Modern Horse Logging

Wesspur
Rugged made
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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
 
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 .
 
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.
 
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.
 
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 .
Click to expand...

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
 
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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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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
30225_116827565012713_100000564094188_207861_5225937_a.jpg

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!
63841_438297647001_823752001_5038374_1434283_n.jpg

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

190398_203525709676231_100000564094188_750462_5776196_n.jpg

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 :rock:
 
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 $
 
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 .
Click to expand...


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

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

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

the secret is to keep some of it :hmm3grin2orange:
Click to expand...

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.
 
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
 
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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