QUESTION

Do you know anything about a forestry management plan that provides tax incentives? I have a good-sized woodlot on my cottage property and wonder if I’d meet the criteria. What is the program and how much land do you need to qualify?

Mary Kelly, Westport, Ont.

ANSWER

That’s MFTIP you’re talking about. The awkward-sounding acronym stands for Managed Forest Tax Incentive Program and is your ticket to big property-tax savings if you own more than four hectares of forest in Ontario. This is how it works: You create a plan, with maps, that shows how you will use and protect your forest, pay to have the plan approved by a licensed “managed forest plan approver,” who then files your plan with your municipality, and presto! your property taxes (on the forested area only) drop by 75 per cent. The MFTIP website at http://ontariosforests.mnr.gov.on.ca/mftip.cfm has all the information, downloadable forms, and listings of managed forest plan approvers by region.

Developing a forest-management plan sounds dauntingly technical but when you read the booklet, you’ll see that it isn’t. Basically, you answer a series of questions about how you use your woodland area – you watch birds, you take the kids on nature hikes, you harvest some trees. If you’d rather not do the plan yourself, the approver can do it all, including ordering the necessary maps (for a larger fee, of course). Costs vary, but expect to spend at least $300.

The approver will also visit your property and tramp around the woods, doing the technical stuff, such as assessing the number of forest stands, the tree species mix, the overall health of the forest, and whether it can sustain any cutting (if that is something you are contemplating).

Tax savings may be your motivation, but once you start studying your forest, you’ll discover new appreciation for it. Martha Copestake, a forester with the Eastern Ontario Model Forest and a licensed plan approver, says cottagers end up with “a whole set of new hobbies” after they’ve done a managed for-est plan. They find out they have a raptor nest in one of their trees and start watching for the birds’ return every spring. Or they discover they have enough sugar maples to tap a few trees. “They just didn’t know what to look for before,” she says.

And some cottagers who would never even think of cutting down a tree find out that their forest would actually benefit from a selective harvest. So that becomes part of the plan and, ka-ching, suddenly they have a cash crop.

Christine Langlois  

 Published in the July/August 2007 issue of Cottage Life.