ya know what really irritates me?

[babylogger]

i hope this is the right forum and its not targeted toward anyone, ok? i was reading some of the threads and the problems with logging. ok you will have bad and good loggers just like any other job, but for everyone who has a problem with it let me ask you some questions! do you use paper? do you buy cards for your loved ones? do you use paper to write on? do you have a checking acct and a ckbk thats made with paper? do you have a title to your vehicle? how about ins cards? do you use toilet paper?? if you answered yes, then where the heck do you think these things come from? TREES!!! if it wasnt for loggers youd really have no modern conveniences and youd be using ferns instead of tp! (sorry if this offends anyone)

[Paschale]

Hey there, Babylogger,

I think you're preaching to the choir.     We're all supportive of loggers, and the logging industry in here.  I for one am very appreciative of the skills and hard work of the logging industry.  I'm very grateful that I have paper,  (especially tp!).    There was a thread we had going about bumper stickers, and many of them were very funny about logging, and essentially said the same things you were saying.  That being said, like you said, there are good loggers and bad loggers, just like there are good dentists and bad dentists, or any other category you might want to talk about.  When it comes to injustice, whether it be in logging, or car repair, or real estate, or the like, then I think you'll find the people here on the forum squarely coming down on the side of the little guy. It has very little to do with logging, ultimately, and everything to do with justice, scruples and integrity, or the lack thereof.  Unfortunately, there are bad loggers out there, and they give a bad name to the majority of the good and scrupulous loggers out there who work from an ethical framework.  The threads you're referring to are probably about the bad eggs.  Just because people on the forum rail against the injustices done by these bad guys, doesn't mean that any of us are anti-logging.  In fact, we're all so passionate about good logging practices, it makes us be that much more vocal about it when bad loggers do their worst.

Just my two cents...

[redpowerd]

well said paschale.

i think anything bad said here about loggers would be about bad loggers. well do the same with bad sawers and bad politicians, too.

kind of a warning to people that aspire to be bad loggers, or may end up dealing with one.

[Black_Bear]

Hey dude you forgot to ask everyone what their houses were made of. There is a reason why housing starts are used as a gauge for the supply and demand of wood products.

Paper products are just one sector of the wood products industry that happen to be driven by supply and demand. Paper products are rather inelastic, meaning the price can rise and people will still be willing to pay a little more for that 2-ply cottony-soft TP. That does not hold true for stumpage prices and, to a lesser degree, lumber.

Don't let a little criticism get to you.  If you do good work and feel good about it don't worry about what others say and do. Just keep on chugging.

Paschale said it: You are preaching to the choir.

BTW, no offense taken.  The company I worked for for 8 years in the early to mid 90s was not well liked for our forest practices. There was not a lot wrong in what we were doing, it was simply a public perception. The public cries when they see a clearcut or a cut that does not meet public approval for one reason or the other. Granted it may be ugly, but here in the northeast 99 out of 100 times that clearcut will grow back into a beautiful stand of timber. Public perception is an important faction of logging and forestry today and all who are involved need to be aware of this.

And yes, I do have a bumper sticker that reads:  If you object to logging, try using plastic toilet paper.  

[slowzuki]

The problem I tend to have is related to that chart Swampy posted awhile back.  You get more volume managing a stand then simply clearcutting and walking away.

Sure both grow back but the clearcut takes longer to regain volume.  If the clearcut is manually replanted you end up with large monoculture plantations susceptible to disease and insect attack.

I'm lucky that our property was owned by a gentleman and his brother that performed careful work while working.  Areas which were even aged and mature were clearcut but they were flexible enough to not apply that to the whole property.  They also did this over a long enough time the remaining mature trees seeded the clearcut areas where the duff had been disturbed.

Many large companies may own say 200 acres with 150 acres of it being mature.  Instead of managing the 50 acres left they clearcut it all so they don't have to go back later.  They can just try and package it up with other properties to trade off for some mature crown land here.

[Black_Bear]

I didn't see the chart Swampy posted, but I can venture a guess that it depicted that a management regime may produce a greater net volume due to the capture of timber that would otherwise be lost to natural mortality.

That does not take into account the discount rate that must be applied to timber cut in the future. To clearcut today gives an immediate, undiscounted return on your timber. Some landowners can't see past this.

Personally, I am an advocate for selection systems. This applies to the financial side of the management regime and the operational side of the management regime. I also realize not all stands are ideal for a selection system. In the end, it boils down to the forester being able to assess the situation, devise a plan that will meet the landowners objectives, advise them of the pitfalls and rewards, and implement the plan. Most larger companies today have an eye on sustainability but they also have an eye on the bottom line, and a good looking bottom line is what makes the investors happy.

There is not much planting going on here in New England; there is no need for it, we are blessed with excellent environments for natural regeneration. The majority of the planting is being done by Irving up in the northern reaches of Maine.

One last thing, when it comes to regeneration most northeast species do not benefit greatly from clearcutting . Species such as hard maple, white pine, yellow birch, and spruce/fir benefit, both in density and in form, if they are regenerated under some sort of shelterwood or selection system. That's not to say that a clearcut won't produce a nice stand someday, but the pioneer species are more apt to occupy these sites shortly after clearcutting.   

Kind of off topic of the thread, but I'm just going with the flow. 

[Kirk_Allen]

  Bravo Paschale Bravo

babylogger I would suggest reading LOTS more threads and get a better feel for the people on this forum.  There is not a better group of folks out there that care as much as we do about the timber industry.   Just recently I spoke of a logger that is a local shyster.  Fortunatly for us in this area the word is getting out about him and it will help both the good loggers and the landowners. 

I bet if you read enough on hear you can find far more positives on logging than negatives. 

[UrbanLogger]

Babylogger,

Your point is well taken, but defending wasteful resource management by picking out a list of products that we all "need" doesn't do the issue justice. 

Here in the South we've seen a huge increase in evenage hardwood management (read indiscriminate clearcutting) over the last 2 decades. The primary driver behind this has been hardwood chip production for coated papers, rayon and acetate with a good portion of it for export to Asia. 

The end use of this hardwood fiber is not even so noble as TP. A larger part of it goes into the disposable packaging that our cheap consumer goods come in. That's one of the reasons I refuse to shop at the "big box" hardware stores--everything they sell comes over packaged. I much prefer my corner hardware where items are not packaged but sold out of bins. 

The other impetous for pulp production from hardwoods is computer paper. Ink jet printers and copying machines like smooth surfaced paper made from hardwood (mainly Oak) pulp. Computers were supposed to lead to a "paperless" society right? WRONG! Now we have a bunch of kids and lazy people printing out and/or copying every webpage they visit or document they receive--actually using more paper than we did back in the days of carbon copies and typewriters.  Another culprit is the immense volume of glossy catalogs distributed with abandon in our consumer culture.

Because these end uses are "low value", the prices paid at the chipmill are extremely low and thus stumpage and logger pay are low too. The loggers really get it the worst in my opinioin as they are forced to invest heavily in big equipment to move enough tonnage to make any money at the scales--one of my favorite logging bumper stickers is "Feller Bunchers Repalce a Bunch of Fellas".

Everybody involved would make more money if the woods were managed selectively for a full range of products from sawlogs to pallet wood to pulp. Of course this requires longterm planning and careful management which many in our instant-gratification/return society can't grasp.

IMHO, sawlogs are the best and highest goal of hardwood forest management--select for stand improvement and send the culls off for pulpwood.

Of course, there are many tracts of forestland that have been converted to fiber crops (read pine) and clearcutting is likely the best and most efficient way to harvest these lands.   

As for my own paper use--we wipe with 100% post-consumer recycled TP which comes largely from recycled packaging and use 100% tree-free paper in our printer made from Kenaf growing on previously abused cotton land (the Kenaf effectively conditions the soil for subsequent hardwood reestablishment).

Huggin' trees just before I saw 'em up to make something built to last,

Scott     


         

[timberjack240]

babylogger
i agree. me and you think a lot alike on this issue

[OLD_ JD]

I sure agree whit u babylogger,but we have to understand on some case cleancut IS the only way out ..i remenber few year ago i ask a forester about some thinning to do on a hemlock area....who i didn't whante to cleancut the  place....we hade no choise to cleancut some plot on 50% of that over mature forest even if they where not THAT big ...now it almost time to go back again and cleancut the rest

what i realy dont like is when i see nice stand where they could be manage for the future, and just bein cleancut for pulpwood ..
some pep juge us coze we cleancut some area just bcoze by a fast look they think we are "killing" some forest ...but they never ask there self IF those nice hardwood stand was not "kill".....20-or 40 yeard ago.....

[Scott]

 What really ticks me off is the huge ruts left everywhere after the cutting is done. These ruts will probably never heal, there's too many of them and theyre way too big. Another big tick off for me is the crappy roads I see a lot of guys building lately. They just dig big holes with the excavator and plop all the dirt down and call it a road. The ditches they dig for dirt don't even drain the water off, it all just collects in pools. Sorry to ramble but this stuff really annoys me. The forest will grow back but that road is always gonna be there. 

[Texas Ranger]

Contracts, everyone, contracts.

[beenthere]

Well Scott, how do you propose to do the road when you get into the logging business and have to get those trees out?     :

[Black_Bear]

UrbanLogger:  That was well said.

I agree 100% about the high grade sawlogs. A lot of those low-grade stands exist today because of poor past cutting practices.  

The northeast is dense with low grade red maple/white birch stands that have been highgraded for decades now. Currently, the University of Maine is a worldwide leader in laminated wood-product research. Hopefully they can devise and successfully market new products that will consume a good portion of this low grade wood.

And as the Texas Ranger mentioned, the fact that anyone would work without a contract when extracting timber is absurd. It doesn't matter if you are a logger, landowner, or forester. They are just begging for trouble if you ask me.  

[UrbanLogger]

Black_Bear,

I hear ya on the highgrading. I just went out and looked at a stand for a feall that wants me to saw out a barn for him. He has 72 acres that he boaught 2 years ago. The previous owner had had it cut (highgraded) a few years before that.

I walked around and all I could find was Post Oak, Sweetgum and a few Poplars. The only stuff over 15" was the Sweetgum and Poplar and nearly every tree was skidder-wounded   

We're gonna use up what we can of the Post Oaks and make board and batten outta the Poplar and then the customer's gonna go down to the Division of Forestry and get him a mess of sapling to scatter around. It'll be another 30 years though before any decent wood comes off the land again.      

[Black_Bear]

Yessir UrbanLogger, we in  the northeast will be cleaning up lots like that for years to come, albeit with different low-grade species.

If people would just learn to take a little bit of the sour with the sweet and not hog out on the grade, the forests would be in much better shape grade-wise. But, you know how it goes.

How much does a sapling cost?  Sounds expensive.

[duramax]

I agree with all you guys on sustainable forestry practices!! I'm 26 and have been logging for 10 years full time. When I started there was lots of private land for everyone around but because of poor logging, there is almost none left. Even when the county put restrictions on clear cuts, people still did it anyways because they knew there would be no consequences. The only consequence being that the younger generation of loggers (like me) were getting screwed over. Now the only work most loggers are stuck with are contracts from large sawmills which for ,as most of you know, is not the most profitable approach. We used to make a really good living with older , cheaper machines, but now have had to make the change to mechanized harvesting. Now we've invested over 1 million (Canadian Dollars) in order to cut enough wood to make a living. We work longer days, pay 10 times as much in insurance, 5 times more fuel and end up with less money at the end of the year. I often wonder if I should continue in this business or try something else. I've watched so many contracters go under in the last 5 years its not even funny.  My Dad often gets discouraged as well , he started back in the 70's , times were a whole lot different back then. I wish I could have started back then too an have some of the good years....

[Scott]

If i were in the business I'd plan out my roads so they follow the best path. Next I'd move the stumps, branches etc off the right of way, not move it all to the center to be burried under the dirt (they start to poke up through the road after awhile). Then I'd set to work grubbing out the road. Ditches would be a reasonable size not the huge trenches often seen around here (sometimes 12 feet wide and 10 feet deep if a lot of dirt is needed on the road) I'd try to use a small on site gravel pit if extra fill is needed for the road. Most operators here either make the ditch larger when they need more dirt or pick a spot beside the road and dig a dig hole, both create drainage problems. Also i wouldn't dig ditches where their not needed, it just creates more damage, simply putting a slight crown on the road will do the trick in many places.
   As far as moving those trees out to the roads, smaller equipment helps a lot but I guess thats not really an option for most operators. Waiting for the ground to either dry out or freeze up goes a long ways in wet areas. Planning out skid trails never hurt either. Forwarders seems to do less damage than a skidder too. These are just my thoughts, but I've seen them work when people are willing to give them a chance. This is WAY off topic  

[Scott]

 Duramax, Where are you located? I've often wondered how loggers can make ends meet with equipment prices (I've seen harvesters go for over 600,000) . Its frustrating to consider that wood prices are skyrocketing here but yet loggers are seeing no more money  .

[Black_Bear]

Duramax,

ou est Lachute?