Hand cutters...

[Stubby]

If your not wet your not working .

[openspaceman]

another problem is that these modern machines are so productive, a harvester snd forwarder can do 1000ton a week which leads to over supply hence driving down timber prices. is it any wonder thst timber prices are the same a 40 years ago. mechanisation has killed it IMO.

 

It's not much different from the way mining has gone, it becomes far cheaper to move hundreds of thousands on tonnes of overburden to get at a seam the other side of the world than to pay UK labour rates to deep mine.

 

The thing harvesters have done is drop the harvesting rate/tonne in real terms, this has affected the roadside price and made the cost of getting timber from small or awkward woodlands higher than the roadside price (I would drive my outfit to site, extract 3 loads onto artics or roadside and move on, the same job now with mechanised kit would involve 4 lowloader movements at over 300 quid each and 2 hours actual work).

 

When we first saw harvesters in the late 80s they weren't that productive and their costs were higher, so I clung on to hand cutting, but they got better.More significantly when trade turned down and things got more cut-throat firstly it was cheaper to lay subbies off than stop finance payments and secondly those businesses with harvesters that gave up put cheaper second-hand machines into the market, making them more competitive.

 

...and remember timber and coal were linked as strategic supplies so were subsidised. As civilisation cannot survive a modern large-scale war so now fights using proxies the economic cost of maintaining strategic supplies exceeds the demands of an affluent society for consumer goods sourced from abroad.

 

I went in to forestry because I naively thought a production industry was good for the country, it also gave a good lifestyle, but the service industries, including arboriculture, have mushroomed since then whilst all the primary industries have shed vast numbers of workers.

[TimberCutterDartmoor]

and made the cost of getting timber from small or awkward woodlands higher than the roadside price (I would drive my outfit to site, extract 3 loads onto artics or roadside and move on, the same job now with mechanised kit would involve 4 lowloader movements at over 300 quid each and 2 hours actual work)..

 

[Jackalope]

If your not wet your not working .

 

Need to be down to a T-shirt by 8.30 at the moment or I know I'm not earning money!