for woody bioenergy in Virginia

Woody bioenergy provides an opportunity for new source of revenue, which forestland owners can respond to either by supplying biomass from an existing stand or by establishing feedstock plantations on currently non-forested land. Using survey data sent out to 900 randomly selected participants in Virginia, we assess if forestland owners would allocate parts of their currently non-forested land, such as cropland and pasture/grazing land, to growing loblolly pine for bioenergy production purposes. Using recursive partitioning based logistic regression, we show that the decision to plant pine on non-forested land depends both on economic and non-economic factors, including price, demographic attributes of the forestland owner, mode of land acquisition and their respective threshold values, providing profile types policies encouraging biomass supply can use in tailoring their efforts. Using bid values, expected landowner revenue from growing pine, we also find a mean willingness to accept value of $1424/acre. Our results also show that the choice among land use types follows economies of scale while the choice among land covers for a given land use type follows species diversification.