A Beginner’s Guide to the Forest Products Industry As told by the men and women who work in it.

veryone benefits from timber harvesting, whether you’re warming yourself by a wood-burning stove, writing with a No. 2 pencil, playing piano, or building a new home. Wood products form a huge part of American life, but surprisingly Efew people know what actually goes into producing the forest products we use. When the average person hears about logging, the association is often negative: Loggers are assumed to be deforesting the country and ruining the environment, or else they’re associated with out-of-date lumberjack stereotypes. Because loggers operate in rural areas, their work is not visible the way other industries are. Plenty of Americans have never met a logger, much less have a sense of what timber harvesting involves. In reality, most loggers are small business owners, professionals who care very much about the health of the forests they work. What follows is a beginner’s guide to the forest products industry and those who work in it. We hope that next time you sit down at your kitchen table or spread mulch in your garden you’ll think of the men and women who brought those wood products to market. Logging practices vary widely region-to-region, the same way that any agricultural practice does. For the sake of simplicity and because we are, after all, The Northern Logger magazine, we’ve elected to focus on timber harvesting and sawmilling in the northeast. We spoke with individuals who fill different roles in the Northeastern wood products supply chain. We hope these interviews will provide a general sense of the day- to-day work of those in the industry, but it would be wrong to say that this explainer provides a comprehensive picture, because there is no “comprehensive picture.” Every timber harvesting business, every sawmill, and every woodlot is different. There are a multitude of ways to get the job done and, for timber harvesters, every day brings new challenges and surprises. We encourage you to speak with the people who do this work in your neck of the woods. They’ll be happy to show you around!

Note: The following interviews have been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 11 HENRY GUNDLACH THE LOGGER Connecticut

Henry Gundlach is a logger in Connecticut who contracts for J&J Log & Lumber, among other jobs. “As a logger, I do quite a few different things. I’m pretty much a handfeller, which means I cut trees with a chainsaw. I have a Connecticut forester’s license, so I do a little bit of forestry. I’m also a log truck driver and truck my own logs. When I’m on a job, I typically follow the harvester and the feller buncher and do the handwork – the bucking of big wood and handcutting big trees that are too large for the machines to handle. My brother and I also deliver a lot of the firewood that’s produced off of the jobs. I will sometimes market softwood logs because we predominately cut for a hardwood mill and we’ve acquired connections over years for marketing the softwood logs ourselves. Apart from the contract logging I do, I buy stumpage myself. We cut quite a bit of softwood pulp in this area, too. A lot of loggers don’t like to do that, but we cut quite a bit of lowgrade material. I buy timber and do some boundary line work, but not a lot of it. We are too busy doing the actual logging. We’re a small crew compared to many. In southern New England you get a lot of small operators because the tracts of land tend to be small, so you have to move quite a bit, and therefore the machinery that comes in handy on small woodlots is the smaller equipment. I have a cable skidder and then we also have a grapple skidder and a forwarder. Lots of times, however, my machinery is parked and I’m working on somebody else’s job, using their equipment. We bounce around to a bunch of different things. It can be complicated, but we’re always busy that way. What am I thinking about when I look at a tree I’m about to cut? Well, to me, the landowner is king. So the first thing you do when you’re talking to a landowner is you ask what their vision is for their woodlot, what they’re looking for. You need to do what the landowner wants because it’s their land. I always tell them, you know, “When I’m done, I’m going home. You are home. So you need to tell me what you want.”After that, once you determine what you’re going to cut, its becomes a safety issue until the trees are on the ground. Then it becomes a marketing problem. You need to merchandise what you cut to the best of your ability. When you’re figuring out a job, you go by the acreage involved, what the landowner wants, what you think should happen, and then the topography of the ground itself – that’s called “the logging chance.” That’s a real old term and what it means is “What are your chances of getting the wood to the side of the road to market it?” A lot depends on how rough the terrain is, how dry it is, how wet it is, how far back in the woods the timber is growing. So you have to decide what equipment fits the job best, as well as see if what’s growing on this particular site is marketable at the time you’re cutting it. That’s where it gets tricky, because markets are very volatile. We’re unique in that we’ve got enough different equipment that we can try to avoid jobs at the wrong time and do them at the right time. There’s a lot of permitting involved. For instance, on the small job that we are doing right now, I had to get bonded with the state highway department in order to put a temporary access in. Sometimes you have to have a wetlands permit. Depending on the town you’re working with, there’s a lot of things to consider on any job – whether you need timber bridges to cross wetlands, portable bridges for stream crossings, things like that. Sometimes you corduroy the roads on

12 THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 Logger Glossary CONTRACT LOGGING: When a logger is paid by a mill the job, which means you put slash down or poles to “PEOPLE TEND TO keep the machinery up so that it doesn’t make ruts. to harvest timber, but is not an employee of the mill. Sometimes contracts are a problem – you have to THINK THAT LOGGERS STUMPAGE: The price paid for the right to harvest timber from a given land base. It is paid to the cur- go and do a job even though you know you shouldn’t, ARE RUTHLESS TIMBER economically speaking, because the contract is going to rent owner of the land. Historically, the price was determined on a basis of the number of trees har- run out. Sometimes you can’t cut a job when it would be BARONS, WHEN IN vested, or “per stump.” right, as far as the time of the year, because the people FACT MOST LOGGERS needed it cut right then. When we used to bid on jobs, TIMBER SALE: Refers to the sale of trees to be made into wood products. we’d routinely get two and three-year contracts. Now LOVE THE WOODS LOG LANDING: A cleared area where timber is piled they’re six months to a year for the most part around AND THEY PERPETUATE here. That’s changed over the years. and sorted and log trucks can come pick up loads for delivery to markets. When you’re doing a handcut operation you try to lay TREE GROWTH.” out the job and the skid roads as well as possible so that SAWLOG: A felled tree trunk suitable for cutting up you are doing the least damage to the residual stand. You need to make sure you do into lumber. the job as safely as possible by cutting the cull trees out of the way before you cut the PULP: The lower quality part of a tree, unsuitable to bigger crop trees. That improves the safety. The whole job is dangerous enough, so be made into lumber. you need to make sure you do it as safely as possible. SOFTWOOD: The wood from a conifer, such as pine, We’re very safety conscious. When I’m on the mechanized jobs, I’m a working a fir, or spruce. week or two behind the machine. In other words, the machines might be a quarter of HARDWOOD: The wood from deciduous tree species a mile away from where I’m hand cutting. We’re in contact with each other but not such as birch, maple, oak, or ash. nowhere near close enough to to do each other harm. I think protocol is that you have : Wood that is not suitable for high-quality to work three tree lengths away from each other and sometimes we’re much further LOWGRADE uses, oftentimes the tops of trees or timber with than that. significant flaws. Pulpwood is considered lowgrade Down here, a lot of guys work alone or in a two man crew – father and son teams. wood. The value of the wood is determined by the They do that for the simple reason that the workers compensation rates are so high markets in a region. in Connecticut that very few people can afford to have a hired person. HEAVILY MECHANIZED OPERATION: Refers to an The first thing you’ll see when you encounter a timber sale is usually the log landing. operation that employs more than one piece of heavy Log landings vary a lot. Our landings are on the sides of a gravel road, or maybe equipment such as a feller buncher and a forwarder. they’re an eighth of an acre that we cleared on a town road. The trucks pick up from Typically used to differentiate from a handfelling operation, in which loggers use chainsaws to fell trees. the landing. What’s a typical log truck load? 3,000-3,500 board feet, international rule. How long it takes to cut a load of logs depends on the average diameter of the CABLE SKIDDER: A type of heavy vehicle used in a trees. When you’re cutting firewood, you’ve got to cut a lot more trees to fill a truck logging operation for pulling cut trees out of a forest in a process called “skidding,” in which the logs are than you do if you’re cutting big pine trees. There are lots of factors that you have to dragged from the cutting site to a landing. A cable take into effect before you even price the job. That’s all part of the chance. One man skidder pulls the logs out with a winch. will typically cut a load a day, handfelling. So, you know, if you’ve got five people, : A skidder with a hydraulic you’ve got five or more truck loads. GRAPPLE SKIDDER grapple attached. The grapple, attached to the skid- There’s math involved in every move you make. It’s simple math, but if you don’t do der by a boom, grabs and lifts the timber, then drags it, you have no idea if you’re going forward, backwards, or standing still. Every step of it to the landing. the way is a math equation. Thinking is more important than anything else. If you can FORWARDER: A forestry vehicle that carries big felled do the work with your head, you can save yourself work with your back. logs from the stump to a roadside landing. Unlike a On the site we’re working right now, we have softwood pulp, skidder, a forwarder carries logs clear of the ground, hardwood pulp, firewood, lowgrade hard- which can reduce soil impacts but tends to limit the wood sawlogs, highgrade hardwood size of the logs it can move. Forwarders are typically employed together with harvesters in cut-to-length sawlogs, hardwood veneer logs, white logging operations. pine logs, and eastern hemlock. They’re all sorted separately on the LOADER/SLASHER: A log loader is a machine used to pick logs up off the ground and stack them into landing. Some outfits will truck piles at the log landing for pickup by log trucks. that mixture and it gets Loaders are sometimes equipped with slashers, sorted out at sawmills which cut the logs to length. and then distributed to FELLER BUNCHER: A type of harvester used in other places, or goes to logging. It is a motorized vehicle with an attachment a concentration yard to that can rapidly gather and cut a tree before felling get sorted out. But we try it. It controls the tree’s fall. we tend to try to do the HARVESTER: A piece of heavy machinery capable of felling a tree and grabbing it as well as delimbing and cutting the tree to length. Used in cut-to-length logging.

THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 13 sorting ourself. That way simplifies it and truckers can take a load of one thing and go to the right place with it. What sort of equipment you would take to the job depends on the wood on that lot. Terrain used to make a huge difference. But now the feller buncher goes on some pretty incredibly steep terrain. If it’s awful rocky, we’ll end up doing a handcut with grapple skidders. When it gets really steep and rocky we park the grapple skidders and use cable skidders. More and more timber is being cut mechanically, probably in southern New England half the wood is mechanically cut, but up in Maine, in the industrial forests, it’s got to be 95% mechanical. If you think you want to be a logger, you have to have a lot of stick-to-itiveness. There’s a lot of hard things in this industry. It’s not easy, but I love it. There’s a good camaraderie. It’s amazing to see how competitors will work together when one guy is down. It’s a pretty close-knit community for people that are competitive with one another. It’s a decent way of living if you can do it.” THE FORESTER WAYNE TRIPP New York

Wayne Tripp is regional manager for F&W Forestry in the Adirondack region of New York state. “One thing I’ve always liked about forestry is that no two days are exactly the same. I worked for thirty three years as a consulting forester, consulting with landowners in the northeast. When you provide forestry assistance to landowners, you try to make happen what it is that they would like to see going on with their forest. It’s a lot of walking, a lot of getting out and being in the woods. I’ve marked a lot of timber sales for landowners for my whole career. My role has always been working for the landowner and what their objectives are with their forest and trying to marry that up with reality of what their forest has and what can be done with it. I believe in forest management and silviculture and trying to grow the future. I also make sure that the landowner gets fairly paid. I work for the landowner, but I couldn’t have got my work done without logging and loggers. To do that job, you spend a lot of time with the landowner and try to determine what it is that they really want out of their property. Most landowners really don’t have good stated objectives. They may have some ideas of what it is they would like, but you have to pull out of them what it is they really want. It’s also a matter of whether they have a forest that will do what they want. The first step is that you have to walk the property. I tell my young foresters when we lay out a big timber sale is the first thing you’ve got to do is walk it take a look. I will start with visual assessment. Now, I’ve been doing this a long time. I have sampled, with inventory techniques, a lot of property over the years. You may put your boundary lines in – you’ve got to dig them out. Sometimes, finding the boundary lines can take as long as anything. You put ribbon on them so you know where they are. And then you walk it some more. And then, the young foresters I’ve trained will tell you that the next thing you do is you walk it some more. Only once we figured we got a good walk, a good idea of it, will we then we’ll use a wedge prism. It’s called variable plot sampling. Mostly to get measures of density – basal area – you know, how crowded it is, and what size the trees are. We’ll come up with an idea of what’s out there, what condition it’s in. Then

14 THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 CORDUROY: To lay down brush, or slash, along a logging trail so that the heavy equipment does not sink into the mud and cause damage to the land. we’ll do some assessments back in the office, on the “WHEN YOU’RE DEALING computer, of what needs to be done. SKID ROAD: A road created by loggers to access When I talk to other foresters, specially interview WITH AN ECOSYSTEM, timber that skidders drag out of the woods and to the log landing. young ones, I’ll ask them “What is the most under- YOU’RE DEALING WITH utilized prescription in forestry?” In general, it’s RESIDUAL STAND: The trees that will remain “Leave it alone and let it grow.” We’re putting a lot of EVERYTHING. WHAT I LOVE untouched during a timber harvest. pressure on our forest. We’ve got lot of turnover in ABOUT THE WORK I DO IS REGENERATION: The process by which new trees landownership. People buy new property and they grow after a timber harvest. think “How are we going to get some money out of THAT IT’S NOT A NARROW CULL TREES: A tree that is non-merchantable it? Let’s cut it.” Well, it was cut just a few years ago. FOCUS TYPE OF WORK. for sawlogs now or prospectively because of rot, Leave it alone and let it grow. That’s what we don’t roughness, or species. get enough of. IT’S HAVING TO PAY CROP TREES: The merchantable timber. When I was an undergrad, we had mainframe ATTENTION TO ALL WORKERS COMPENSATION: Insurance that a computers with punch cards. We now use GIS. Most logging contrator needs to hold on his or her of the products we put out are mapped in it. ArcMap THE INTERACTING AND employees, which can often be quite expensive. is a very powerful spacial tool, probably even a little INTERRELATED THINGS SORTS: The different varieties of timber harvested more than the average forester needs for simple on a logging job, arranged by species and quality, mapping. We put shapefiles into our GPS that’ll have THAT ARE HAPPENING.” and driven by the markets available to the logger. topo maps and the boundary lines. BUCKING: The process of cutting a felled and We do formal inspection reports at least weekly, on any active timber sale jobs we’re delimbed tree into logs. This process is essential involved with. So a forester would go out and walk the job to document what’s been because a logger must know how to buck a log in happening and inspect for contract compliance and best management practices for order to glean the best value from the tree. water quality, these kinds of things. We are now are using an app that we’ve got on our WHOLE TREE OPERATION: This refers to the cell phones. We’ll stand right in the woods, look at it, and enter it into an app, where it equipment lineup and method used to complete the gets uploaded automatically. job. In a whole tree operation, the whole tree is either There are plenty of different paths for foresters. I have been in the operational end cut by hand or harvested with a feller buncher. It is of forestry my whole career. It’s what I chose. I started grad school on a track that then dragged to the log landing by a skidder, where it is cut into logs using a chainsaw or a slasher, and would have led more towards teaching and research, but I realized that wasn’t for me arranged into piles with a log loader. This method is fairly early and left. How you work is a matter of who you are employed by and what common in the hardwood forests of the northeast. their objectives are. A procurement forester, for instance, has the objective to supply Brush, treetops, and other non-merchantable parts of a mill with raw material. Procurement foresters are a fairly strong employment sector the tree are separated at the landing. here in the northeast. CUT-TO-LENGTH OPERATION: Cut-to-length operations As a consulting forester, our job is to represent our landowner client. We don’t work use heavy machines called harvesters, which fell a tree for loggers or mill. We don’t purchase timber. We shouldn’t have that relationship. and cut them to the appropriate length in the forest. The other big sector of forestry employment is government – the Department of The trees are then moved to the landing by a forwarder. In the northeast, this kind of operation is more common Environmental Conservation, the New York City watershed. And then there’s the in industrial softwood forests than in mixed-species university sector, which is smaller. Then there’s the nonprofits, the NGOs. Then big forests. Brush, treetops, and other non-merchantable timber investment management firms will also employ their own forestry staffs. parts of the tree remain in the woods. When I’m in the woods, I’m trying to see the forest for the trees. I’m looking at the INTERNATIONAL RULE: There are many different trees. I’m looking at the species of them – we take a quick glance, and we’ve got a rules for scaling logs. These rules exist so that good idea. It may be the middle of winter, and you’re doing it off of a silhouette – the loggers, mills, and other buyers can speak a common color, the buds, the bark. We don’t need to see those leaves up close. We look at the language about value. The international rule was size of the trees; the height. The height of the trees is an indication of the quality of developed in 1906 and is generally used in timber sales in eastern national forests. Other log rules the site. The size of the trees, at a certain point, is based on the crowding, the density. include the Doyle rule and the Scribner rule. A lot of foresters spend a lot of time looking up. I remember starting out, when I was young, we would fall several times a day. The quality of the tree is often a function of Forester Glossary the crown, the top, the leafy area that’s giving photosynthesis. We’re also looking for signs of disease or pests. That’s constantly changing with all SILVICULTURE: The art and science of controlling the new invasives, whether it’s an insect or a disease or a fungus. The average forest the establishment, growth, composition, health, and quality of forests and woodlands to meet the diverse is a history lesson. You walk a forest and you can see a long-term history of what’s on needs and values of landowners and society such as the ground. You can get an idea of what was there a hundred years ago or more. wildlife habitat, timber, water resources, restoration, When you’re dealing with an ecosystem, you’re dealing with everything. What I and recreation on a sustainable basis. love about the work I do is that it’s not a narrow focus type of work. It’s having to pay TIMBER CRUISE: A sample measurement of a stand attention to all the interacting and interrelated things that are happening.” used to estimate the amount of standing timber that the forest contains. These measurements are collected at sample locations called plots, quadrants, or strips.

THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 15 CHRIS GOODNOW THE TRUCKER New Hampshire

Chris Goodnow is a logger and trucker based out of southern New Hampshire. “I guess we’ve always kind of been in the trucking business. My dad started in the mid- 80s trucking and from there, we developed into other areas. We started producing and hauling wood chips. We always had our own markets for wood chips. When my dad started he was just hauling wood for other people, but our business developed from there. We developed the logging side of our business to keep some of the quotas and markets that we had full. We’re based out of Winchester, New Hampshire. We work in central western Massachusetts, a little bit into Vermont, and around Cheshire County and Sullivan County in New Hampshire. We don’t typically go too far East. We take pulp out to Glens Falls, New York. Chips will go to a plant in Westminster, Massachusetts, or to Jeffrey, New Hampshire, or Springfield, New Hampshire. We have taken a lot of chips over the years up into the White Mountains region, to some of the chip plants up there. We’ve been hauling a lot of our pine logs into Maine ourselves. So we’ll go all the way to Bethel, Maine, with pine logs. Sometimes we’ll come back with logs to a different mill. We do go kind of far at times. Sometimes we have to if we can’t get a backhaul truck to do it and we have pine logs on the landing and they’ve got to be moved. As far as our trucks, we have three Internationals and one Volvo. We’ve always been the kind of outfit that buys used equipment. We don’t buy a whole lot of new stuff, though we did buy a new Manac log trailer last spring. Sometimes, on trailers, it’s better to buy a brand new one than a used one. When you find a good deal, you jump on it, I guess. We’ve had the International trucks for so long. The Volvo is our newest truck. The thing about our Internationals is that we have a lot of spare parts that fit all the trucks, whether it’s oil filters or fuel filters. When all your trucks are the same, your inventory of parts and supplies for maintenance can be a lot smaller. There’s so many different types of relationships in the trucking industry between loggers and sawmills. We’re just one example. Some truckers truck to the same place every day, while some just get whatever they can find. A lot of companies that I know of either have their own trucks or they have a trucking outfit that they’ve worked with for a long time and it’s a kind of a hand-in-hand relationship. The bigger producers obviously need the bigger volume of trucks, whether they have their own or they have companies that haul for them. I know in our area, there’s a couple trucking outfits that have a couple of trucks and all they do is haul logs or sometimes chips for a certain group of loggers. They obviously cater to the more productive ones because your bigger profit margins come from the ones that keep you the most busy. Then there are the smaller guys that put out a load a day or a couple loads a week, who work with somebody with a log truck that pick up whenever they need it. That log truck might be an owner-operator that picks up from five or six different other loggers and does a balancing act to keep them all taken care of. Really, I guess the toughest part of our logging operation is getting the trucks off of the pavement onto the landing, where they can be loaded. Its challenging when there’s a narrow road, or not a lot of room to make a big landing, or if there is no access to the town or state highway. I guess for the landowner that doesn’t know a lot about trucking, one of the things that’s hard for me to convince people is how much room it actually takes to back a truck in off of the road. We need wide landings to get the trucks in. A lot of people don’t realize the room it actually takes. I handle figuring out all our routes. I do most of the bidding on the lots and the projects. So, when we go on a job, I’ve already driven there in the pickup. Sometimes

16 THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 BASAL AREA: The area of a given section of land that is occupied by the cross-section of tree trunks and stems. When foresters consider basal area, they I have to go back a second or third time to travel “FOR THE MOST PART, are essentially looking at the density of the forest. the local roads to make sure everything is okay – bridges, low-weight restricted bridges. Sometimes ON THE ROAD, THE WOOD WEDGE PRISM: A wedge prism is a tool used in timber cruising to estimate basal area of a group of we find a spot where there are wires that aren’t high INDUSTRY USUALLY STICKS trees by counting trees which are “in” or “out” of a enough to get the truck underneath. The first couple plot centered on a single point. trips are always a pain but then everybody gets to TOGETHER...ONE THING I DO VARIABLE PLOT SAMPLING: One technique used by know where everything is and knows how to get in LOVE ABOUT THE LOGGING foresters to estimate volume in a given tree stand. and out, and it’s not too bad. You really want the load tightly packed because AND FORESTRY INDUSTRY GIS: Stands for “geographic information system” and is a computerized system designed to capture, if it’s all kind of locked in, it doesn’t shift or move. IS HOW CLOSE-KNIT store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present But as far as hauling logs or pulp, usually once you spatial or geographic data. get it on the truck, and if you’re somewhat careful EVERYBODY REALLY IS... TOPO MAP: A topographic map is a type of map loading it, you don’t usually have any problems with IN OUR INDUSTRY, PEOPLE characterized by large-scale detail and quantitative any shifting or moving. representation of relief, usually using contour The further you truck, the less profit margin you ARE ALWAYS WILLING TO lines, but historically using a variety of methods. have. The delivered price doesn’t reflect how far MAKE THINGS WORK.” Traditional definitions require a topographic map to away the wood comes in a lot of cases. The guy show both natural and man-made features. that’s right next door the mill delivering his wood five miles away is getting the same BEST MANAGEMENT PRACTICES: Often referred to price that I would get if I’m 200 miles away. So, you have to absorb that cost somehow. as “BMPs”, these are proactive and often voluntary The other side of that is that if we’re too far away, that means you have to add another practical methods or practices used during forest management to achieve goals related to safety, truck to get the same amount of wood moved. water quality, silviculture, wildlife and biodiversity, Backhauls are a big part of trucking. The trucks that bring logs from the southern aesthetics, and/or recreation. part of New England back up to the northern part – whether that’s Maine, or even Canada – their loads that they concentrate on are actually the loads come down from Trucker Glossary up north and they will pick up logs just so it makes economic sense to get the trucks back closer to where the better paying loads originate. PICKER: A mechanized loader attached to the back of a log truck that places the logs in the bed of the truck. Some mills have different specifications on what you need for your trailer or truck. We don’t have any trailers that have log loaders on them. We load them with a crane QUOTAS: Refers to the number of loads a trucker is on the landing and they have to be unloaded by a crane at the site that we’re delivering allowed to bring into a mill on a weekly basis. the product to. There’s a lot of people who have pickers on the trucks or trailers. We BACKHAUL: The load that truckers will haul back decided not to set up that way because of the extra weight. It gives you a lot more to their point of origin after delivering an initial load. payload if you’re not carrying the picker with you everywhere you go. The backhaul is not usually where truckers make the bulk of their money, but a way to make the drive Once you’re at the mill delivering, whether it’s logs, pulp, or chips, you might have back make economic sense. a line to sit in to get unloaded or to be dumped out. If you’ve got roundwood on, you need to get the straps on your cables off and talk to whoever is going to unload it, whether it’s on the CB or in person, and then make sure the paperwork – the trip Sawmill Glossary tickets or whatever – is taken care of. In our case, the crane unloads the logs. Or you CIRCULAR HEADSAW: A round blade with inserted back on the chip dumper and dump your chips. replaceable and sharpenable teeth that does the primary breakdown of the log. This saw’s job is to For the most part, on the road, the wood industry usually sticks together. So if remove enough boards from the log to create a square you had a flat tire and somebody was going to pull over and help you out, it would (cant) that can then be conveyed to a resaw, or absent be probably another wood-hauling truck. One thing I do love about the logging and of a resaw, to cut out and remove all of the boards from forestry industry is how close-knit everybody really is. A lot of times we’d put a truck the log including slabs, edgeboards, and 4 sided lumber. on and haul for somebody else if we were really close to a mill and we weren’t using all our trucks and somebody else was having a hard time. In our industry, people are always willing to make things work.”

THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 17 THE SAWMILL COLLEEN GOODRIDGE Vermont OWNER Colleen Goodridge is the president of Goodridge Lumber, a sawmill in Vermont. “Goodridge Lumber is a family owned and operated lumber manufacturer located in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, one of the most rural counties in Vermont. The business started in 1974 as a result of us wanting to cut logs and mill them for our own log home. From there, we seemed to get the bug for working outside and working with a natural resource. So, here we are, 45 years later. My three sons operate the business with me, and we have four other employees. We process a very special wood out of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont: white cedar, which is put into many products from log homes to log siding, rough and finished lumber, b-groove and decking, clear-edged boards, shiplap. Its a very unique wood to the northeast – very decay resistant, bug resistant, and very beautiful. This resource grows within a 75 mile radius of the mill, which means we work with probably a hundred different landowners, foresters, loggers, and truckers within a 75 mile radius. Our mill is fairly small by industry standards. We saw approximately 1-1.2 million feet per year. We are small but we try to provide a market for our local landowners, foresters, loggers, and truckers. Everyone in the supply chain has to work together in order for this business to survive. If any one of us is out of the circle, the rest of us cannot survive. You end up with a very close knit circle of people. We have many visitors to the mill from kindergarten age all the way through college, and seniors as well. We start our tours by looking at the raw material that the folks – the landowners and loggers and truckers – have brought into the yard. When a load of logs is delivered to the yard, we can explain to people where it came from and how it is harvested. Visitors see all those neatly-stacked piles of logs, sorted for diameter and length for different products. You can stand in the yard; you can smell the cedar and see the raw material. We visit the sawmill and we describe the machines that we use to process the wood – from our circular saw to the bandsaws, which are thin-kerf saws that save as much wood as possible. We look at the drying shed and see the care that we take getting those rough-sawn boards on stickers to air dry. We explain the process of using mother nature, in our case, to dry the wood, and then proceed to the planer building where we see rough-sawn lumber being put through a planer. We have no waste products. The chips that are broken down in our chipper are taken to a mulch factory where they are reground and turned into mulch. The sawdust and the shavings are sold to multiple farmers. We save boards down to three feet in length for our wood workers and fence companies. We have pallet-grade lumber for pallet tops. We are very intentional about using the logs that are brought in for their best use. We don’t waste anything, and I think that speaks well for all of us. It’s what you should do, morally, but also economically. You’ve got to make every molecule of those trees count in order to keep your business running. There are lots of different skills used in our one particular business here. On a day-to-day basis, one of my sons is responsible for unloading the trucks that come in with their logs, and scaling, and so forth. There will be another son that does the actual sawing, and one that tends to planing operations. We have people who stack lumber and people who grade lumber. Grading lumber means that you will see what the quality is: For instance, we want all tight knots; there cannot be any decay, so we grade for a certain value or a certain criteria of what makes that board useful for a specific surface.

18 THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 BANDSAW: A flat piece of saw steel with each end welded to the other end to form a band that travels around two large wheels, with one of the wheels When you walk into the mill, you’ll see that “WE ARE VERY INTENTIONAL being powered and the other wheel being driven there are a variety of machines that help us do our by the bandsaw. work, from loaders to skidsteers to delivery trucks ABOUT USING THE LOGS CANT: During the primary breakdown process, to log loaders. All of this machinery needs to be THAT ARE BROUGHT IN FOR the first cut from the log will be what is called serviced. Repairs and maintenance are another a slab. The slab is considered waste and will critical part to keeping things going. We also THEIR BEST USE. WE DON’T become firewood or chips. The next cut is called have to have a person knowledgeable in sales of an edgeboard because it has two flat surfaces and what you actually produce and what you have for WASTE ANYTHING, AND I two rough edges called wane that are the shape of the outside of the log. Once you have removed inventory. THINK THAT SPEAKS WELL four slabs, and four edgeboards, you are left with a For us right now, coming into the winter season, cant, or square, that has four flat sides. we will be getting 80 percent of out 1-1.2 million FOR ALL OF US. IT’S WHAT DRYING SHED: This is where sawmillers stack board feet of logs, because the white cedar tends YOU SHOULD DO, MORALLY, lumber to keep the rain away from it as it air dries. to grow in swampy areas, in softer areas, so we require frozen ground and snow to get the wood BUT ALSO ECONOMICALLY. PLANING: The process of machining the surfaces of rough sawn boards to produce smooth surfaces. out without ground disturbance. White cedar is a YOU’VE GOT TO MAKE The machining is done by a planner, which is a little different than other species because it is not EVERY MOLECULE OF machine that has a series of very sharp knives that available on a year-round basis. So typically in the essentially peel the surface of the board to make summertime it is physically impossible to get to THOSE TREES COUNT IN it smooth. the tree because of the ground being soft. So we ORDER TO KEEP YOUR SCALING: A method of measuring logs to gauge have to buy all the wood that we can in the winter how much lumber they are capable of producing in months, and that is a challenge, but the benefit BUSINESS RUNNING.” measurements called board feet. is that white cedar does not stain; the bugs don’t EDGING: The process of cutting both edges of an get into it, so we can hold that inventory up to two years here in the yard. It is a cash- edgeboard to turn it into a board that has square flow puzzle, but our white cedar is a little different in terms of not being able to buy it edges instead of rough, waney edges. year-round. TRIMMING: 8-foot logs usually measure 8’4” to The loggers will give us a call and ask “When are you going to start buying; what allow for any unevenness of the cut from tree are you going to need as far as length and diameter, and what is the price going to length to log length. The eight foot boards that are be?” We will go over that information and take a look at our orders to see if there is cut from that log will be uneven and unsquare on each end and slightly over eight feet long. So they any specific length that we need. We rely on good communication so that we have are sent through a sawing machine that is called the right size, the right length, and so that it works well for the logger and, in turn, the a “double end trimmer” because it will trim both landowner, and we get the wood that we need for our orders. ends of the board at the same time to produce a On the sales side, we have both wholesale orders and retail orders. You need both board that is eight feet long, leaving both ends of to use up your log pile. Our wholesale orders go out usually by trailer truck; we have a the board square. local carrier in the Barre, VT area that takes most of that. We also supply rough green CLEAR-EDGED BOARDS: These are boards that lumber to a playground company in Massachusetts, two trailer loads a year. So those have two flat sides and two square, straight edges. orders are packaged up in a mill, covered with lumber covers, and put on the tractor ROUGH-SAWN BOARDS: These are boards that trailer and shipped. Our retail orders can be picked up by the customer here at the mill, have been cut directly from a log and nothing has or we will deliver in the local area. yet been done to smooth the surface. As an industry, we are a professional group. I think when people see the amount of STICKERS: Small stick-like boards that are effort put into marking the timber or sawing the timber and making the decision on the strategically placed between boards that are being landing of how to get the most out of it, they see that it’s not haphazard. We wouldn’t stacked to be air dried or kiln dried. The object is be here if we did a haphazard job. People can always understand about weeding their so that the air can circulate to all surfaces of each board while they are staked in a large pile. garden – well, the forested landscape is not any different.” SHIPLAP: Shiplap boards rest on top of each other and overlap, while tongue-and-groove planks join together and interlock.

THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 19 ANDREW CLARK THE Connecticut

CONCENTRATION Andrew Clark is the owner of Limb-it-Less Logging in LOG YARD central Connecticut. “My primary position in our company would be that of procurement manager. I’m in charge of procuring the forest products to resell to our customers, the sawmills, and OWNER veneer mills that manufacture lumber and plywood, and then our overseas customers. But it’s oversimplified to say that I’m head of procurement. I wear many hats. I also purchase standing timber because we have our own logging crews who supply us. I deal with the private landowners and with different foresters, as well as dealing with other loggers to purchase their logs. I’m also in charge of sales of the logs, keeping the negotiations going and the customers happy. A lot of the value that we bring to our local industry is in our concentration yard, or log yard, where we can buy and sort the forest products based on the customer’s needs, in order to give them the volumes that they require. Not every sawmill buys all the species of logs. They may focus on one particular species, or – even breaking it down and refining it even further – they may only saw a certain product of that species. So if you want a certain grade, a certain quality of log, you have the opportunity to go to a facility like ours and and buy just certain products. That gives us our edge. It’s nothing new, but in our little small state of Connecticut, that is the value that we bring to these to the loggers and customers. The majority of the species we deal with are hardwood species. I would say 75% of the logs that we handle are of the oak species – red oak and white oak – and then the other 25% are a mix of birch and maple and tulip and hickory. We’re primarily in what I like to call “oak country.” Consistently, we have about 10 outside logging companies that sell us logs on a week to week, month by month basis. And then we have three of our own logging crews that that work our own personal jobs. When we evaluate a log, we look at what are called the sides of the log. A lowgrade log is a log that lacks any clear sides. When we grade logs, we look at logs as four sections. Imagine looking at the circular end of the log and dividing it into four pieces of pie. We look at the number of clear faces or lack thereof. Now picture how a tree grows: When you get into the upper portions of a tree where there’s typically a lot of branches and knots where there were branches before, that is the lowgrade part of the tree. Sometimes you have trees that are purely lowgrade from the bottom right on up, but typically it’s the upper portions of the trees that make lowgrade material. Of all the logs that we handle every year, I would say at least 50 percent is lowgrade. The lowest quality wood is cordwood. Cordwood is essentially firewood. It refers to the logs that don’t meet the requirements to be a log, whether they’re either too small, too crooked, or rotten. Typically we can market logs that are 10 inches on the small end and larger. But they have to be perfectly straight. They have to be free of rot. They have to be sound. So basically anything that doesn’t meet that criteria is cordwood. We get a fair percentage of that as well. Most of that we wholesale to firewood producers. We do a little bit of firewood ourselves at our log yard, but a very small volume. On the sales side of it, right now we have approximately eight different customers that we deal with on a week-to-week basis. The lowest grade products of logs that are one step above cordwood go to a flooring manufacturer and they make hardwood strip flooring, pre-finished hardwood flooring. The flooring mills buy lowgrade logs of various hardwood species and manufacture that into a hardwood flooring product. Also, some of our lowgrade logs go into the railroad tie industry and are hewn into crossties for railroad infrastructure. The next customer, as far as volume is concerned, are the guys who produce lumber. They take the logs that are a little bit better than those lowgrade logs, logs that have maybe one or two or three clear faces. They still have their problems, but they’re good

20 THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 Log Yard Glossary sawlogs. And then we have the top-of-the-line logs, “A LOT OF THE VALUE PROCUREMENT MANAGER: The person in charge the clear logs that are used for making plywood and of sourcing or procuring appropriate timber for an and door skins, very high-end material. That’s the THAT WE BRING TO OUR operation. smallest percentage of what we handle, probably LOCAL INDUSTRY IS IN VENEER MILL: A mill that processes the highest only 10 or 12 percent of our overall volume, but they quality wood. A veneer is a very thin surface of are still an important customer. OUR LOG YARD, WHERE high quality wood, typically placed on top of lower quality wood to improve appearance. We’re diversified. We don’t just sell all of our WE CAN BUY AND SORT products to one or two customers. We spread it DOOR SKINS: A thin veneer layer that forms the around and keep the doors open for all the markets THE FOREST PRODUCTS exterior surface of a door. that we deal with. A fair amount of volume historically BASED ON THE CUSTOMER’S STANDING TIMBER: Timber that has not been cut. as gone to North America, mostly Canada. Some of it CONCENTRATION YARD: An area where logs are stays domestic in the United States, but I would say NEEDS, IN ORDER TO sorted by grade, measures, and prepared for their we send 60 percent between Canada and domestic. GIVE THEM THE VOLUMES intended destination. Sometimes a concentration And then 40 percent goes to overseas markets. yard is attached to a sawmill or logging operation Mostly Asia, China, and Vietnam, though we do a little THAT THEY REQUIRE.” and sometimes it operates as an independent business. bit of business in India and Pakistan as well. Right now, the export markets are in turmoil because of tariffs and other issues. So currently CORDWOOD: Another word for firewood, which is almost a hundred percent of our products are staying domestic. measured in cords. We mostly truck logs, but we have a couple customers that we rail logs to and that’s fairly unique. It doesn’t typically work for customers who are excessively far from a particular rail line or rail spur or a yard where they can unload the cars, because that’s where logistically it starts to become more expensive. But it can be very cost effective. The railroads can move a lot of product per rail car, typically four to five truckloads can go on a railcar. It sometimes can be as much as a 50% savings when you break it down into a per-unit cost, per board foot. In recent years, especially in the winter time, when we have had trouble getting the long-haul trucks to go to Canada, we’ve incorporated the rail to help pick up the slack. Right now we employ four people, but we do have about six people that subcontract for us as truckers and loggers. They’re independent contractors themselves, but they work for us primarily on a full-time basis. That gives them and us flexibility. It gives them the ability to sometimes go and do their own jobs, but it works for us because it keeps costs under control. In the logging industry, 99% of people are paid on a piece, a per-unit rate. What’s a usual day for me? Well, let’s take Monday. Typically, my Monday mornings start about anywhere between 5:30 and 6 a.m., when my log truck drivers will call to find out what their trucking schedule is for the day. Sunday night, I usually send out a couple emails or some text messages to my logging contractors to find out where everybody is. So by Monday morning, I’ll have a handle on the day and I’ll give my truckers their tasks. I usually arrive at my log yard about 7 a.m. I’ll take a drive through the yard and see you how many loads of logs came in over the weekend from our outside vendors that handle their own logging and trucking and who will bring in logs over the weekend. I’ll do a quick count and and we’ll gear up and start doing log inspections. We will start scaling the loads of logs, identifying each log and its customer. Over the course of that day, we may have four five trucks that we have to load, between Canadian trucks that are going to our Canadian customers and maybe a container truck that is eventually going overseas. Once lunchtime comes, I may go out for the rest of the day and go visit some of my my own logging sites to make sure my contractors are doing okay and make sure they are working as efficiently and safely as possible. I’ll see if they need anything. Then, I might talk to my customers, the landowners who own the land that we’re working on, and make sure everybody’s happy. It seems like half of my day is spent scaling logs and talking to my log customers, then the other half of my day is spent making sure that my contractors and my landowners that own the timber are happy. So it’s a lot of public relations!”

THE NORTHERN LOGGER | JANUARY 2019 21