[Gabe Ayers]

Tim,

Tell your son that all cutting in Tn. will be in real time along with descriptions of what is happening, in person, in the woods. This site has a logging road the runs through the middle of the ridge and we will try to keep our visitors on it during the logging demonstration, but it will be close enough for folks to see.

I think this whole approach of adding value to the forest products and being experienced in making the raw material more valuable, through understanding those processes and actually doing them, will become a part of the work that anyone that is using animal power to log in a restorative way will have to do. We cannot compete with machines and don’t even try.

The point should be that machines cannot compete with us for sensitivity to the environment or provide restorative forestry services.

For the past week or so we have been working in the lumber yard, grading, stacking and stickering high quality lumber for the eventual use of our landowner or sale to other consumers in the future. This is where one should high grade…in the lumber pile, dry and add value to the 1 common and above and use the other green for fencing, barns, sheds and other uses that don’t require it to be dry enough to stay the same shape inside a temperature controlled atmosphere like a modern home.

This simple handling alone will add tremendous value to the products and move it toward being a stable commodity of dry lumber instead of raw logs. When we sell raw logs, we get a raw deal most of the time.

There is another post here about the finished products made from the material harvested in this video. I am not sure of the title of that post.

There also is an earlier post about the choice of Discovery to use the folks they did to produce a counter piece of media to the ax man stuff when they did a show called “extreme logging”. We try to avail our images and approach to mainstream media, but they want sensationalism not inspiring information about being gentle and restorative to the environment….there
doesn’t seem to be anyone interested in that story in the mainstream..
But we will keep doing what we know to be the right thing and maybe one day someone will get the exposure this culture earns…

The Rural Hertiage show on RFD-TV is the closest thing we have had to open minded media and it is only a thirty minute show that airs are ridiculous times.
The entire series we have done for them will be available on DVD eventually and we hope to edit a longer documentary and take some more film soon.

We have had other Sterling students over the years and some Paul Smith students too.

Thanks for watching…glad you enjoyed it, hopefully more to come…

[Gabe Ayers]

Ok, I feel dumb, again, Larry just suggested P&L means profits and losses….
thanks DAP folks.

[Gabe Ayers]

Carl,

I want to invite Ronnie Tucker to this page too, I don’t think he uses a handle, he calls himself Tn. Logger. He is the real deal from my exchanges with him.
Works four up mules with a jerk line….

Scott what is P&L? I know I will feel dumb when you tell me but it is getting late again so I don’t get it or am not familiar with the acronym.

[Gabe Ayers]

Neal, some photos would be nice, there are some ground driven Grimm’s around
Va. but I can’t think of one at the moment.

Can a fellow put a tongue and seat on this thing and just pull it directly with the horses and have less wheels running over the ground and hay? (and more hooves)

[Gabe Ayers]

Well this is just a law in Wisconsin. The ability to build with your own material is Va. just required a structural engineer to grade the material and sign off on it so the building inspector could be removed from taking any responsibility as to the quality of the material.

I don’t think it was a safety issue or scheme as much as making sure the building would last beyond the lifetime of the builder so it would stay on the tax roles longer and generate income for localities. I really don’t think the government cares if it falls down on the occupants, just that it stands long enough to contribute to the tax revenue stream. But it may be spun differently ways in different regions, with the same result of profit for the few… You are right there – in just about everything we look at closely.

A lobbying effort is very expensive, but it would be good to give a voice to our approach to every public official we can, they just all will balk at being called backwards by supporting anything animal powered. None of them have the vision to see it as green jobs creation and environmentally sensitive and therefore superior. The general attitude from the power structure is to dismiss animal powered techniques as being to labor intensive and not enough people available to do the work. They can’t have it both ways, but they do, despite our efforts to seek funding to train more “biological woodsmen” through our established network, organization and proven system.

The “green” story is about establishing a “source differentiated identity” on the product and that is where we have a serious advantage by the general public perception that animals are gentler on the land. We all know you can high grade with an animal and make it look good to an untrained or unaware observer, so we have a challenge to educate the public, specifically private forest landowners – about what we know good forestry to be. That will be our strength in an “ecological capitalism” way – not through the sold out/bought off government.

But that is just my opinion.

We should keep all doors open and skid trails clear so we can have lots of directions to grow this culture in any way we can.

You are wise to be suspicious….make good points. Thanks.

Matt, I think the point is a logger/sawyer/forest manager can be certified to produce structural material for home building on site. So it could lead to another way to make a living doing good forestry without selling to the mills. I did notice that the patch of woods behind the sawmill was even aged…. not what we work with or in….

We have also been doing this somewhat by harvesting and processing for the timber framers which are grandfathered in as not needing grade stamps in Va.

[Gabe Ayers]

Welcome back Ira. I would like to invite Ira to join the working group committee. Did you have a chance to read all that stuff yet Ira?

Is there no work with Troy these days? It is hard time for the sawlog market and as you notice from the posting folks are doing all sorts of other arrangements, but you have allot of experience that we could all benefit from.

I hope everyone can hang on someway. We just had one of our fellows declare he was quitting and moving into another field… he is joining the peace corp at last report…not a option for the family folks.

Good to hear you are there Ira.

[Gabe Ayers]

BenSumner just joined today.

Ian was at the fiddler’s convention all weekend so he won’t be on the net until later.

Nice quotes from Charlie Finney on the BHL site and some good verbage at the German site too.

Simon,

NAHMLA is probably not going to produce another newsletter, according to the President’s message in an earlier post.

So a new newsletter will have to come out of the states. There are enough stories from the working group committee members to fill our several newsletters.

Are you a member of the British Horselogger’s Association? I recall you saying you hadn’t joined them yet. I haven’t been a member of NAHMLA for many years now. I read BHLA are planning a big event in 2012 in the UK.

I think this group should be representative and a benefit for all the folks involved in this work even if they aren’t members of this group or any other. It is the general message behind the work that needs to be promoted and the public educated about.

The membership fees would just be a way to generate funds to pay the cost of printing and postage.

I know how difficult it is to put out a hard copy newsletter and expensive. We have done the electronic versions recently but it has been a couple of years since a hard copy was produced. We have a regular mailing list of almost a thousand, mostly landowner’s.

We use a British fellow (in Blacksburg, VA.) that has a bulk mailing service that can do it for less than the stamps cost us and he checks the addresses to be sure they are good before the newsletter goes out and picks it up from the printers.

[Gabe Ayers]

This is a cut copy and paste from Jean Leo Dugast in France. He is a photographer that sent us a beautiful book he published about horse logging in France a while back.

Bonjour,
I would be happy to work with you on an International group of horse-loggers. In fact, in Europe people with animal power are already organized in an European group called FECTU (http://www.fectu.org).
I’m definitely ready to help to get everybody together. I’ll get in touch with some people here in Europe to tell them about your call.
There is a big meeting on animal power (a sort of Horse Progress Days) in Germany on 29th and 30th of August this year in the city of Detmold (http://www.pferdestark.org)
Do you know that the British horse-loggers will organize a big meeting in 2012 ? (http://www.britishhorseloggers.org).
Let’s keep in touch.

Jean-Léo DUGAST
14, avenue de la Peupleraie. 72600 Mamers. France
Tel : (33 2) 43 97 97 03
E-mail : jeanleo.dugast@wanadoo.fr
Blog : http://percheron-international.blogspot.com

[Gabe Ayers]

Carl,

Ian and Ben are board members of HHFF and practitioners of restorative forestry. Since I am speaking for the 501c3 that we are, and probably have some authority in that regard, it is still a board run group and if three of the five board members are on this forum we have a quorum to participate legitimately, within the rules of that status.

Ben Harris is a HHFC Biological Woodsman practitioner that is doing similar work to Scott in Wyoming.

I will leave it up to them, they are both deeply involved and busy – as anyone on here understands well.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

[Gabe Ayers]

I would request we add Tim Carroll, Ben Harris, Ben Sumner and Ian Snider to this working group.

I am not sure Ben Sumner has joined DAP yet, but will check no that and Ian.

Thanks Carl, you bring new meaning to the term of being a seedy dude….seeds of culture….

[Gabe Ayers]

Seems we are definitely getting to the point where this discussion needs it’s own page. There are so many different ways of doing this work that may be regionally appropriate and can be fleshed out in this forum and eventually a hard copy version.

We have been to the point of not paying stumpage for a long time based on the sliding scale pay system and the sale of the services as being truly “restorative”, and indeed an investment by the landowner. One landowner called it the “cheapest stock upgrade program he had ever seen” when compared to the investment in a stock market portfolio upgrade. It was interesting to hear a landowner make their own comparison from this financial perspective as a compliment to the values he held for his forests.

More on all this later…..

Welcome to Wes and Greg Lange in the NW. Glad you all are here with us.

[Gabe Ayers]

I will gladly seriously be on the committee and feel comfortable representing the 50+ full time animal powered forestry people that we call the Healing Harvest Forestry Coalition – the founding group of Healing Harvest Forest Foundation.

This is an extremely worthy project. Even if the worst possible environmental scenarios come true…this is the best thing to do..

“restorative forestry with animal powered extraction”

enjoy the mysterious waters, the wonder of your children and animals and we will all meet here again soon. Out here in the cyber woods.

[Gabe Ayers]

First I would like to make a motion we determine to start a completely new group with a different name, goals, objectives and mission statement.

The legal status is unimportant at this point and can be something decided later if deemed important or to our advantage in pulling it off. If we need a fiscal agent for grants or tax deductible donations earmarked to the Animal Powered Forestry Association then HHFF is in a legal status to do that, but since it seems to a better fit to have a membership organization then that may not be necessary.

The strength of this effort will be the sharing of the group about methods, techniques, opportunities and strategies for making a living doing this work.

There are many ways to do this work and the economics are unfortunately the bottom line, pun intended. It is like I often say in many talks as I take out my wallet and say “this is the most environmentally sensitive part of all of us – if we can’t change the system so that those who do the best work can make a living from it – nothing will change”.

Some of us are doing that already and need to share those approaches with anyone sincerely interested and experienced enough to understand it.

It’s getting late, but I wanted to share a couple of images that are exactly what Scott is talking about when he says sell the services of superior forest management for what they are worth….or certainly more than the dominant paradigm, status quo, industry folks would pay if they could continue to have their way…

I am attaching a couple of photos of a structure we sourced the material for a company that is using the sourcing methods as a sales pitch to “green” consumers for Timber Frame Structures. These photos show the use of art and demonstration to introduce the public to the culture in a high traffic place. These photos are of a stage and sound system control structure called the “front of the house” at the Floyd Festival site. The art is a local artist renditions from photos we provided. The images are intended to link the customer with the source of their building materials. We will write an article for the Draft Horse pubs about this work and it would be a great place to introduce the new group project and field the general interest from the cultural base that the readers are.

Let me know what you think. This new group is a good story and a good start to our determined effort to change the way things are done in the forests everywhere we can…. We (HHFF) are honored to be a part of it. Thanks to everyone that is connecting with this… we are on our way….

It is getting later here and this discussion will be continued…

Glad you are again tired in that horselogger rewarding way too Carl. Our hemlock are gone in this particular part of the Appalachians.

[Gabe Ayers]

One good thing about the internet is the google translation feature. I have visited a French web site of a fellow name Jean Leo Dugast and used that translation button and it was readable in English. We surely have peers working with animals in the forest all over the world.

Some things we all have in common is how hard the work is, how dangerous and how difficult it is to make a decent living at it, particularly when the intention is to be sustainable, restorative or improving on the natural resources.

I think we all have more in common than different, so an association could help us grow personally and collectively. It would be wonderful to see this happen.

HHFF would be a part of this international or world association in any way possible. This work would be for the public good indeed.

Maybe taking Carl’s offer up to start a separate page for the formation of this group would be an appropriate next step. We have a page at the http://www.restorativeforestry.com site but keeping the spammers or robot computers out of these places seems about impossible and an unnecessary distraction. That may just be the price paid for such a world connected medium. Putting a hard copy newsletter out in multiple languages may be harder, but has to be a part of the effort because more people still don’t have internet than do. We won’t ever get everyone involved, but having some principle proven practitioners from all over the world would be a good start.

I think we should do some research on the Humanities groups and see if there may be some support for such an endeavor that would cross political borders to support culture that is beneficial to the human race. It will take some money – beyond membership fees – to do this particularly at a start up phase.

Not to jump to far ahead, but I nominate Scott Golden as the Chairman of the planning committee. Do I hear a second?

What next folks?

[Gabe Ayers]

There is a fellow named Weaver in Kentucky that manufactures several sizes of treadmills that would do this with a small horse easily. His telephone number is:

606-787-0266. This actually is his son’s Tim’s number but he can help you with it. No Sunday business calls please.

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