Mofga Lif Dvd

There is such a wide variety of landscapes that are the working sites for this international forum membership that no blanket statements can hold true. Sorry if that was what it sounded like, it is not what I meant. We certainly know that you can’t use an arch on a slope as steep as a cows face. We also know there are lots of places that ground skidding is appropriate and in fact the only way possible.

I guess it is an admittance of laziness or maybe just a naturally evolved position of economic and personal survival that we avoid working on very steep ground. We don’t have to, so we don’t.

There was a recent time when “horse logging” was relegated to only being appropriate on very steep ground or very wet ground or hard places to work. We have come to reject this notion historically or in the last twenty years or so and in the present and future.

Our position is that animal powered extraction is the ultimate low impact overland harvesting method. So given that understanding of the practice being the best way, then why not work on the best sites? This is a luxury we have earned through the development of our practices to be proven as superior in achieving the landowner’s objectives and being within the principles of restorative/sustainable/improvement forestry.

Just like Carl, we have a waiting list of landowners far beyond our existing capacity, therefore we continue to work to train anyone seriously interested in being a Biological Woodsman. No brag, just fact.

So we are not going to work on the hard places until we have ran out of good sites to harvest that are not steep, wet, remote or of a quality to not allow enough income to support the improvement of the forested conditions post harvest.

I think a big factor in our approach is that we are trying to educate the public as to the benefits of our forestry practices and specifically educate individuals in the skills of how to do this work and the environmental, social and personal ethics of why to do it. This means we are trying to get more new young people into this as a business, culture and lifestyle. This is a hard job in any situation, but will be even harder, if not impossible, if we put them on a mountainside with marginal timber available for harvesting as the “worst first”.

I don’t think we can find folks as tough as Joel these days…although Chad Miano would probably give him a good run for his money on a mountain side.
Chad lives so deep in Appalachia that he doesn’t have much choice but work on the mountainside and skids on the ground frequently. Most level or near level ground was either created by a bulldozer or is in a flood plain in the middle of the Appalachians, not much easy land to farm or log.

I don’t want to sound arrogant about this folks, but the fact is that our intention is to work on the best sites from the onset. In the east the forestland is increasingly being owned by more people in smaller and smaller sized tracts. These tracts often have the best timber left and that is our service area. The concern these private forest landowners have for the aesthetics is our “in” to access the timber with cultural skill, not money…
(These landowners are not about money first, but the beauty of their forest first.) It is called creating “social capital” in some circles or as we think of it – making people worth money for their skills to improve the resource, not just produce/extract forest products, or provide the services the cheapest possible or to increase the profits to other stakeholders in the process.

Sincerely,