Big J

Certainly sounds interesting, but I don't have any means of getting in touch with Ben Mann, or indeed seeing the conversation. Can anyone link me in please?

I had no issues understanding the post. ?

I'm being told that £50-55 a tonne is presently the going rate in East Devon for roadside hardwood. That's almost low grade milling butt money.

You don't paint a pretty picture. Hard to know what to suggest when you have customers that are that fussy. I think a lot of them forget that all you are doing with firewood is burning it.

I would certainly be worth looking into now. Whether it was harvesting for logs or harvesting for biomass, you'd make a good return on either.

For the hardwood market, would their be an mileage in setting up stands of fast growing coppice willow or hybrid poplar? I know that they aren't as favourable as denser hardwoods, but then you also don't have the resin issues (which can make handling unpleasant) of some softwoods and you get a nice bed of embers from both. Short rotation willow coppice will produce as much as 36 dry tonnes per hectare per year, which would equate to about 70 wet tonnes. That's on 15,000 cuttings per hectare which is a planting density that is extremely tight. Even if you halved the number of cuttings and lost 50% of your yield (as the yield figures are for whole tree chipping, rather than using only the stem for logs) you're still producing 70 cubic metres of salable logs per hectare per year. If I was harvesting something like that, I'd look to find something like the branch logger that would maybe take up to 150mm. Fix that to the front of a custom machine (that can straddle the coppice stools) with a rotating drum log cleaner feeding into a hopper. The branch logger processes the stem in a few seconds, the cleaner gets rid of most of the rubbish and the hopper is full of fairly tidy hardwood logs, ready for bagging. 70 cube per hectare per year means a financial return of £6-8k per hectare per year (depending on local market. Could be run as a self sustaining business with 10 or more hectares. You'd be able to use really low quality ground too. Apologies for the rambling, I just like brain storming these things. Reference: https://eservices.ruralni.gov.uk/pdfs/divbus_ideas/Biomassmk2.pdf

If you purchased a tracked dumper like the one above, I'd assume it would have a ROPS/OPS/FOPS? It would therefor be OK for a forest environment and the winch would just be a bolt on?

My god the Iron/Forest horses are expensive. I think you could do something better for half the price on a self build

I'd forgotten about the Iron horses. Good call.

I do remember the chap that runs Champfluerie Estate and the firewood business boasting to me that they now sell more softwood than hardwood and more in July and August when it's on offer than over winter. They are quite negative about hardwood on their website, and you see their little trucks out for delivery all year around. I think it must be possible to educate the customers, but perhaps folk in Scotland are a touch more receptive to softwood?

Just wondering if anyone thought that there was any mileage in converting a tracked dumper into a winch tractor? Something like this: I thought it was a much cheaper option than an alpine tractor, and with a reasonable (5t) sized winch in place of the tipping body, could be a useful low impact winch machine. Devon seems to be full of sites requiring winch work, so thought it might be a useful tool in the armoury.

It's amusing when you look at the Estover website for Sandwich as the bits in red are clearly bollocks. The Sandwich, Kent biomass CHP will supply heat and electricity to Discovery Park, one of Europe's leading science and technology parks. The plant will source its fuel predominantly from traditionally managed coppiced woodlands, stimulating the local forestry industry and improving traditionally managed forests. The project was financed in August 2016 by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and BWSC with over £150m of finance. The project is due to commission in Q1 2018. Low cost carbon electricity and steam for Discovery Park tenants Up to 27MWe power and 11MWth steam offtake. Enough to power 40,000 homes Abundant local fuel - 430,000 acres of unmanaged woodland in South East England

I could only suggest that an effort is made to educate customers about the market pressures of supplying very small quantities of pristine hardwood, and how difficult that is. 50:50 loads the norm, with pure hardwood loads a real rarity. 2 cube plus deliveries to bypass the moisture content rules, and ideally get them to buy ahead and throughout the year, to spread demand. Pipe dream stuff maybe, but I think that there is still plenty of wood around, but customers need to be much more flexible and savvy.

It's not ideal, I know, but if you look at where the woodfuel market is going, you've got a lot of people on 20 year RHI contracts with the government and sitka is ideal for their needs.

Fully qualified forestry cutters, experienced and hardworking - £20 an hour subbed in, supplying all fuel, tools and PPE

But if you consider that the bulk of the wood fuel market by volume now is softwood, it makes sense. Native hardwoods top out at yield class 10-12 (10-12 cubic metres of timber, per hectare, per year). If the figures are to be believed for this case study, the spruce is achieving a yield class of over 35. Couple that with the fact that softwoods (especially spruce) are much easier and quicker to harvest, then you have a situation where the financial return on hardwood is derisory. Example - plant a good level field of 5 hectares with this (super) sitka from Wales. Plant an identical field next to it with something hardwood and fast growing, like alder. Assuming the sitka grows to it's full potential, then after 25 years, you have around 4125 tonnes of roundwood, of which about 1/2 would be 16cm TDUB 3.1m or 3.7m log. Roadside value of £237k, assuming £45/t for the chip and £70 for the log (Scottish prices - not so familiar with South West prices). Harvesting/forwarding cost could be as low as £10/t, so gross profit at the end of the 25 year cycle of nearly £200k. Then on the alder, assuming it makes it's maximum yield class of 12, you'll end up with 1500t at the end of it. It costs twice as much to harvest (£20/t) as much, or all of it needs to be hand cut. None of it can be used for sawmilling, and assume a price (today's prices) of £50 a tonne, and you've got a roadside value of £75k, and a gross profit of £45k. Obviously, these are just figures on the back of a fag packet, but they indicate why softwood is widely planted up north as a cash crop. Even a normal sitka stand at yield class 18 would be twice as profitable as hardwoods over the same rotation.

Read this article the other day with interest: http://www.confor.org.uk/news/latest-news/super-sitka-growing-super-fast/ Replace the ash with Sitka? At 33 tonnes per hectare per year, the growth rate is astonishing.

Interestingly, I don't find that funny at all. Just crass really.

I think it's mostly climate. Lack of wind and defined seasons. We also get too much rain I think.

I've possibly got a day of mobile sawmilling required a few miles outside of Taunton in early/mid November. Good site access for something like a Woodmizer. Level, solid site. The timber will be impeccably presented for rolling into the mill (on bearers, lined up). It'll also be perfectly clean (forwarded, not skidded) forest grown ash and maybe beech, 400-600mm diameter. Nothing oversized, nothing undersized. 3 and 3.6m lengths most likely. All perfect cylinders. You'd need to supply a lackey for helping unload as I won't be able to help. I'd expect at least 10 cubic metres throughput, but the cutting spec is extremely simple, and all through and through. Get in touch if you can help.

Great to get an insight into Scandinavian forestry practices. Really good post again. I was taken aback by the quality of the stands I've seen in Finland and Sweden. Almost no effort to get a complete stand of poker straight trees, whereas you can plant quality saplings here, high prune rigorously, control your pests diligently and thin at the correct intervals and still end up with a final crop of shite!

I've often been accused of having a crush on Scandinavia as a whole. The forests there are so different to here, and require so little maintenance in order to get a top notch crop. I love the little harvesters from Usewood - their combi machine (both a forwarder and a harvester) is brilliant, but at over £100k, well out of my price range. Our trees seem to grow quite stoutly compared to in Scandinavia too, so even in a first thinning, I think you'd soon come unstuck with a 22cm throat.

Excellent post Frett. Very informative.

There are a couple of harvester heads available for machines of that kind of size, but they will only take stems up to 22cm diameter. The issue is that the machine has no weight to counterbalance the weight of the tree. That's why I went for the bed processor instead of a harvester type machine. It'll take about 37cm, instead of 22cm. We did cut quite a lot of nice 3.7m log out of it too

Very true. In the scheme of things, the site we were on wasn't too bad, but it's just all so unfriendly towards smaller machinery. What also struck me was the level of wastage in the stands. We were working in a 48 year old block of sitka (the machine will lift anything in that stand at 3.1m, for reference) and whilst some effort had been made to thin a little, the last majority of the stand had seen one rack thin in it's entire history. As such, around 50-70% of the standing stems were dead, and due to the fact that everything was overdrawn, much of it was blown. Is it that uneconomical to thin sitka that it just doesn't get done? Assuming that the first thin could have been done at 18 years, if should be on it's 7th thin by now. I was just amazed how much dead (and given it's sold on the tonne, relatively valueless) timber there was.