Oklahoma Red Cedar

[teakboat]

Is this topic still alive?  I am in Oklahoma and have been interested in this subject some.

I wonder if there is a way to integrate and market cedar for higher-end uses, rather than lowly mulch.  Love to get high margins!

I was at the Pawnee OK steam tractor show a couple of years ago and they were cutting some very large red cedar logs.  They were very impressive, and supposedly cut just a few miles from there.  They were just running them through a steam shingle cutter, seemed a bit sad to me.

Western Oklahoma banks will not be very interested in sawmill/forestry projects, however there is much logging in the eastern parts of the state, there is a good mix of pines and hardwoods, and some of those eastern OK banks will be more agreeable.

Bank financing is kind of grim, would be great to have enough equity to dispense with banks.

Anyway, I am new to this forum and think it is great.

[Cedarman]

The challenge as I see it in the cedar area of Ok is the lack of a sawmill and logging culture.  There is not a pool of people that understand logging and sawmilling.  Landowners are not familiar with timber values.

We have the chicken and egg thing.  No markets, no big sawmills. No big sawmills, no markets.

There is talk of a decent sized mill going in somewhere in central Ok.  There is money to back it.  This would be great.  I think the first thing that needs to be done is establish markets.  This can be done, but will take some time and effort. How do you market a million feet of cedar a year? 

As I see it the small mills get a few orders, then try to get some logs.  A logger needs a dependable buyer if they are going to invest in logging equipment. They can't just sit by the phone and wait for a few small mills to call once in a while.  The sawmill cant buy unlimited amount of cedar because they do not have a steady market.

With 10,000,000 acres of cedar and in this cedar is 1 to 2 billion feet of nice standing cedar sawlogs, there is ample opportunity.  Talk about a huge untapped resource. My competitors in so In are paying up to 60 cents per foot for cedar delivered to the mill.  There is no shortage of cedar in my area, just people that don't understand the cedar business. 

Since we started grinding, we have 3 competitors.  They have not hurt us at all.  We have sales lined up for our biggest year ever. 

[TexasTimbers]

Welcome to the forum teakboat!

If you built your own boat we would love to see some pictures. You can post them over on the General forum. 

[saddletramp]

Howdy Cedarman.  Great thread. My partner in crime and I have been working on this very thing in the Kansas flinthills. We are a much smaller operation with smaller ideas. You have really got me to thinking. Has any one mentioned the E.Q.I.P. money avalible to land owners in Kansas to clear cedars? We have been working with ranchers on this, we get trees leave slabs, branches and they get the E.Q.I.P. money and they are happy. Have some real forest comming up and was wondering about asking for some of the money as sheares wont touch most of the trees and no other way to clear other than chainsaw. Question, would you be interested in grinding in central Kansas(Manhattan area) and if so what voulume would it take to justify you moving your machinery to do it? The biggest killer for us is the time it takes to limb out a cedar log. Very low volume per day. Maybe you know of a better way or are you just in to the grinding not the logging? I fully agree with you in that there are many oppurtunities in this for more than one operation. Maybe if smaller mills and operators could band together to meet volume requirements would help to get this off the ground. What brand of grinder are you running? With the new housing market around here there is a very good market for mulch locally which would cut down on the trucking cost. As I see it this problem is here to stay. Too many do gooders want to ban the rancher from burning pastures. Spraying costs way too much, espically when a pasture may be from 600 to 10000 acres. Also as urban sprawl creeps out that limits what you can burn. Would like to talk with you some time, you are a man with ideas. I like that. Steve

[teakboat]

Cedarman, what are they doing with the logs that are getting up to 60 cents per foot, if I could ask?  I suppose only the nicest logs get anywhere near that?  What diameter?

Kevjay, I wish I had a teakboat, I've got an aluminum bass boat!  www.teakboat.com is our business, related to outdoor furniture.

[Cedarman]

We use a Rotochopper horizontal grinder.
Don Queal out of Pratt Ks also has a Rotochopper grinder.  He might want to travel, but I think he is on a 25,000 acre ranch and has several cedars to grind.

We do cut the logs out of trees that will make an 9" log at least 8' long and are stockpiling these.  One tract we left about 80,000 standing feet of sawlogs that were in the hardwoods and didn't interfer with the pasture land.  We use a tree shear on trees from 8" to 24", a chain saw on the bigger ones and a tree saw on the smaller trees if they are enough to justify.  We can cut from 400 to 1000 trees per hour with the saw if they are thick and mostly poles.  The shears is about a minute or two per tree average as you have to move the tree after cutting it to get it out of the way.
When using the tree saw if they are too thick, we use another loader to windrow them.

The ranchers in Ok can get cost share on cedar eradification.

GW with his real nice homemade mill has the scoop on sawing timber near Ok City.

[Fla._Deadheader]

 If a machine such as the harvester type, where it grabs the tree, cuts it off, turns it to strip limbs and bucks, were used on Red Cedar, would it effectively strip the cedar limbs. They seem more "rubbery" than Pine. They don't break cleanly like Pine

  I was thinking, maybe some form of stuffer-stripper of Cedar trunks, too small for sawing, might be stripped and sent through a chipper. Bigger pieces sent through a Shaver, and the largest, sawn ??

  Too much machinery involved for this process to be economical???

[teakboat]

Thanks Cedarman for the information.

[Cedarman]

Cedar limbs are very brittle and shear off nicely with a harvester.  We use one at times in In.  The problem with the field cedar is that they have limbs to the ground. I looked at a Timber King harvester (I think that is the name) in the UP several years ago.  I asked the operator who was delimbing some nasty jack pine to start near the top where it was very limby with big limbs to see how it would contend with them.  It would grab the stem crushing the limbs and stroke to the end.  Then let go rotate 180 degrees grab the tree where it had been delimbed and proceed to the trunk.  It did a nice job, so this delimber would work on any cedar that I have ever seen.  This is the most powerful delimber I have ever seen.  6" pine limb gone with ease.

There is a huge demand for cedar shavings.  American Wood Fibres cannot keep up with demand.  So, someone could open up a shaving mill in Ok and do well making shavings.  Get contracts for the shavings first, the logs can be obtained inexpensively enough.  It would cost several hundred thousand to set up the process properly.  The big thing is that the shavings need to be dried to the right MC to store in the bag.  Dry logs don't shave as well as green logs do, but I think the right shaver could overcome this problem.  Salsco makes a portable shaver.  So if you had smaller markets established first, this could be a good deal. There are portable baggers, but they run to $50,000 and up.  You can also take all the decent slabs and shave them too.
It would take a bit of research and running around lining all the ducks up, but it can be done.  A small bandmill on the side to saw the really nice logs and sell as markets opened up would be a good companion to a shaver.  I think the shaver could run full time.  Ok, being several hundred miles west of any other cedar shaving mill would have a leg up on transportation.

It will take someone with access to capital, with time to do the legwork, and willingness to take a big risk to do this.  It won't be easy.  If it was, soneone else would already be doing it.

[Fla._Deadheader]

 Ed and I looked into a Shaving Mill for Pine. Horse Bedding is a huge market. I had thought about a grain dryer, like for corn. Shouldn't be THAT expensive to operate, if it's used for $2.00 bushel corn ??  Expell chips from that into a Solar "tempering" bin, then bag it.

  I could interested in a "Joint" venture on this.

[Stump Jumper]

can someone explain to us with a little more detail how this E.Q.I.P.money works .where it comes from , who is intitled to it , is it based acres or trees removed ?