I won't mention the company. It is timberland that has changed hands a few times. I believe it was Champion, originally.
Oh, THOSE jokers. Yeah, I bet they're testing the waters to see if hogfuel today will bring a better ROI for their investors than waiting fifty years for a timber harvest. They, like other REITs, are on my "list".
It would seem that there would be so much root mass left in the ground that LRR would live on uneffected regardless if the stump was ripped out or not. Or does LRR not penetrate deeply into the root system?
LRR works from the small, fine outermost roots to the thick, central structural ones over time. It does not attack all roots at the same time, nor at the same rate. This is why in blowdown pockets they will end up all jackstrawed rather than laying in the direction of a prevailing wind; they simply don't all fail the same. This is also why when you see the stain on the stump it's often only on one side, or in short bands that don't complete a ring all the way around the stem. Sometimes it's possible to estimate the center of an infection area by the density and direction of blowdowns, but that is hardly the rule. The nearest thing to a "rule" this stuff follows is that it spreads at a rate of about 1 foot diameter per year throughout an infected area. Oh, and you're almost entirely unlikely to ever be able to identify it by a fruiting body, unlike
Armillaria.
Cut doug-fir stumps provide an innoculum source (food) for the fungus so pulling it out of the ground removes the food source. Root rot spreads by root to root contact.
This is exactly right. It's not uncommon for a plantation to die over a single summer when the saplings all contact old roots at the same time. Even spacings lead to even mortality. If you've ever seen a whole hillside turn red at once, that's what you're seeing. However, the medium-sized roots that get left behind when stumps are are pulled can be just as active an inoculum source as anything else and have been known to last for 10-30 years depending on site and source, so ripping is really more a feel-good activity that costs plenty and probably returns nothing. The worst is when somebody rips then retires while the plantation still looks good, and then isn't there to share the sinking feeling when the disease hits a few years later.
Thing is, this is an endemic disease that has co-evolved with the forests it lives in. It only attacks forests between about 30 and 100 years of age; after that, the remaining stand has either survived the attack or has developed resistance. It's only modern forestry practices that make LRR appear epidemic -- in mature stands, it is a minor pathogen at best.