It sounds like you have a lot of very good information and have made a very close study of this situation, fawtsc. I'm not a wise investor, I just took a stab at TATF because it caught my imagination and I bought the sales pitch. It helped that Fine Woodworking did a story on TATF, I had read the brief article years before and filed it away in the corners of my mind as a great idea. Several years later, I stumbled across the website when I had some money available to invest. I like trees and wood. FWW article was the seal of approval in my mind, so I dove in, probably a lot deeper than I should have.
Hearing from you folks that have taken the time to dig into the local situation, travelled to examine your trees, studied the costs and evaluated the investment a lot more deeply than I was willing to is very informative. I really appreciate this board.
So when I was asking if you were speculating about their costs, I wasn't saying it was just a wild guess. By speculation I mean that you are estimating their costs because you don't have any inside information from their own books - so even though your speculation is very informed by real facts and FAO reports, you are speculating, not that that is a bad thing. You have obviously spent a lot of time and thought on gathering information and looking at the markets in that area. I have no reason to doubt that your cost estimate is pretty close, it sounds very reasonable and you back it up with a lot of good information.
My speculation is a lot wilder :). I don't have a lot of facts, just my limited personal experience with TATF, what I have heard here, my forgotten half-finished MBA, my bent toward optimism, and my judgment of human nature.
What I'm saying about the costs is: it's interesting to know what TATF's costs are, but that is information that would only be helpful to make an informed purchase decision. That helps to answer the question of whether the price they set is reasonable for the value and service that they are providing. If you can get the same service elsewhere for a better price or at a lower risk, it would be wise to buy somewhere else.
We're all in the same boat now, we're tree owners. Once you are a tree owner, it doesn't matter whether you bought at a good price or not. It doesn't matter if the farms are on great land or poor land. Now the trees belong to you, and not TATF. So the question of whether it was a good deal to start out with is not important. The only question now is, are you getting what you paid for - however much you paid.
The real questions:
1. What did they promise to do in return for our money?
2. Have they breached the contract in any way to this point?
3. What recourse is there if they have breached the contract?
I don't know the answers to those questions - what do you think? At what point does the apparent lack of projected thinnings become a breach of contract? Are they required to post new information regularly or to let us know if things are going badly, or is that just our reasonable expectation of a valid, solid business?
