# Modern Horse Logging



## dancan (Apr 7, 2012)

A different twist on a horse trailer .

[video=youtube;f17jMkoSdR8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=f17jMkoSdR8[/video]


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## Slamm (Apr 7, 2012)

That is neat and all, and not to expose my ignorance, but what in the heck do they do with all of those sticks they are picking up. There is more board footage in a couple of decent logs than those little sticks, makes me tired and depressed from a financial point of view to watch it.

To make those little piles along the trail do they or are they piling those up by hand?

I guess, I don't see the financial gain in that work being from the board footage or tonage of wood coming out, am I wrong?

Sam


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## dancan (Apr 8, 2012)

Every stick counts in Europe , what we leave to rot gets used , whether it is turned into firewood or chipped for fuel .
One of our paper companies did a clearcut in this area , they took the stumps .


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## Rick Alger (Apr 8, 2012)

Don't know what they do in Sweden, but in NH that stuff would be pulp or roundwood biomass (chipped elsewhere) I've pulled a good bit of that kind of wood on a scoot (sled). Hand piled and hand loaded. Roadside value runs around $25 a ton. Not a money maker.


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## dancan (Apr 8, 2012)

That's the same kind of $$ I had heard around here a while back .


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## Samlock (Apr 8, 2012)

That's pulp sticks. And the slash will go through a chipper for energy, I think.

The timber is not the money making product there, though, but the stand itself. Seems like a residential job. They have pretty much manicured the forest floor. I suppose that piece of woodland serves as a leisure park for the community. That justifies using the horses. They don't want any visible tracks there.

The commercial thinning looks quite different in Scandinavia. No horse forwarders.


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## Slamm (Apr 8, 2012)

dancan said:


> Every stick counts in Europe , what we leave to rot gets used , whether it is turned into firewood or chipped for fuel .
> One of our paper companies did a clearcut in this area , they took the stumps .



Wow, pulp or chip wood amazes me. I always assume that people would not work for free, but yet its difficult for me to see how they are making any money with that stuff.

Pretty good set of horses in that video.

When I was younger I ran a team of Clydesdales for an old neighbor, horse drawn sickle bar mower, horse drawn rake, tractor and baler, then horse drawn wagon to pick up the bales. Plowed fields with those two and pulled a wagon in parades. The guy I bought my truck and trailer from in Wisconsin is said to have owned the first machinized skidder in that stated. He said, he still liked his horses for awhile afterwards, he had 3 of them that the cutter would attached them to a log and the horse would walk itself down to the landing and his wife would unhook the log and send the horse back up to the cutter, nobody had to guide the horse from the dropped trees to the landing, once the trail was established, and he had three that would do that.

Sam


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## floyd (Apr 8, 2012)

Thanks for posting that. That team has done that job awhile. Nice to see a road gear on them as well. Notice he worked them open as well. See the knucklehead on the right always turning around & looking. At least when he wasn't bugging his buddy.

This may come as a shock to some...the management objective is not always turn a $ profit. There was a busy road next to the work. It appeared he was decking in a public park, or something.


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## dancan (Apr 8, 2012)

Some horse logging from Nova Scotia .

[video=youtube;CFzXj_bg8KU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CFzXj_bg8KU[/video]


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## dancan (Apr 8, 2012)

Some bigger sticks for you Sam , but not monsters .

[video=youtube;JhMlreqW3Cg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=JhMlreqW3Cg[/video]

These guys are building horse trailers , Mini Tractor Enterprises- Compact Logging Tractors and Logging Equipment for Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan .

I'd guess at about 20,000 $$ + for a horse trailer .



Darnnit ! wrong video , now I got to find it again ....Fixed !


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## Samlock (Apr 9, 2012)

That seems to be a video from Finland, Dan. I guess they are logging blowdowns. A proper job for a horse team, if you have one. Picking up logs from here and there isn't profitable for a forwarder anyway. 



Slamm said:


> Wow, pulp or chip wood amazes me. I always assume that people would not work for free, but yet its difficult for me to see how they are making any money with that stuff.



That's a damn good question, Sam. You hit right to the core. That's a basic dilemma of the optimized forest management. Clear cutting even aged mature stands is where the money comes from. But in order to get to that point, you need to play with the pulp sticks. And nobody really likes that. Landowners won't get paid, loggers do it for a minimum profit and the pulp and yet paper industry is always complaining the pulp wood is too expensive and they need to keep closing down mills because of that.

In fact your question is so clever, I have not enough brain to answer it.


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## ChainsawmanXX (Apr 9, 2012)

Horse logging is coming back my friends  

Get ready, your gonna see alot more horse logging going on. 
Dan, I dont know if you know but we used horses to log with? 
Here's some action shots. 





A cedar job we pulled some good sized logs out of. With 2 single horses in small soft wood you can move ALOT of logs! 




Another small job we did. Clearing cedar trees off a steep hill. 





Here is the rig we use for bigger logs, still working some of the small bugs out of it. but it works good for 28" logs


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## lmbrman (Apr 9, 2012)

I know of a few landowners that paid to have their land logged by horses-

maybe i could get over my fear of horses for $


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## ShaneLogs (Apr 9, 2012)

dancan said:


> Every stick counts in Europe , what we leave to rot gets used , whether it is turned into firewood or chipped for fuel .
> One of our paper companies did a clearcut in this area , they took the stumps .




Did they just dig the stumps out in a backhoe and throw them in the chipper or what ?


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## dancan (Apr 9, 2012)

ShaneLogs said:


> Did they just dig the stumps out in a backhoe and throw them in the chipper or what ?



Excavator then a tubgrinder , they'll replant from what I've been told but they sure have taken a lot of nutrient out of the ecosystem that is already topsoil poor .


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## Slamm (Apr 9, 2012)

I don't see how they can remove stumps and come out at a net profit on energy. But again I don't see how there is much of any profit in a lot of what has been shown in this thread or some pulp projects.

Sam


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## lmbrman (Apr 9, 2012)

Slamm said:


> I don't see how they can remove stumps and come out at a net profit on energy. But again I don't see how there is much of any profit in a lot of what has been shown in this thread or some pulp projects.
> 
> Sam



I have been told there is lots of money in pulp-

the secret is to keep some of it :hmm3grin2orange:


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## Samlock (Apr 10, 2012)

lmbrman said:


> I have been told there is lots of money in pulp-
> 
> the secret is to keep some of it :hmm3grin2orange:



You said it, sir!

A local rich bastard lives 4 blocks from my place. No, I don't live in an exclusive residential area, just one of the twists of the decentraliced community structure. Well, he owns a good deal of timberland. He also owns a printing house and the provincial newspaper. He said he sells pulp wood, buys it back as paper, sprays some ink on it - and that's what he calls business.


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## imagineero (Apr 11, 2012)

Each one of those stick will be turned down to make a leg for an ikea desk or chair ;-)

Well trained horse team was a pleasure to watch, especially the part where they backed the trailer. Slightly less impressive seeing the horses work against the background of a busy road though.

Shaun


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## Samlock (Apr 11, 2012)

Ikea is quite slick with the small diameter twigs. They have a sawmill and a factory making furniture components in Kostamus, the Russian side of Karelia. They managed to rent cutting privileges for 3000 square kilometers of timberland from the Karelian Republic governement. Pretty nice old growth forests they have now rights for. South west of the area - close to the mill - is however mostly peatland growing small pine - dense wood it is, a 30' high 5'' in diameter tree may well be 200-300 years old. We noticed couple of years ago that they had marked the small pine sticks on the roadside. That was queer. We figured they had different colours for each diameter category. Later we heard that was the case. There's a line in the sawmill for the small sticks. They'll log different diameter categories on the row, depending what kind of settings the sawmill and the factory has.


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## ShaneLogs (Apr 11, 2012)

dancan said:


> Excavator then a tubgrinder , they'll replant from what I've been told but they sure have taken a lot of nutrient out of the ecosystem that is already topsoil poor .



It sounds like it is more in pain of the butt then it is worth!


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## redprospector (Apr 11, 2012)

Slamm said:


> I don't see how they can remove stumps and come out at a net profit on energy. But again I don't see how there is much of any profit in a lot of what has been shown in this thread or some pulp projects.
> 
> Sam



Haha. I made the mistake of saying something similar to my Dad one time. The "Old Man" looked me right in the eye and said: "That's the problem son, you just don't see".

Andy


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## Slamm (Apr 12, 2012)

redprospector said:


> Haha. I made the mistake of saying something similar to my Dad one time. The "Old Man" looked me right in the eye and said: "That's the problem son, you just don't see".
> 
> Andy



Well, however you want to take it, I'm interested in how they make money off of those processes. I can see in a big dedicated pulp operation, if it doesn't rain them out, its a numbers game and those big deals take a lot of wood, loads and loads of it to make it, then the pulp mill shuts down for one week and it all goes to heck. I've seen that happen several times in just the little pulping I've done, we made money, but not what we make when doing a good select cut job, but I'm not set up with the multi-thousands or million dollar setups that some of these bigger pulp only operations have. I can also sleep at night and have a pretty worry free life/business, LOL.

Sam


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## lmbrman (Apr 12, 2012)

Sam,

i can only speak for the operations i have worked with, but some of the operators around me plan on 400 cords a week, half pulp, half logs, two man operation plus trucking, older rebuilt equipment, i think $40/cord is ballpark for cutting and piling on the landing.

Some of the smaller guys are working small jobs that the big boys don't want, and sometimes there is only one bid on the timber, so they might have few cords in a week, but maybe the rate for them turns out to be $60/ cord for cutting and piling on the landing. A few horse logging operations have sprung up and i have seen where the landowner PAYS them to log- i guess the fascination of it is worth more to the landowner than the timber. Some of these operators are niche guys, but some are not. Kinda half logging, half tree service i guess.

There are at least two dozen smaller sawmills in this area, and five pulp mills. They seldom all close at the same time, and the prices change often, so managing that is a few calls each week.

Certainly not sayin it is easy, but possible if a guys wants it.

-dave


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## redprospector (Apr 12, 2012)

Slamm said:


> Well, however you want to take it, I'm interested in how they make money off of those processes. I can see in a big dedicated pulp operation, if it doesn't rain them out, its a numbers game and those big deals take a lot of wood, loads and loads of it to make it, then the pulp mill shuts down for one week and it all goes to heck. I've seen that happen several times in just the little pulping I've done, we made money, but not what we make when doing a good select cut job, but I'm not set up with the multi-thousands or million dollar setups that some of these bigger pulp only operations have. I can also sleep at night and have a pretty worry free life/business, LOL.
> 
> Sam



Sorry Sam, I didn't take it at all. What you said made me think of my Dad. Made me smile pretty big thinking about him, and I posted it.
Sorry, I wasn't pickin', just reminissin'.

Andy


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## floyd (Apr 12, 2012)

I think the reason one sees animal power being used is because the road is there. Very visual site. Want it pretty.


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## johnnycompost (Dec 9, 2012)

*horse logging and the little stuff*

we are logging a lot now about 62 acres and the landowner pays fairly well but part of the agreement is neatness and we cut all the way down to the twig it seems but he is paying and we are working go figure


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