Quickthorn

that's it..plus anything else you owe..credit cards, unpaid bills, etc.

Nice one, john..I'm in.

£3000 isn't much for a 200 or 300 tdi..you might get a good example 2.5 TD, but that engine had a hell of a lot of problems. I know I'm managing with a 2.5 normally aspirated 110, and I've seen examples similar to mine for £1500 -2000 but god it's slow. Reliable-ish, and cheap to fix, but it leaks oil here and there as well - I think they all do from that era. Mine was ex-military from Withams, but I think the military ones are a bit over priced - they're not that much different from a civvy one. I bought mine from there because I needed it in a hurry, and hadn't found anything else in the paper. The only other option is if you're lucky at an auction. I've found NFU mutual are good for Landrover insurance.

That doesn't include goodwill (ie. the amount someone would be prepared to pay above and beyond assets - liabilities ). As firewood demand is so strong at the moment, perhaps the goodwill portion might be quite high. It might be worth looking at what sort of return you're getting on your equity. If you do the assets minus liabilities sum, that's useful, because you can see what return you're getting for the equity you have tied up in the business: how much profit does the business make (profit after depreciation and your wages) from that equity, and is this profit more or less than what you'd get if you cashed it all in and put it in the bank?

That's encouraging if there's a steady market that's been going for a while. If there was a shortage of producers, I'd love to get out there and start a business like that, or help someone else. (I'm sure the lifestyle's much better - there's too much greed in the UK now.) Having said that, there's no point going half way round the world just to pinch another bloke's job.

I did my main training about 10 years ago, (all on 3 strand nylon) but started trading full time self employed about 8 years ago. The last job I had I chucked in after a month, as the boss was a total ogre - I was getting £180 p.w for a 40 hr week, but it involved almost an hour's driving each way just to get there. It's much better being self employed, but I've never made much money. I started with about £3,000 in savings, which bought climbing gear, an 026 and a Tranny tipper. now I reckon all my stuff is worth about £6,500, so not a great return, considering I've only ever drawn enough to pay rent, bills and buy food and not much else. Having said that, you can't put a price on being your own boss.

Is it only climbers they'd want from the UK? Are there any chances for ground workers, especially South Island, in the firewood business, or is that all taken care of by locals?

It depends whether firewood will follow general fuel prices or not, i'd have thought, especially other solid fuels. In a recession, fuel goes generally goes down in price as the economy slows, and if coal gets cheaper, perhaps people might decide to burn that instead of wood.

Have you looked at grants? Low Carbon Buildings Lots of hoops to jump through, plus you have to have an approved product, but they include at least one boiler that's designed for up to 55% moisture content chip.. Binder

No worries, paul.

I don't think many other people would jump to that conclusion. What's happened, paul? Only yesterday you were saying: Dave, I might be misunderstanding you here, but if you think I'm trying to mislead anyone with the glyphosate/salt comment, nothing could be further from the truth. Try re-reading that post I put up (#43), and if you still think I'm trying to mislead anyone, please point out the phrases you think are misleading. It's too late to edit that post, but I'll gladly re-phrase it ...if it is misleading. Happy New Year!

I've got £5 million P/L (excess £250),£10 million employers and £2000 sml tools(excess £100), no climbing cover, for £654. I've been with them for a while now. based on 2 workers..don't know if they take turnover into account, but I bet I'm on minimum premiums.

Why do you assume that none of us question our usage of pesticides?

I put cost; I couldn't afford it. It also seems there's no grant help available for people who rent. If I did ever invest, I'd be more interested in a log burning system, despite the extra workinvolved in firing it.

They certainly are optimistic a lot of the time, although every now and again a buyer pays silly money for stuff, which I suppose encourages the owners: they never want to take a lower bid, once someone has bid over the odds. That's just happened to me..a landowner won't accept my price for some coppice because someone bought it for twice as much last year. The guy lost money on it, because the stuff he cut out of it never sold, and that's why he's not back this year, but the landowner still wants the same amount. A thread or something on prices would be good. Openness would help contractors; secrecy only helps landowners.

Just because they're doing it doesn't mean to say that these people know what they're doing. I can't help thinking that the firewood market is in a bit of a bubble. If the price of coal follows that of oil, which it may well do as the recession continues, it 's bound to dampen the demand for firewood.

Thistles are pretty good for bees and butterflies, too.

The simplistic answer might be that salt is more toxic: a standard test for toxicity is to measure the dose per kg body weight needed to kill 50% of a sample of rats - the LD50 test. published figures seem to say that LD50 for glyphosate is around 5 g / kg body weight, whereas LD50 salt is 3 g / kg (Since aspirin was mentioned, LD50 for that is around 0.2 g / kg..that seems to be an order of magnitude more toxic than salt or glyphosate!). That doesn't really say that one substance is in general more toxic than another, it only tells us about relative toxicity under certain conditions. To say that salt is more toxic than glyphosate is as misleading as saying glyphosate is "Toxic to soil microbes including nitrogen-fixing bacteria, mycorrhizae, actinomycete, and yeast isolates": whilst true under certain conditions, it doesn't help us if we don't know those conditions, and I start to wonder about the motives of people or organisations who would publish such "facts" in such a loose way. It's very easy to selectively pluck key phrases out of their context to support a pre-formed opinion or agenda, and it seems that agri-businesses and their detractors are both capable of doing it, but it doesn't help people who want to come to the right decision based only on the truth. The moral is we should go back to the original research where possible and find out for ourselves, rather than rely on persons relatively-unknown to interpret it for us. The original post was: Tom, I haven't been able to access too much original research showing that glyphosate accumulates in the root zone of trees. It's not hard to find pages saying that this is the case, but I would want to check the original research myself, as published in a credible scientific journal - just to make sure it was being interpreted correctly. I get the feeling that a lot of these studies-including those about Fusarium colonisation - are in the context of agricultural "roundup ready" monocrops using min-till methods of cultivation, rather than trees or forestry crops; some of them cannot show whether the pesticide causes the effect, or whether there's an interaction between pesticide and cultivation regime. More research is needed. I have to admit that, when I'm considering whether to use a pesticide or not, I'm one of these ignorant people who fall back on guidance: in the UK, the ACOP "Pesticides" advises that the first question we should be asking is whether we need to use a pesticide at all. If no, then great! If yes, then it is worthwhile to think about how much might be applied over the course of the treatment. I don't know what situation you are thinking of, and it would be down to you to work out the details, but if you know what dose and frequency you will be applying it is possible to work out an upper limit of how much might accumulate..that Carlisle & Trevors paper helps you work out how an application might increase the concentration of glyphosate in the soil. I know from the product I use, applying it typically at 4 l/ha, it seems to show that every application would add 0.648 parts per million to the top 13 cm of a field. So, a 3 year weed control programme (1 app per year) might result in nearly 2 ppm in the top 13 cm, assuming 100% persisted, and my maths is correct...but don't take my word for it! That paper does also list studies showing the effects of various concentrations of glyphosate on various organisms, which may help you judge risks involved in using the stuff. If anyone does have evidence that glyphosate, or any other pesticide, is causing harm, it needs to be reported ASAP

Yes, that's how I read it. They also said: "glyphosate inhibited the growth of 59% of selected naturally occurring soil microbes", not "59% of beneficial soil organisms", which puts a subtly different slant on it again. Have you read this paper? It's available here as a pdf. It's actually a literature review rather than original research, and the papers they refer to mainly test pure cultures of microorganisms in laboratory conditions. They write: "Cooper et al. (1978) found that 50 ppm inhibited growth of 59% of randomly selected soil bacterial, fungal, actinomycete, and yeast isolates"; earlier, they state: "Recommended field application rates from 0.34 to 1.12 kg active ingredient (AI) ha- 1 for control of annual weeds, and 1.12 to 4.48 kg AI ha- 1 for perennials, applied in 187 to 561 L water ha- 1 (WSSA, 1983). According to Brown (1978), 1 kg ha 1 of a pesticide will give a concentration in the top 13 cm of a field of roughly 0.45 ppm. Thus, the highest application rate should give rise to a soil concentration of roughly 2 microg g- 1.[ie 2 ppm]" In other words, they're telling us that growth of 59% of these organisms were inhibited in laboratory conditions when exposed to glyphosate in a concentration 25 times stronger than that expected under normal field application rates. In section 7. Effect on Soil Microbial Activity and Populations, Carlisle and Trevors cover other literature on the effects of glyphosate on microbial activity in the soil. With high applications of glyphosate, some studies showed inhibition of microbial activity; others found no such inhibition. In another work, the authors themselves found that anaerobic nitrogen fixation was inhibited by high (ie. 630 ppm) concentrations of glyphosate. The final sentence of this section reads: "However, no toxicity to any of these microbial processes should be observed at recommended field application rates of the herbicide." Curiously, this is interpreted in the abc link as "Toxic to soil microbes including nitrogen-fixing bacteria, mycorrhizae, actinomycete, and yeast isolates". In fact, in my reading of that paper, Carlisle and Trevors seem quite favourable towards glyphosate. I can't find the entire paper, only the abstract, but Levesque et al, in trial plots infested with various weeds, did find increases in the size of Fusarium spp colonies in some species of weeds, but not in others. The final sentences of the abstract read:"At both sites, the number of colony-forming units of Fusarium spp. per gram of dried soil was increased by the application of glyphosate. Nevertheless, crops subsequently sown in the field containing the annual weeds were not detrimentally affected by glyphosate treatment of these weeds." Nowhere in the abstract are Columbian subsistence farmers mentioned. I could go on, but a lot of the other papers cited are only available by subscription. I agree with those who think we should be sceptical of official guidelines etc, rather than blindly following them - scepticism, to a point, is healthy - but I believe that major parts of this "evidence" published on the abc website lack credibility, because whoever wrote it seems to have mis-interpreted and selectively quoted some of the literature to try and support their opinion ( isn't that the sort of think that these big agri-businesses are always being accused of?). Why be sceptical of official guidelines, recommendations, etc, yet then accept without question summaries of research we have never read, written by people we don't know and published on a website we had never heard of until a few days ago? To put it into context, which do you think is more toxic: glyphosate or salt?

I could only open the abc link, but on that page, can you point out to me where it says that glyphosate kills off 59% of beneficial soil organisms? I couldn't see where it says this.

I'm sure a lot of us think likewise, but people won't pay the extra.

That fits in with mine..I was 2200 kg odd tare normally, and I'm sure I used to get out for the weigh... and no tools, either..so that left 1.3 tons for me and everything else, assuming it could be loaded without going overweight on an axle. It was a tipper, and it had a twin rear axle.