Skidding Charge?

[gwpoky]

I have a neighbor that is doing a selective harvest in his woods, he had a outfit come and mark the trees to be cut and he will be felling the trees. He wants me to come over with my teams to skid the logs to a landing. There are good trails in the woods and furthest skid would be under a 1/4 mile, about 50 trees to be harvested. He is wanting to know what it will cost to have me do this for him, what do you all think? I need to figure how long I think it will take, I need to make my wage and so do my teams beyond that I am not looking to get rich. My teams are used most days on our farm but it is a little slower in the winter plus not much snow to plow “yet” this winter. Any suggestions would be great.

Thank you.

[Tim Harrigan]

George, 50 trees can mean a lot of different things. Are you ground skidding one at a time, arch, loading a scoot or something else? Skidding tree length or 2 or 3 logs per tree? Easy to twitch out to the skid trail? Seems like there are a lot of variables that could affect your productivity and time needed.

[gwpoky]

Thanks Tim, here are some more details:

I have a arch, should be able to get to most of the trees with it, no scoot will be skidding with the arch to landing, it wil be 2 or 3 logs per tree. The longest skids will be under 1/4 mile. Thanks for the questions, I think this will be a good learning experience in the planning front, my nighbor is in no big hurry and is very supportive of this and everything we have been doing on our farm. Thanks again for your help.

[Michael Colby]

$35/hour. And be careful about the landowner felling the trees. I recently had a landowner do this “favor” for me and it only caused more headaches because he had no idea about how to fell them correctly for horse extraction. Worse, he didn’t know how strong my horses were and cut rather small firewood trees in 10-foot lengths.

Good luck.

[Tim Harrigan]

I agree with everything Michael said. Also, if this will be a good learning experience just charge what you think you need on an hourly basis and see how it goes. If you do not make a lot you won’t loose much either on a small job like this but you will be in better stead to make a better bid on the next job.

[Author]

Posts