[Gabe Ayers]

The cheapest way would be a paint brush and you can gob it on there good that way, and just buy the enamel that is on sale, any color….

Those bolt on sled runners from Pioneer are about 250.00 per set, not cheap.

This weather is really rough down here, just busted out from the last one and another is forecast for tomorrow. Makes for some grumpy southerners for sure….

Jason

[Gabe Ayers]

I have been pulling horses that I also work daily for forty years. I have won a few contests, but far fewer than just placing and making a good show of it.

The ability to competitively pull horses and work them in other situations to is definitely a matter of teamster skill.

Perhaps the greatest factor may be the skill of the teamster to know that the horses know where they are. When given an opportunity to learn through good training, they know what is expected of them according to where they are and what has happened there in that particular situation before. Horses don’t reason stuff out analytically but their memory of details is far greater than humans. I think recognizing and trusting the horses perception is a great asset in gaining great performance from and with them.

Most pulling horses are just that, pulling horses only. The rare few that actually do anything else with the horses seen at pulling contest is a tiny percentage. Those few are usually horse loggers or folks that farm seriously with their horses.

We enjoy competing with our horses, but the economic reason we pull our horses is to promote our business of logging. The crowd at a county fair or public horse pulling event is probably the largest non auction audience that we can introduce our service of horse logging to.

Winning the contest is not always who pulls the most weight, but who gets the greatest response from the crowd. When we are training our horses to be honest by taking them to pulls many times without hanging them up, we drop out voluntarily. The crowd always goes wild when we drop out. We get a greater round of applause that the winners in most cases. That is what pulling horses is about for us.

I think that the longevity of a horses pulling career is a mutual matter of the horse being a great athlete and being cared for and handled by a great horseman. This is probably how old Rock made it so long, he was a good one in the hands of good folks.

We have an old gelding Wedge, that is quite well known in this part of the country. All the pullers know him and many of the fans. He has been pulling and logging for us for over ten years. We have retired him from pulling but he still works in the woods for us. He is also a member of the million foot club our informal few horses that has logged that long. I will try to attach a photo of Wedge and our Stallion Rudy winning the light weight contest crossing 9500 at the State Fair of Virginia – 2005.

I have to say that despite the skills of the horseman, all horses may not be able to do allot of things and be seriously good at all of them, especially when heavy pulling is required. This is where experience comes in to evaluating a horses ability from confirmation and then a mind that will work for you and a heart that will give you honest try over and over.

Hope this photo comes through, it may be on the site somewhere already. I know this subject of pulling horses has came up on DAP before.

~

[Gabe Ayers]

Donn,

I think your arch sled looks great! The lift point is somewhat low for larger logs, but if you use the cradle hitch that shouldn’t be a problem. Very impressive work man.

Looks like some real low impact extraction. Now the temptation will be to not use it on dry ground. Might have to recap your runners pretty often if you do that.

Alright, what color are you going to paint it, fire engine red or high vis yellow?

~

[Gabe Ayers]

Mark,

I hope you Suffolk Folks have a great meeting and decent safe weather to travel around in.

Please give my regards to all there from the old guy in the Mountains of Virginia that logs with red hosses for a living, when I can.

Here is some gossip to take to the meeting.

I heard a rumor that the annual Suffolk meeting is going to be at the Southern Draft Animal Days event – 17-18th of September at the Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College in Ferrum, Virginia. Maybe some NE Suffolk folks will get to make the ride south, we’d love to have them with us.

Anyone interested can contact me for more information about local accommodations.

Y’all have fun.

~

[Gabe Ayers]

“For animal powered forestry to support itself, there has to be a growing market for the material produced from the methods and practices that we promote. Similar to SFI, when the market pays extra, then the work will be supported.” Carl

I couldn’t agree more, this is why we established the source differentiated identity of/with DRAFTWOOD. People will pay more when they know the source and like the method of sourcing – the whole picture, silvic’s, the mechanics of animal power and particularly being local. This DW program has been in existence long before SFC, which of course predictably prompted the industry green wash of SFI. I sat on the advisory board in D.C. when SFC was started by the Rain Forest Allinace. They are not about bottom up change.

We just have to keep telling the story and some will hear…
maybe a forest of dreams kinda thing… a play on field of dreams, if you will – if you build it they will come… except, this is no fantasy or dream. It works – people like the story and like being a part of it. They want to be connected to the natural work and our products surrogate that desire.

Ok, so if they will pay more then how much more. Well just make the price what you need to make a living. Your cost of being the best at tending the whole forest is the price. It’s like wood parity, bottom up economics, ecological capitalism.

I truly believe this is the right thing to do.

This is a great cyber segway into a more formal introduction of the DRAFTWOOD brandname to the larger community. More later.

~

[Gabe Ayers]

@Carl Russell 15246 wrote:

Jason, What would the oak logs have been sold for? Were they pallet grade, or firewood?

The reason I ask is that merely sawing logs into lumber is really not enough to add value. By taking a product that would be basically worthless to the landowner and turning it into competitively priced products, you have added some practical value, but it is still difficult to purely justify it in economic terms.

It is when you take into consideration that there has been value added to the forest asset by the manner in which the work was done, this on-site milling allowing the harvest to be more economically viable, that value can be seen as added to the fence boards.

I’m assuming that if you cut and sold these logs, you probably wouldn’t even get $300/mbf . With that in mind, it is this added income that allows you to provide the superior forestry services that add value to the product.

In many cases we can process material that is more desirable to some than it would be to the conventional market, but we still have to turn that increased desirability into some financial gain that we can use to make our approach more profitable.

I think that many times landowners are also very happy to see the value of the operation reflected in the product that they have used, such as a board fence etc..

The reason that I mention this is that I think it is really important that we maintain clear focus on the primary product as the improved forest asset, and not the log/lumber pile. I know that you practice that, but it was noticeably absent from your post, with the exception of the mention of the worst first harvest.

I just want to reiterate that the first step, in my mind, is to add value to the forestland holding. Otherwise we are just talking about cost.

Carl

Thanks for the call out for further defining Carl. I guess I am just a bit gun shy of making a case for more than the straight up immediate value added cash for the landowner, given some mean spirited comments some of my post have provoked. I get tired of fighting against reductionist
marginalization and over simplification of our work.

The logs harvested as worst first from this site would have averaged around .25 or less, per board foot delivered to 30 miles away. So yes there is a clear cash value added from the on site processing and that unfortunately is the first and only value some landowners see or look for, especially in a first analysis scenario. When the landowner uses the value added forest products and they end up being cheaper than they can buy them from the conventional mills, it immediately makes good sense to them.

I think an important point here is that animal powered loggers are competing for access to the natural resources with conventional mechanized harvesters. So that reality brings us to the position of refining our choices of who we work with.

In our case it always includes the concept of whole forest management through worst first single tree selection and what we call Restorative Forestry. The key here is the word forest. If you cut all the big and good trees you don’t really have a forest after the harvest in some landowners minds and that is not what we do.

When the average landowner still sees trees after the harvest and the aesthetic natural beauty of their forest is the highest value they place on their forest, then we have a starting point to educate them about the long term value of the forested inventory and conditions as being capable of becoming a highly gainful, low input, Natural Capital System or a biological bank – that they own. The logic would be if you own the bank then why rob it? Of course this doesn’t follow what the big bankers have done and continue to do through bonuses – I digress, sorry

As we always say “it is what you leave that is more important than what you take”. Given the current demographics of forest landowners in the eastern U.S. being that the largest condition or greatest percentage of forestland (70%) is owned by private people in tracts of 10 acres or less we have a perfect opportunity to expand our cultural practices over a larger portion of the overall land base, yet on a community by community basis. What was once recently only acknowledged as a niche is now in many cases a method of choice – in our forest type.

We are totally dedicated to this concept of whole forest management and restorative forestry. The education of the landowner as to the value of the residual stand in a highly improved condition is an undeniable added value from this cultural treatment. You just have to find landowners that have that vision although it may not see much further than their own backyard or driveway. That’s far enough for us to define our work as superior to their achieving their objectives.

Once a landowner owns these values for their woodlot, we reach a point where investing in their forest improvement may be done by adopting the restorative forestry approach, meaning not getting the immediate return available from high grading of clear cutting.

Part of our job as a forester and logger dedicated to sustainable practices is to educate the landowners as to the increased value of the practices we employ. This of course includes the rapid increased growth rate of the best specimens and species left to respond to the release provided by a worst first type thinning (see attachment). As Rick suggests these increased values are much greater when sensitive selection, felling and extraction have been applied. There used to be a web site constructed by a now deceased forester name Karl Davies that describes this with numbers very well. I am not sure if it is still up. We have his charts and spread sheets saved and print them out in hard copy for landowners that want those kinds of numbers to support their decision making.

There are also other examples such as the Menominee Forest in Wisconsin and the Pioneer Forest in Missouri that prove that over the long term highly skilled worst first single tree selection and low impact
extraction will make the most money.

I think an important point here for us is the convincing of the young practitioners that they also own the condition of the residual forest. In other words if they leave those best trees now they will have the option of harvesting them in the future. We have been doing this for a relatively long time in human years (30+ years), but a short time in the lifespan of climax hardwoods. But the point is they do own their practices with a clear vision of them being able to access that natural resource in the future as the proven superior practitioners when man ages the forests.

There are all sorts of other values added from restorative improvement styled forestry. They may not be immediately rewarded with cash, but fortunately that is not the value expected by some landowners and that is who we will work for.

Some anecdotal evidence presented through our long term involvement in this form of forestry includes many landowners that have approached me after they elected to have conventional loggers work in their woods and said that they deeply regretted making that choice, because firstly, they didn’t make as much money as promised and second their woods were devastated in the process -their words.

Another problem is telling prospective clients where they can see some of your previous harvesting activities. We have one site on the roadside that we have harvested four times in my lifetime and we send folks there to look at what the forested conditions look like after a harvest. Repeatedly they call back and say “hey man, I drove down that road to where you said you had cut timber and I couldn’t find the place”. That is exactly the point, you can’t see where we worked last because it doesn’t look like what most folks think of how a logging job looks. This has lead us to funding the creation of signage for our HHFF trained practitioners. We post a permanent sign on these roadside woodlots that states the date of the last restorative harvest, name of the landowner and the practitioner, along with a HHFF and DRAFTWOOD logo and contact information. Seeing is believing and this approach has added to our waiting list of clients.

I hope this helps with supporting the added value of superior forest management, sorry for not elaborating further initially. There is much more to the forests than the trees. Maybe we will all get to write more about those values later.

Note: if u look at the photo you can see the mark at 1991 when we released that tulip poplar the first time. The growth rate increase was 300% for about 8 years. That’s when we thinned it again. This stand is now a poplar cathedral with a canopy height of around 75 feet, a 18″ DBH and still growing fast. The larger holes created in harvesting bigger trees are often being filled with NRO, refuting the shade intolerant myth.

Sincerely,

~

[Gabe Ayers]

A frequent first step in value adding forest products that start as raw logs is primary processing or sawing logs into lumber or beams. The difference is that when something becomes larger than a 4×4 it is a beam.

We work with a few portable band sawmill operators with our primary one being a fellow named Bob Gill. He is a very efficient operator and highly productive. He has sawed millions of feet on this mill. I think it is a Cook made in Alabama.

Photo attached of one of our small operations. This particular landowner had allot of low grade scarlet oak that needed to come out following the principle of worst first single tree selection. We processed them into fencing boards and siding for the landowner’s use – who after paying .30 cents a foot for selection, felling and skidding and .30 a foot for sawing had .60 in good 12-14-16 foot oak fencing boards. Of course this doesn’t figure much for stumpage or the value of the standing timber, but that value could be offset by having no over the road hauling cost.

The landowner was delighted, particularly when the conventional sawmill was asking .65 a foot at the mill, thirty miles away. His came off the back side of his place. He bedded with the sawdust and gave his slabs to neighbors. We get out around 2000 board feet a day so it works for fair payment for our services too and we don’t have to spend any time in a log truck or money on a hauler.

This is just one example of value adding that we practice. We will write some more about other methods/techniques and systems later.

~

[Gabe Ayers]

Welcome Travis,

There is a wealth of information and experience on this board. Glad to have you here with us.

~

[Gabe Ayers]

This is what we did today……. hope the wind doesn’t pick up to bad, because this is some fluffy stuff….

~

[Gabe Ayers]

An old prospector shuffled into the town of El Indio, Texas leading an old tired mule. The old man headed straight for the only saloon in town, to clear his parched throat. He walked up to the saloon and tied his old mule to the hitch rail. As he stood there, brushing some of the dust from his face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

The young gunslinger looked at the old man and laughed, saying, “Hey old man, have you ever danced?” The old man looked up at the gunslinger and said, “No, I never did dance… never really wanted to.”

A crowd had gathered as the gunslinger grinned and said, “Well, you old fool, you’re gonna’ dance now,” and started shooting at the old man’s feet. The old prospector, not wanting to get a toe blown off, started hopping around like a flea on a hot skillet. Everybody was laughing, fit to be tied.

When his last bullet had been fired, the young gunslinger, still laughing, holstered his gun and turned around to go back into the saloon. The old man turned to his pack mule, pulled out a double-barreled shotgun, and cocked both hammers. The loud clicks carried clearly through the desert air.

The crowd stopped laughing immediately. The young gunslinger heard the sounds too, and he turned around very slowly. The silence was almost deafening. The crowd watched as the young gunman stared at the old timer and the large gaping holes of those twin barrels.

The barrels of the shotgun never wavered in the old man’s hands, as he quietly said, “Son, have you ever kissed a mule’s ass?”
The gunslinger swallowed hard and said, “No sir….. but… I’ve always wanted to.”

There are two lessons for us all here:

Don’t waste ammunition.

Don’t mess with old people.

[Gabe Ayers]

I believe “high grading” is an untenable practice in all forest types, regardless of how the wood is extracted.

Our specific silvicultural prescriptions are definitely about the Appalachian Forest Type, I have said and written that frequently.

~

[Gabe Ayers]

…..

The property taxes were paid here on the 5th of December and it was with worst first log/lumber/forestry services – money, as it has been for decades. We’ve been paying property taxes on forests owned by neighbors in our community by cutting worst first for 30 years now too. We ain’t getting rich but we are some how managing to get buy. Yes I wear patched coveralls and don’t have a vehicle younger than 15 years. The newest machine on our place is a chainsaw.

Yet we control thousands of acres of the best timber in the world – by just being the best at taking care of it. Not with money, but the cultural skills to do what the landowner wants with it, and that’s usually also restoration.

Worst First does often include some very valuable trees. Especially in old forest 125-50 average age. There ain’t much of it left and we aim to get in all of it we can. Sometimes large over mature trees need to be harvested,
if they are declining faster than they are growing.

Yup, the land and timber belong to the landowner, and smart ones will use it to grow money in healthy trees – if they are not desperate.

But a point that is missed by many traditional and conventional thinkers is that the landowner doesn’t own the water or air that moves over their land. Those values are common to all humans and are of a “public interest”. That value is quickly becoming an accountable cost of forest products and we will serve it better than a any machine.

Oh yea, I did buy some (80 acres/1/2 wooded) land 30 years ago Joel, still happily paying for and have been doing this for a while. It was high graded five years before I got it. I know what it takes to make a valuable forest from one that’s had that treatment for three or four harvest rotations. Not owning some land would bug me.

…..

I have heard countless times from conventional foresters that all “horse loggers” were high graders and therefore cannot be recommended to cut anybodies timber.

So we are battling the conventional mindset and will keep doing so, that is our reality…

~

[Gabe Ayers]

I think this load is being skidded on ice roads.

I have read about systems up north that actually have water tank on a bob sled that waters the tracks and makes them solid ice. I can only imagine that load being moved with that reduced resistance from the load. I also would note that this is level ground and that there would be no stopping if it were downhill.

Someone sent me a link to a site a few years ago that showed and told about the above mentioned system. They actually skidded these massive loads over a frozen lake, somewhere in Canada. Pretty impressive…

~

[Gabe Ayers]

It seems only necessary to sub soil when a mold board plow has been used for several years. If you drive a soil probe and to a profile it is usually just compacted at the plow shear level and loose under that.

The freezing and resulting heaving of the soil seem to take care of compaction on the surface, and deeper when it freezes deeper – for the most part, depends on where you live.

Sub-soiling certainly increases water penetration and we like to do it before liming and at some point on all long term pasture land, on the contour.

I really don’t think there is much increase in top soil depth from doing this, since that builds from the top. It always seems that when the top soil is thin or the plowing is to deep and sub soil is brought to the surface and if you are growing without chemical fertilizes you will see a reduced yield. There is no biotic life in the sub-soil it is mostly mineral.

They do have some nice horse drawn sub-soilers that have break away features. They do pull hard. We had a three point hitch cart and used one a few backs. It had a breakaway foot on it and we broke it on tight rock several times.

~

The idea is don’t moldboard plow except to break sod, then use the animals and other tillage tools.

Jason

Not a HHFF post…just an old farmer thinking out loud….

[Gabe Ayers]

Neal,

Black locust is made into flooring by the commercial processors and us too.
They call it Appalachian Gold and I charge for it like it is gold plated at least.
There are markets for it, we have it on our web site and sell it through Architects that prescribe it as a “green” alternative to Ipe or rain forest woods. So if you have any sound stuff and can saw even 3″ wide boards out of it and get it dry, slowly, it is valuable and the most durable wood in North America. There is even a sub species called Ships Mast that is straighter than normal black locust (pseudo acacia), it has slightly more oval leaves than the normal and is exported and planted in other parts of the world from scions that are dug from the root system.

I love the stuff, we search for it everywhere and it is usually about ready to harvest in an intermediate age ranged forest (75 y.o.) If you begin to see shelf mushrooms the real hard woody kind, it is to late to harvest for lumber, but still is awesome firewood. We burn the slab exclusively.

We sell the decking for about the same price as Ipe.

Here is a photo of one we shipped to Mass.

Thanks for asking, hope you find some you can use up there. It has to be pre-drilled and screwed down with treated or stainless steel deck screws. We sell it as “DRAFTWOOD green certified” and as a product that brings good money without kiln drying….as it is applied to exterior applications. It has made my land payment more than once.

~

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