[Rick Alger]

Tim, Joshua, Joel I’ve done a fair share of skidder logging and a fair share of horse logging.

To me it comes down to the silvicutural prescription and the economics. Simon’s post covers this well. There are things that skidders do best such as final harvests, and there are things that horses do best such as careful thinning. The operator or teamster may or may not be effective with the tool they are using.

Woody biomass harvesting in New England is not an appropriate use of horsepower. The last roundwood biomass I twitched to a chipper brought 5$ a ton in the yard – 28$ chipped and delivered.

Horsepower is appropriate on woodland managed for multiple interventions, and an ever increasing residual stand quality. I have done work with this type of prescription, and I can point you to the foresters who managed the job.

[Rick Alger]

They used to use horses to drag seaweed (moss) out of coastal tidewaters in PEI. Maybe they still do.

Sensitizing to water should be doable, but sensitizing to unstable clay footing may be a stretch as others have said.

But it’s a righteous concept. I wish you luck.

[Rick Alger]

At this time I don’t think there is enough activity/interest/organizational commitment to proceed any further with the plan to contact insurance commissioners with data.

[Rick Alger]

I like the concept of the gin pole.

But the one I saw in action back in the day was slow and took three men. One hooked tongs on the log and steered it to the truck with a pick pole, one ran the winch, and the third was in the body to settle the log in and send the tongs back.

One man with hydraulics can do it all, and do it much faster.

[Rick Alger]

Scott,

I get the ramp concept. A lot of trucks around here were loaded by hand off a rollway on a brow, back in the day. My question is, How do you keep the wood (espescially short hardwood) from slithering out of the truck body when you load over the side with a skidsteer?

Ben,

For those huge logs, a low budget forwarding possibility might be an older 60 hp farm tractor with a winch and forks. No floating fees if you can drive the forwarder to the job.

[Rick Alger]

I second Carl’s suggestion to study production/ residual damage/ silviculture / and I’ll add , aesthetics/ water quality/ wildlife/ etc.

I have quite a few sites scattered around Coos County that a researcher would be welcome to visit and talk to foresters/LO. There are also plenty of conventional sites around for comparison.

[Rick Alger]

Hi Carl,

Thanks for asking.

This year I’m aggressively trying to develop some “clients” like you and Jason have. Ideally it will be on a fee for service basis with “credit” going back to the LO for wood extracted. We hope to get the sawmill back to running, and use the back 40 as a concentration yard for whatever small odd lots of wood or chipper material come our way on my little trailer from “retail” jobs. Maybe spot a big trailer like Scott suggested. So it looks like I may be able to use the old truck, without registering it, to good advantage.

If plans don’t work out I’ll be sure to let you know.

[Rick Alger]

Hi Mark,

I cut steps in my ramps with a chain saw. You can ratchet up one side at a time.

But it’s way safer to have help.

[Rick Alger]

Taylor,
I have an LN9000 Ford Tri-axle with a Prentice 120. It’s parked. For what it’s worth, I’ll tell you why I don’t run it.

#1. The pulp mills go on and off quotas unpredictably. I’m too small a producer to get a contract, so I can’t count on moving my own pulp in my own truck.

#2. I work alone. My production is one tri-axle load a week. I can’t justify the registration, insurance and upkeep for say 35 loads a year, and I don’t see any sense in chasing other people’s wood.

#3. If I’m running the truck, I’m not putting wood on the ground, and yet I still have to drive back to the job at night to feed and water the horses.

[Rick Alger]

Joel,

Cat spruce is picea glauca. Same color foliage as norway, but a smaller tree without the drooping branches. Much tangier smell. It tends to be tapered and knotty. Okay for sawlogs and pulp. Never heard of it being used for veneer. They don’t often get much over a foot dbh.

There is no market here for softwood veneer. There is a clapboard mill over Carl’s way that pays a premium for clear red spruce butts, but I’ve never had enough at one time to deal with them. I would guess 99.9 percent of the softwood logs harvested in the northeast are milled for construction lumber.

As far as dnr people, they are good folks here. The guy I know best spent a winter horse logging. He is an ally. The challenge is competing for small pots of money doled out by suits at the other end of the state.

Regarding wanna be woods around trophy houses, that is a problem. Suburban blight on the rural landscape. I will work for peanuts in the deep woods before I’ll toady to the majority of these new aristocrats. It’s not just class warfare. They are seriously fragmenting the forest environment. I don’t think I could stomach helping them feel “environmentally friendly.”

Carl,

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

[Rick Alger]

Jason,

Along the lines of making something out of junk, what I’ve been thinking is how to get paid twice for removing the junk. For example getting paid once by the mill and once by the DNR for improving deer habitat.

Any experience in this area?

Joel,

We’ve got a fragrant species around here called cat spruce. It smells like a litter box.

[Rick Alger]

Yes, the trailer has a mid-mount crane.

I have a friend who does load a six wheeler with a tractor, but he works less than ten miles from three different mills.

Most commercial trucks around here have stakes roughly 13′ off the ground. You need a good size crane to load them. Side loading with a tractor is out of the question.

[Rick Alger]

Carl,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. You hit the nail on the head regarding pre-commercial thinning. It’s not on screen for any forester I’ve had contact with.

Because I have no formal forestry training, I’ve been reluctant to bill myself as a silviculturalist. That is going to change. In fact it’s the motivation behind my earlier post. I’m ruminating on trying to sell interventions like managing feed and cover in deer yards, and maintaining healthy stands in riparian zones where the mechanical guys have taken the best and left the rest for “water quality.”

I hope to hear some other ideas from folks in similar situation. I know around here, I’ve got to find new ways to justify the cost of any intervention. I can’t keep going much longer with traditional harvesting.

[Rick Alger]

Hi Ben,

I agree in principle with Carl’s post, but now that the only trucks available are tractor trailers, I need something mechanical to sort and pile in the yard. A farm tractor with forks has been the best for my purposes.

[Rick Alger]

Hey Mitch,

Yeah, they windthrow pretty easy. Up here they mark mostly fir and favor spruce. And they don’t mark heavy. Take the fir at 10-12 inches and leave the spruce to get up to around 16.

We have mostly red spruce and that does root a little better than fir or black spruce. I’ve been back to some of the lots I’ve done, and they have held up fairly well but not totally. The patch cuts work great for regen.

Production is a challenge when you’re only taking around 30% of the wood. Lately I’ve been trying a scoot for some of the 8ft pulp and odd sticks of hardwood, but pulling tree-length with the cart is generally the fastest for me even with the time it takes to swamp trails.

Markets are tough. I got shafted on a load of popple groundwood this summer. They gave me a hardwood pulp price, but the trucker said they made him unload at the popple pile. GRRR. I did get in on the high price of softwood pulp for a short while. Diesel was high at the time though, and trucking was around $500 a load. But even then it was sweet for a while.

Anyway, anybody else out there dealing with these issues in the northern forest?
Found a way to increase the value of your silvicultural services?
Found a way to increase production?

[Author]

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