Wistful Hello

[Anonymous]

I stumbled upon this forum a few days ago, while surfing for any new horse logging stuff on the net. Its something I find myself doing wistfully every now and again from my cubicle, where I try to stay on task as a graduate student in Forest Ecology and Management at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Yeah, I’m studying forestry, but its a far cry from the world most of y’all are working in.

I’m just trying to stay in touch with my roots. I was raised on a draft-powered organic dairy farm before organic was recognized, and was logging with horses myself for nearly 4 years before I sold my horses and came back to school. I had three horses, truck and trailer, logging arch (nice one by Henry Miller), all the gear… Why the change?, well… Of course, married life is complicated. I will just say that I wasn’t really ready to give up my logging and consulting business, but my wife brings home the health insurance, the steady salary, and needed a change in both place and job. So we pulled up stakes (and sometimes I feel like I pulled up my roots.)

Now, I’m “working” in the university system, and seeing how little-acknowledged are the views of many of you. One of the issues facing forest management in the U.S. is the increasing parcelization of non-industrial private forests. There is some hand-wringing here in the universities about this increasingly broken-up mosaic of forest ownership, with the assumption that more landowners and smaller forest tracts means more difficult forest operations. (You just can’t get a logger in there on 20 acres, they say.) Tell that to a horse logger! But the idea of horse manure on the skid trail is so backwards, so inefficient to the establishment that they spend all their time trying to figure out how to get landowners to “cooperate across boundaries”-lump smaller timber sales together to make them viable for the ever-larger extraction equipment.

I say, though the increasing fragmentation may indeed have some negative outcomes, that it is a real opportunity for small-scale operators, and for true “efficiency” (read: skilled, well-trained, and yes, carbon-neutral management operations like only horse(or other draft)logging can offer.) At least I hope so.

We just need to get it to not be about nostalgia, but about what makes sense. I know from having a couple newspaper articles done about my horse-logging that it can be really hard to get that message out there, that this is a real and viable alternative to conventional logging. The romanticism of horses pulling trees out is both a blessing and a curse. Its certainly a blessing when its just you and the team on the skid trail, and its a blessing when it makes people watch you, but its a curse when those people just see you as a relic. I think one of the keys is to get just a few “establishment” people on board, to continue to find ways for draft-powered forest management to be legitimate in the eyese of the mainstream. I’m really just reiterating things that people like the HHFF have been eloquently saying, and that many of you have experienced.

So, meanwhile, I’ll live vicariously through you all, learn from you, and maybe pitch in where I feel I had some relevant experience in the woods or behind the horses. Sometime in the future I’ll be back at it.

Take care in the woods, or wherever you work!

-Luke

[Jim Ostergard]

Luke,
Nice to hear your perspective. Nice to have someone on the, “inside,” who has actually knuckled dragged his/her way through a wood lot. We see lots of small lots here in the mid-coast area of Maine. Lots were part of larger parcels cut off some years ago and the work is really, worst first or low quality wood for the most part. Finding folks who are will to share in the cost of horse logging is a task.
I may be old but don’t feel like a relic although I agree many folks think of animal logging that way.
I am working on the local and regional land trusts. They can be a hard nut to crack although one would think they would welcome our type of harvests. Lots of old school (read industrial) foresters seem to have them in their clutches. I read a Maine Tree Growth plan done recently for a piece given to then land trust with the explicit instruction that animals be used in any harvest. The forester actually stated at the end of his plan that animal logging was inefficient and expensive. A real slam. I wondered who he was working for! Seemingling not the land owner.
On the relic issue. I have found that in a group of land trust folks mention one is a logger and most people don’t really want to talk to you. Mention horse logging and its, ” wow that is wonderful.”
Anyway, enough of this, I’ve got a horse with scratches and I need to get him back to work. Welcome to this wonderful forum and keep us informed.
JIm

[Gabe Ayers]

Luke, Good to hear from you,

I just wanted to add some additional data collected by our Industry U. down here. In 1999 a research project revealed that 52% of the forest land in Virginia was in tracts of 40 acres of less owned by private individuals. This demographic was hard for some folks to believe but it is and was true at the time. I used this data to try to gain support for low cost, low impact, low production systems such as HHFF promotes and many on this site practice. I admitted that it was a “niche” that we could fulfill, because the primary concern or conclusion of this research was the worry that the industry would run out of wood to supply their sawmills since these smaller tracts were not available/accessible economically or culturally by industrial methods. Only a few accepted our place in the largest industry in our state, even as a “niche”.

I have tired of throwing pearls to the swine of industry. They* want to clearcut the planet, siting supposedly good sound science that a former high graded site can only regenerate shade intolerant species from even aged management, read clear cut. That is an industrial myth aimed at keeping resources cheap and skilled labor as slaves. Don’t get me wrong here, we have many allies in industry, the truly wise ones see our place as beneficial and worthy. They have no choice, the private landowners will not accept mechanized methods in most cases.

Now, less than a decade later I received an invitation to attend a workshop from the Va. Dept. of Forestry entitled: Business opportunities with Small Acreage and Suburban Woodlands. My response was that we should be presenting at this workshop since we have been saying this for more than a decade and practicing what we preach, but that request was not responded to at all – silence. That is not a surprise, they have not really helped us much yet and for the most part they probably won’t help us in the future. They all should buy more Exxon stock and then Exxon should buy out Maxwell House Coffee so they can use their slogan of “Good to the last Drop”. This 2008 brochure had the current data: “Landowners with less than 10 acres now own 73% of forest properties in Virginia.”

We agree with their approach in some ways. If we practice restorative forestry everywhere – through worst first single tree selection and the ultimate low impact overland extraction method of modern animal power – then the property line doesn’t matter. They are not going to convince landowners to let machines tear the their woods up no matter how they attempt to bundle the tracts. Sure we use machines in our logging operations, but from stump to landing – animal power is superior. The above system presents the only “carbon positive forestry” currently available.

Don’t forget your roots man, your anthropological culture will reward you in addition to your degree. There are lots of us with degrees, many Biological Woodsmen and others on this site have degrees too. It is what one does with their life, knowledge, skills and ethics that will make them successful and happy.

So – Carry on and finish what you started educationally and then get back in the woods – anywhere….we all need you. Don’t feel alone there in the halls of higher education, there are young people in most University Forestry programs that feel the same way as you do and are getting their degrees to have the “credentials” to support their common sense and personal vision. I meet a few of them regularly, to few, but I’m thankful nonetheless.

I hope this doesn’t sound to radical, but that is just what we have experienced and it is getting to late to turn our backs on what we know is best. Thanks for writing Luke.

*They = Industrially funded academic institutions, research and industry in general….not exclusively, but generally. Disclaimer – We (HHFF) are thankful for what positive relationships and support we garner from “They”, but it is not enough to equal the proven methods we promote and practice and should have earned by now.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the responses to my intro, Jim and Jason,

I think that its probably understandable, in a way, that draft-powered logging gets ignored by the establishment. Its a matter of numbers and volume, and we live in a “quantity, not quality” society. There just aren’t enough quality Biological Woods-peeps out there to really hear us yet. But this growing parcelization of forests, along with a change in the values of forest owners, can really be your foot in the door as a horse logger. We’re just starting to come to terms with the fact that conventional logging systems, with increasingly capital (and energy)-intensive operations, aren’t meeting the demand for services by the increasingly smaller forest property holding. Its a matter of time before some of the focus for forest management solutions turns to appropriate-sized management operations. I’m better at being a skeptic and critic than being a visionary like some of you, but this changing dynamic of land-ownership is the one thing that presents a real opportunity for horse logging. Its not a question of draft-power being backwards, but a question of “appropriate technology” for the task at hand, and right now there appears to be a void to be filled of small-scale operators.

I’ll direct further thoughts on this to the appropriate “sustainable forestry” forum. This site offers a great opportunity for the “how” part of draft animal power, but its important for people that really want this stuff to stick to pay attention to the “WHY” part, too, and to learn how to sell yourself and your services. Looks like there are some great teachers here in that regard.

This has been a crazy winter in the Midwest, too. Almost 90 inches of snow for season here in Madison, WI, I think. Ground still wasn’t frozen after New Years.

take care,
Luke

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