[mitchmaine]

hey billy and welcome to dap. i know a fella in minot or hebron ? maybe even poland, named brian mitchell. logged with horses for many moons. his dad phil is a logging contractor and thats what they do. brian is a little rough around the edges but knows what hes talking about and would be worth while listening to. further west in berwick is bob crichton, and hes a mule man and can’t be beat. evelyn and francis pike are neighbors of his and do mules too. there is a club over that way called farmers draft hoss and mule assn. you could join. lots of teamsters with various opinions that may not always jibe but never in doubt. you are surrounded with horses and mules and teamsters in every direction. can’t imagine one hasn’t found you yet. good luck with your search.
mitch

[mitchmaine]

i remember thirty five years ago, one fella driving clear to michigan to buy a horse, gave $16,000. to match another horse so he could win a blue ribbon and the forty dollar premium that went with it. never made sense to me, but entertainment comes at a cost up here in the winter.

[mitchmaine]

hey tom, those guys in the pulling ring don’t spare the feed. sweepstake horses often eat a BAG of grain, yes, fifty pounds, per day, and exercise on a light drag for four or six hours with a few heavy pulls. everybody does it a little different, but the key is water. just before you weigh in, you hold their water and throw on a blanket and they will sweat a hundred fifty pounds of water. after they come off the scales and a horse with a 29 inch collar is in the 3300 class, they start drinking and turn back into dinosaurs on steroids. oh, did i mention the steroids?

[mitchmaine]

michael, the pin in your bolster should have alot of play in it. it should be captured by the steel plate on the bottom of the bolster but be almost sloppy and be able to move easily. wonder if that is working against you?

[mitchmaine]

looks like you did it right. good idea. usually the bolster is made into the body of the sled, and it would seem that that would make it even stiffer. what is it doing that you don’t care for?

[mitchmaine]

michael. do your sleds have bolsters? they are another set of bunks that pin to the center of the sled bunks and swivel and roll as the sleds move over uneven ground. your body should mount on them. hard for me to tell from your question if you were including them.
mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey tom,
we had a system of regional state foresters here in maine. funding for the program ended in the early 80’s, but for a long while before that date, a landowner could get a professional forester to mark their woodlot, at no personal cost to them. loggers, myself included, could always contact a forester and get woodlots to cut. the forester was the go-between, acting as the landowners agent, dealing with tally and stumpage and so-on. their salarys were paid from state funds. when a woodlot came up with some good wood on it, several woodcutters would bid on the lot, but there were always marginal woodlots that you could get without too much competition.
local pulp mills with their own land hired their own foresters to manage their own lands with a bias to procurring pulpwood. pallet and borderline logs were always marked for pulp. seemed like a good system at the time. no quotas. strong demand for wood. no insurance or bonds nessecary. all you needed was a saw.
the first time i ever heard the term forest management plan was when the state was trying to stiffen up the tree growth tax law. the plan forced landowners using the tax break to actually cut their woodlots. although if i remember correctly, the new law required you to get the management plan, but couldn’t actually force you to implement it.
usually when the state gets involved in an industry, logging fishing and or farming, it seems to come with some new restriction or fee or something, but i think that the state foresters here in maine in the sixtys and seventies was a pretty good deal for both sides and kept us busy.
mitch

[mitchmaine]

hi ed, i didn’t have any better luck than anyone else clicking on your links. but i did notice on your first go that the text in the linc line(???), if thats what you call it, was incomplete. in the sense that the date was spelled out at the end of the line and september was missing its “s”. wondering if that could have been your problem. i’m not a computer whiz, but i shhhure would like to see your photographs. mitch

[mitchmaine]

hi tony,
in a couple months, mofga is doing their annual low impact forestry workshop in unity. its a great place to swap ideas with others with similar interests. jim hawkes demonstrates steers up there. he is a great man, and you should meet and talk with him. drive his steers. swap yarns.
i know sam from tide mill farm. a friend took him to ohio a few years back to get his grey team. i have friends in whitneyville and cutler too and love washington county. i still think you folk see the sun rise first. who hangs out on top of katahdin at four in the morning anyway?

best wishes, mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey bob, we’ve had a booth there many many years in the ag area selling maple syrup. maine maple kithen, near the small farm journal tent. please come find us. mitch

[mitchmaine]

anuthuh mainuh, glad to hear it. it may be a small world, but there is still probably 200 miles between us. otherwise, i’d hook you up withdozens of steer and ox men down here that love to sit for hours and bullshit about their cattle. i could ask around and see if they know anyone down your way. good luck with your farm, is it saltwater? mitch

[mitchmaine]

i think ronnie said it best. keep it simple. let the horse do what it does best, hotyarding wood to roadside, and let the machine do its job moving the big loads.
back in the twenties when they came out with the lombard steam tractors, hauling hundreds cord of pulp and logs, they still had a pair of horses out front steering, until someone said just get over with it, and went head long into the machine.
its evolution. a natural process getting a machine to do the work. and we are all under the same pressure trying to find a way to make it smoother, and up pops a machine.
it ain’t how much you make as much as how much you keep, and machines cost money, up front and forever.
i bought a skidder with a worn out pair of ring chains, and the only thing i had to repair them with was a pile of no. 8 shoes with heavy caulks, so i welded in a few to keep the chains going and after a couple trips in and out of the woods, it pocked it up enough to look like i was still using horses, and i remember how disappointed people got when i had to stop and tell them i was using a tractor.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

Sometimes I hear us trying to create the one method of horse logging that fits all, and of course none does, and it is our diversity that gives us the greatest strength as a community. We know that adapting to ones environment is what makes any species successful. And all of our logging conditions, from Oregon to Colorado to Vermont to Ireland and Scotland, along with local markets, are so diverse, that certainly no model would fit all. I’ve been using the same tools here for almost forty years, and even though they work well on the terrain, they haven’t kept up with markets or technology and would fail if I tried to go back into the business of chopping wood for a living. And I’ve seen lots of forwarders before, including simons, but I saw them differently as I followed this thread along, and yesterday, I had an “aha” moment. I was cutting up the bed on our rotten haycart, using the forks on the tractor to haul off the stringers and planks, and “eureka”, the stripped down running gear became a forwarded. I could see that in 45 minutes, I could weld up two sets of bunks and stake pockets, and have a wood cart to haul long wood. On the way to the burn pile, the idea kept forming, so on the way back I pulled in under the wagon and picked it up on the forks like a tinkertoy. I could run into the woodyard, unhitch, pick up the cart, turn it around or place it wherever I wished, and with five and a half foot bunks and three foot stakes, pile on two to two and a half cord and go. It might not work, but I bet it would, and I probably won’t do it but I know I could. And it all started by listening to this thread and seeing simons forecarts, planting a seed and going with it. Great fun inventing sometimes. But the point I make is all our ideas pool up in this great collective whatever and thoughts and plans form and tools come and go and in the end some things work and some don’t, but it’s the process that counts, and if we keep our minds open and are ready to adapt, it might work.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

hi dennis,
i agree with john here. charge your man an hourly rate you feel good about and cut and pile the wood for him. if he wants it hauled off, charge him for that, too. then try and get some money for the wood. my guess is, after a good windstorm, hurricane for sure, wood isn’t going to be worth too much. good luck with your team. one good thing about working hourly is you can slow down and be safe. mitch

[mitchmaine]

judging by the news and television, most of vermont is now in connecticut. very hard to watch and listen to. we hope you are all well, and slowly getting your worlds back in order.
we’d rather see rain here than wind, and of course, we got the wind. barely four inches of rain that got sucked up by the very dry land quickly. and the wind didn’t seem that bad. a few strong gusts. in the end we lost the weather vane. we had two acres spelt that withstood the wind, but after closer inspection, lost all its heads somewhere. so now we have two acres straw. and mother nature did a little wood chopping for us. she can put down alot of wood in a hurry, but she sucks when it comes to directional felling. probably five or six truckloads down out there. we got out of it pretty easy.
like jim o. i used tyo have to worry about a boat. glad those days are gone.
best wishes to all who suffered, great or small. the sun is back, and the wind is dry. your friend, mitch

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