Biomass harvest demo - Whetstone Conservation center, Mo. July 2011

[Bibbyman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sy1FPpg2_c

Mary and I attended a biomass forest harvest demo this morning.  I shot this video but it only shows a bit that went on.  Unfortunately, the conditions were poor and not much info was absorbed.  I hope they don't give a test!

[Bibbyman]

I'm awake this morning and thought I'd expound on our biomass forest fuel demo.

It was put on by The Missouri Department of Conservation – Forestry,  Missouri Forest Products Industry Association and the University of Missouri Forestry Department.

Here are a couple of links to info.

http://mdc4.mdc.mo.gov/Documents/19813.pdf

http://moforest.org/news_info/2011/July.pdf

The demo/presentation could have been much better.  They'd had some rain overnight and it was somewhere between drizzling and raining most of the morning.  The presentation was started in the field where they had skidded out some small understory trees.  I guess they intended to have the grinder set up to show that process.  But the grinder was setting some 100 yards back on the lake dam.  I figured they could have set it up in the large parking lot and pulled some material to it.  But for some reason they didn't think of that or it was not possible.

They fired up the delimer and worked up a few stems.  We went to the woods and got somewhat close enough to see the feller/buncher work.  I cut out of the video (at Mary's insistence) so views of a large chunk of top hanging in a tree right over the skidder path.  People were standing under it.  The main guy putting on the demo gathered people under this big dead chunk of treetop to start the in-forest lecture.  Someone suggested moving from under it and we did.  I also had some video of a tree that had been cut but left lodged.  People were walking around it but not directly under it.

The skidder, feller/buncher and delimer continued to work as they made their presentation.  I was on the outside edge and could hardly hear anything but the noise of the machines.  Mary was front and center so she probably heard more.

I think their goal was to open another product for loggers.  They were trying to document the costs and paybacks of using large sale machinery to harvest understory and trees of no current value. 

I asked, "What happens if/when the price of fuel doubles?".  He talked a good bit about price per ton of chips, on and on and didn't answer my question.  The raw material is basically free for the taking.  But the taking is quite expensive. 

I asked if they were going to include in their study the use of lighter equipment – i.e. Heavy bobcat with shear, farm tractor for skidder, etc.  No.  They were only focusing on using large equipment.  Seems to me this would limit the number of people that could get into the business.  Or even consider the risk.

From what I gather they would really like for this thing to take off and have every stand and harvest managed by the Forestry Department.  They (as caught on video) would like to turn the forest back to pre-European settlement state. 

I don't think they trust private land owners and independent loggers to decide the best use for the forest land they own.

[LOGDOG]

Morning Bibby,

That's interesting. During my last visit with my salesman from Doggett Machinery (John Deere) he was telling me about the new biomass harvesting equipment. He made the comment that John Deere blieved in it so much they had actually invested a sizable amount (I forget how many millions) in a plant over here in East Texas. I believe he said they were working on a plant over in MS too.

Great quote: "The raw material is basically free for the taking.  But the taking is quite expensive."  ;)

[Norm]

These types of things are being mandated from DC. Green energy type of thing is my understanding. As is typical they don't have a clue what they're doing, the comment about only huge equipment use is telling.

[Bibbyman]

I've got to tell this one.. 

The last speaker on the video was a biologist for the Department of Conservation. His part in this drama was to follow up on the cuttings and see how the wildlife had recovered.   He went on and on about how the cutting helped the wildlife.  And I don't doubt that. 

At a pause in his program, one guy asked if it was true that the quail were on the decline because the turkeys were eating the eggs and young.   You could see that the biologist was cranked up by this question.  His long reply was that it was not true that turkeys were responsible for the decline of quail and that turkey didn't eat quail eggs and young hatchlings.   

He went on about quail habitat and such.  And in conclusion, he added, "In fact, the turkey population is also in decline.".  I jumped in, "Yea, because they don't have any more quail to eat!".  The crowd broke up in laughter. 

As they say in comedy, timing is everything.  I couldn't help myself.  :

[Kansas]

I am on a committee that represents the tree farmers and walnut council people. I told them in a meeting last week that if there is not some sort of economic product associated with timber, that will be real hard to compete with 7 dollar corn. Someone said we need to promote forests for the looks and beauty, and wildlife. And I suppose for some, especially city types that own some land in the country and money isn't an issue, that would be true. But somehow there has to be value in a standing timber for people to keep that in timber over generations and take the time to improve it in greater part. Right now, every grade mill that I know of in Kansas that was the type to buy a variety of grade logs is gone. I don't know of any along the Missouri or Nebraska border either. There are a very few smaller mills still going that do a little specialty cutting. But the amount they cut doesn't add up to that much. Which includes me.

what gets me is they promote biomass, but no one will pay for it. One that is going here in Ne Kansas wants to charge pallet recycling companies to set in dumpsters for their waste. As long as it has no value, why do it. Why would a landowner let someone come onto his place and take all those trees for free. I suppose you could claim timber stand improvement, but that kind of equipment strikes me as taking too big a footprint in a hardwood timber. I don't know what its like in other areas, just here. But either woody biomass has value in the timber or waste products, or it doesn't. If it doesn't have value, there is no need to promote it. Maybe in other parts of the country, they are paying up for it. They are charging to take it here.

[Kansas]

And to expand on that, I really haven't seen any good studies on the value of wood for biomass. They have to be out there. But whenever I ask anyone about it, the first words out of their mouth are about government subsidies, and talk glowingly of those. It might be alright to have government loans to put these plants in. But if you have to subsidize the fuel source, and have grants to go with it, then it makes no economic sense. Either it stands on it own after the plant is built, or it doesn't. And if they can't pay for anything for the fuel, be it waste pallets, side slabs from a mill, slash or junk trees from a timber, then the plant will ultimately fail.

And as for the turkeys. I'm not a biologist, but common sense seems to me that you only have a finite amount of cover and food. If you have turkeys, you have to have less quail and pheasant, and in the case of Kansas, less prarie chicken. The state of Kansas views wildlife as a moneymaker. You have to buy a special license to take a turkey in Kansas. They are everywhere. Same with deer. A woman who left the party at my house yesterday evening nailed one, serious damage to the car. Its like playing Russian roulette around here every time you drive.

[Bibbyman]

I don't know.  Seems like when I was a young man, we had quail.  Then we got turkey and they took off.  Then, no quail.  We raised turkeys when I was a kid.  They'd eat anything they could catch.  I've watched them a number of times gang up on a snake and pick it to pieces.  They're basically a buzzard that don't wait around to find something dead.  There is no doubt in my mind if a turkey came across a nest of any eggs, it would eat them.  And it wouldn't be hard for me to believe they'd eat anything they could catch.

Another factor in the quail equation is that back in the old days, there were always people out there hunting coons, opossums, foxes and other furbearing critters.   There was a whole army of ol'farts that said they were running fox hounds but mostly drinking beer and letting their dowg run coyotes or deer.  I think they've all died off.

But back to the bio-mass fuel deal.   I think the Department of Conservation is paying land owners $125.00 acre to do TSI (Timber Stand Improvement).  I don't know if that's to be the landowner's profit from having a crew come in and harvest bio-mass fuel or not.  I think they're having problems getting land owners to be involved in the TSI program.  Mary said the guy there really worked on her to get involved. I'm sure she said it more politely but she told him if the government had anything to do with it, she didn't.

[Gary_C]

Biomass harvesting is a very big thing here in MN and WI but it goes along with pulpwood harvesting. Most of the larger logging operators have contracts with the biomass users and there are a few generation plants that are now burning biomass. But they are very close mouthed about the prices they pay for chips or grindings.

Problem is the smaller loggers cannot afford to have as one put it "a half million dollar machine sitting there that has a 1000 HP engine that can drink 34 gallons per hour of diesel fuel." But increasingly the smaller loggers cannot compete with these large loggers that can afford to pay high prices for low value stumpage that will end up being chipped for biomass including the sawlogs.

And right now, the state seems intent on giving away some biomass to these biomass users. So it's little wonder that private landowners that thought this biomass was going to be a good thing for their low value trees do not want to get into this biomass thing.

[Ron Wenrich]

We used to have a very limited amount of quail, but pheasants used to be abundant.  Two things happened over about a 20 year span.  One was that farmers took out a lot of the fence rows.  That used to provide a lot of habitat for those bird species.  Another is that there are a lot more hawks around these days.  When the hawk population went up, the pheasant population disappeared.  I haven't seen a pheasant in 20 years, and the ones I did were put in by the Game Commission.

We have very few biomass burners.  All the new electric capacity went to natural gas.  With the Marcellus gas fields coming on line, I doubt that we can compete.  We also have lots of coal, and those markets have always been tough to beat.  The only way biomass pays is if you have a secondary use for the steam.  Stand alones rarely work, given the amount of cheap energy we have here in the east.

Back in the '70s there was a push for more capacity and they were looking for co-gen plants to burn biomass.  They even had a fast growing poplar developed and they could be planted on strip mine reclamation.  Rotation was on the order of 7-10 years and you relied on stump sprouts for regeneration.  The equipment for harvest looked more like combines.  They couldn't get landowners interested, and it was hard to find the secondary steam user.  Getting the investment money wasn't all that hard, but pulling a project together takes a lot of work.  I did one in the late '70s when the buy back prices were pretty high.  We had to use a mixture of sawdust and chips in order to bring the price down to an acceptable level.  Finding a reliable, long-term supply is always a problem. 

The government does pay subsidies for TSI.  What does that really tell the landowner about forest management?  If it has to be subsidized, then its probably not a paying field to get into.  The logger down the road will pay more for his "timber stand improvement".  They'll cut all those big ones and let the little ones grow.