Page 17 - Georgia Forestry - Winter2017

Allen Dykes
Inspired by Family,
Present and Past
For Savannah native Allen Dykes, a hunting license is far from a soulless piece of paperwork. It’s a declaration that his land, though relatively recently acquired, will be there for his descendants, long after he’s gone.
“I’ve bought lifetime hunting licenses for myself and my two sons,” Dykes says, his voice low and steady, “and I now have nine grandchildren and I’ve purchased lifetime hunting licenses for each of them. I don’t know if they’ll be interested. I want them to make their own decisions, but — it’s there for them.”
Childhood deer-hunting with his grandfather — on leased forestland — planted Dykes’ yearning to become the landowner. The one that does the planting and cultivating. The steward. As a career in the pulp and paper industry transferred him around the country, he even had 120 acres in Arkansas for a time.
But it wasn’t until Dykes was 50 and decided to take over portions of his father’s Savannah-based company, a manufacturer and distributor of security devices for tractor trailers, that Dykes got serious about his dream. Starting in 2000, he and his wife, Susan, bought the first of the four tracts of forestland they would acquire in Jefferson, Johnson and Emanuel counties. In total, they now
own 574 acres. They live on 75 of them in Swainsboro, where a hunting stand is close enough to the house that even the littlest grandkids can make forays with Dykes and where a fish-stocked pond irrigates a pecan orchard and fruit trees. Also on this tract, Dykes regularly hosts first-time hunters through a Christian program called 3030 Ministries.
“Yeah, this is a third career,” Dykes notes with a dry laugh. “When I sold my business two years ago, I told people, ‘I haven’t quit working, I just quit getting paid.’”
Dykes, who has a masters and Ph.D. from the Institute of Paper Chemistry, approaches his land management with the zeal of an academic. He’s taken
Dykes focuses on diversity across his 574 acres of forestland. His Jefferson County tract has several beautiful acres of planted sawtooth oaks.
Georgia Forestry Commission classes in prescribed burning and formed relationships with the commission’s foresters and wildlife biologists who’ve drawn up detailed stewardship plans for each of his tracts. Dykes executes his burning regimen himself but says he’s leaving the planting of thousands of Longleaf and Loblolly pine trees — currently in progress on two of the properties — to a hired gun.
“The bending over would kill me,” he jokes.
Still, he says the trees come first in his land management goals. “Generally, I’d list forestry as my first priority and wildlife as the second.”
Of course, the point of all of it is Dykes’ family, present and past. Of all the enduring oak trees he’s planted on his land, it’s a dozen swamp chestnuts that are the most precious.
“My father-in-law nursed those in little Styrofoam cups when he was in his late nineties,” Dykes recalls. “He couldn’t do much, but he could water the seedlings and I planted them.
“He passed away in 2008, but I can take his great grandchildren out there now and show them, ‘This is what
your great grandfather started.’”
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