Big J

Drought stress from the extreme summer last year I wonder? Did you water them through the hot spell?

Visited one of my sites today and loads of very fresh damage to the beech. This tree was 10 inch dbh roughly. Huge areas of bark stripped.

My uncle (in his mid fifties now, having recently retrained again as a climber, after doing it for 10 years or so in his 20s and 30s) prunes commercial fruit orchards in south west Germany as a climber. He works 5 hours a day typically, 3 days a week at 50 Euros an hour. It's a good life I think!

This was a roadside sapling that I walked past the other day that had died suddenly and spectacularly

Dead ash everywhere around us in Mid Devon. That said, I'm up in Edinburgh at the moment and it's quite evident around here too. There is going to be a vast amount of work coming up on removals.

Pine martens are apparently the single best control measure for greys. Where the numbers of martens has increased, the greys have retreated and the reds have started to reestablish.

If I were starting a firewood business I would look to maximise automation and minimise handling. So large capacity firewood processor, log deck with old forwarder/tractor with timber trailer to load it. Conveyor off with well-vented potato boxes to be loaded. Boxes taken by small telehandler to one of several large polytunnels for drying (good halfway house between natural drying and kiln drying). Box rotator on telehandler to load into segregated tipper for rapid deliveries of part loads. You'd need to be doing at least 2000 cube a year for it to be worthwhile, and I'd try to focus on softwood due to more rapid drying times and quicker processing. But I wouldn't start a firewood business to be honest.

I very much doubt that Packham would get behind not culling grey squirrels. The broader environmental damage they cause is so extensive that it would take someone tremendously blinkered to make a case for not controlling them. Can I just stress, every single young hardwood stand I've seen since moving to Devon has moderate to severe squirrel damage. Considering that on plantation format planting, you're 2500 trees per hectare, you have a planting cost of £7500 minimum, plus maintenance. Without significant squirrel control between the ages of 10-50 years, you'll end up with a woodland full of bushes, with almost no commercial value at all. At a grey squirrel talk the other day, the forestry consultant presenting it used the example of a large estate they manage in Hampshire. On a significant replanting block, they calculated that without squirrel control, the stand would have an eventual value of £2.5m. With £500,000 of squirrel control during those vulnerable years, the final value of the stand was worked out to be £11m. They are not native. They are responsible for the demise of our native squirrel and they extensively damage the eco systems they inhabit. People need to stop anthropomorphising them as cute little woodland dwellers and instead shooting the bastards on sight.

You should get some Eastern Europeans in. They'd clear those pesky trees, double quick. Take advantage of the migrant labour whilst you can! ?

Just trap and kill the little shitbag. I wish people were less tolerant of grey squirrels. Almost all new hardwood plantation I see has been completely destroyed by them.

It's what I aim for with my contracts generally, or a bit more. That's once machine costs are paid, contractors paid and landowners too.

I am not sure what the planning laws are in Scotland relating to Agricultural Occupancy Certificates, but in England, if you work in Forestry or Agriculture, it's much easier to get planning on a plot that would otherwise not be approved. That is the route that we are intending to go, starting with finding some land towards the end of the year. As you have a better chance of getting planning on an otherwise undevelopable plot, you'll find that the £100k you'd budget for a modest 1/4 acre house plot might get you 15 acres of grazing/woodland. In England, the AOC can be lifted after 15 years, so you can then sell it as a normal property. If you sell it prior to that, the value is substantially reduced as it can only be sold to other people who would qualify for an AOC. To echo other contributors, speak to a rural planning specialist and go from there. They may well have contacts for finding you suitable land too.

Agreed. I brought 18t of fairly dry, windblown ash back home for my domestic supply. It produced 45 cube of logs, but took about 15 hours in total to cut and stack (large logs). It'll probably save us 4 tanks of oil, which is £2400 (4 x 1200l), but I could have sold the firewood at roadside for about £1200. Add to that the £200 haulage, my time for cutting and splitting (which went faster as I had the forwarder to speed things up) and then the approximately 15 minutes per day of bringing wood into the house and stocking the fire over the winter and it really doesn't make any sense.

I can't see the prices dropping. Even with the deluge of ash that'll come to market, demand will always hugely outstrip supply.

The two mainly ash woodlands that we thinned over winter are now severely infected. Approximately a third of the trees are showing little sign of life. I can imagine that with at least one of them that we will be back again this winter.

Update: Signed the paperwork for the Komatsu 840TX yesterday. It's straight to work next month on a 1500t clearfell/thin, with a further 5800t booked in for the remainder of the year. Lots of low impact work to run alongside it too

After 10 years of putting an average of 35 cube a year through various stoves, as well as processing for other people, one of my greatest desires is to build a house that doesn't need a stove. So tired of stoking fires! ?

Producing and selling firewood is only really viable if you are one end of the spectrum or the other. It works well for someone with a transit, a chainsaw and a splitter. Very low overheads and earns some beer money. Or if you are on the other end, with a very fast highly automated processor, loads of space/kilns for drying and an efficient delivery method. You want to be processing upwards of 1000t/year really. It's the folk inbetween where I don't know how they do it. Not enough to live on really, but enough to require significant investment in machinery, stock and yard space. Firewood is selling the unprofitable to the ungrateful, and it's worth remembering that. As regards, profit, someone once said to me to aim for your business to be 27% profitable after all day to day costs. It seemed like an arbitrary figure at the time, but over the years, it's rung true. So on that basis, you need to be turning over £100k on firewood for a £27k salary. Doesn't seem worth it to me, to be honest.

Your labourer sounds like a waste of space. A stoner, can't get to work by himself and can't follow instruction. It's not a glowing CV when you break it down like that. I'd get rid and find someone else.

I need a child free, distraction free afternoon and I might crack it. I just liked the simplicity of the paper version. Thanks for the input though

Well that was a bit underwhelming...... ?

In order to get the form to print out to fill in manually, you have to email them to get them to send you one. Why can't you just download one instead (just like before)? I could have finished it by now but instead I have to wait for some desk jockey to send me a form that I used to be able to get instantly. For instance, on the mapping section, it asks you to select compartments to be felled from a generic OS map with no compartments listed. You can't submit a compartment map of your own as a pdf because it won't accept pdfs. Arghh! ?

In an effort to bring their process for applying for felling licences into the 21st century, the Commission seems to have moved to an online format, with the option of having the paper form emailed to you to fill in manually and return to them. I'm a bit of a technological Luddite when it comes to this sort of thing and despite my best efforts, want to kill the computer after 30 minutes of trying to do the online forms. It's asking for obscure file types, asking me to select compartments on maps that don't exist and is generally not user-friendly. Has anyone else had the displeasure of completing one of these awful online forms yet?

A lot of them are pretty much stone dead here. Spring is about 3-4 weeks ahead down here compared to the North East.

So many trees around here in East/Mid Devon with barely any growth on them this spring. Variable within stands and rows, but the demise is self-evident and severe. If you're not allowing them to grow too tall then they aren't going to be a safety issue so I'd perhaps just continue on as you have been.