Firewood Or Logging?

How the property looked when we purchased it.

This has been a conversation of ours at the Norsemen Ranch since the beginning. We have timber a plenty on our property. I for one love the trees. They are beautiful to walk through, to explore or to sit and enjoy the breeze blow past your face. It the number one place I go to hear God, to be in the still and quiet. Sometimes it is for peace, sometimes it is for answers or sometimes it is just to share with The Heavenly Father what has been going on inside my head. That being said all the trees are not practical for what we are trying to do. It is hard to garden, raise livestock or even have a place to play with your kids. This leads to the question what to do with the trees?

I do not like wasting and for us here cutting the trees down to simply burn is a waste. The trees do have to go in certain areas but what to do with them is the question. When I first moved down here everyone claimed we could make thousands of dollars on the standing timber if we sold them as logs. So this was my first thought to log the trees where we were getting ready to clear trees. This is something that I am not knowledgable in and have little to no experience. So I did what most sensible people would I started calling the local loggers. I will start with saying this was one of the most frustrating experiences. The loggers I have come to find out were essentially only interested if they could scalp the entire property. I was a little taken a back at how they were simply just not interested. The first guy I called showed up smelling of booze and from the beginning there was no way he was going to be an option. To make matters worse it was also found out later on that his price per foot was cheaper then the going rate because he did not know us. For me that is unacceptable. It is dishonest and I do not do business with anyone that chooses dishonesty.

The second guy I called was very interested even came out to "estimate" the property twice. One with me and then a again to meet with my father for a second opinion. He proceeded to string us along for well over a year. Randomly calling saying he wanted the job but was on another property that kept getting bigger. More and more timber being cut down. I do not know but I for one wanted to see this property because it sounded like he had landed the perfect job for a logger. Like someone has exclusively hired him to log the Mark Twain forest. For people who do not understand how amazing that would be for a logger here is the breakdown. The Mark Twain Forest has approximately 1.3-1.5 million acres, with an average of 150 trees acre. All I know that is a job of a lifetime. I wont even try to breakdown the money that would be made from that but it is a lot. Needless to say the guy decided to lead me on and I was not in a major rush so I let it go on.

Eventually I ran across another guy who is friends of the family who had a logging business he was honest! He straight up said it was not worth his time and that the timber was not worth it for him. I appreciated that more then anything else. He did offer to haul the logs if I found a way to log them. This led me to my next point lets try to log the property ourselves. I mean how hard could it be. I enjoy working with timber. I love cutting firewood, its hard work and I enjoy it. Just me, the woods and a chainsaw. Added bonus I do not have to deal with people I do not want to. That should of been my first clue to try firewood but no I decided to press on with the logging because I believed there was a monetary gain to be had.

I initially tried to go cut standing trees down. Figured I would go slow and just take down a few here an there. This was okay but the trees that were worth money were too big for me to handle back then. As in I started getting nervous and if your nervous handling heavy machinery and a oak tree that is 30 feet in the air and 20 inches wide that is a mixture for disaster. So I stopped and decided to not press my luck. I also came to find out once I put down the tree the question became how in the world was I going to get a 9 foot log out of the woods without a tractor, skid steer, 4 wheeler or any of the standard equipment. All I had was my f150 and some chains. This became a major issue when I had a friend who was a lineman that offered to cut a group of white oak down and he would make some money along from the timber. This went well. He put them down but they were scattered and some were not near the road. I had literally no way of getting them out. I was frustrated to say the least.

I started looking up every idea I could of how to move these logs. Turned out I was very overmatched and had another friend with a skid steer offer to move as much as he could in a couple hours. He did and I got my first load of logs off. It was a pain and a hassle from start to finish. You would think I would have stopped there but no I like to try things three times for some reason before I try something else. Also, I think there is something to do with "losing" that becomes an issue. I do not like to lose or give up. I do not think anyone should give up that is not how we were made especially not men. The truth is in this scenario your not really losing when you are not even capable of performing the task and believe me I have tried to move some of these logs by hand, rolling, flipping and some other ideas that were sure to lead to injury.

The next attempt was to try to log an area that was pushed. This was probably the only idea that was kind of successful but it took back breaking work. A blown seal on my transmission and a ton of time to get half a load of logs off the property. Take a look at that tree below. Try to move that with nothing but a chainsaw, a f150 and 50 foot of chain. Most people would say absolutely not. It is not even worth trying but not this guy, I did it. Pulled it off actually for half a load. It gave me my small sense of victory but it was the last attempt at logging until we have real equipment to do the work. Something I am learning more and more as I get older and with bigger projects on the ranch. There are some projects you do not undertake if you do not have the equipment and no matter how much stubbornness you have it is going to end poorly.

This led to the idea of firewood. Now this became something I could formulate a plan behind. It started on a whim. I had a ton of timber on the ground. We needed it clear for future projects on the property and burning it all was really not something I wanted to do. So I went to cutting firewood. Now I have cut firewood before but not to this amount. It began with doing research what is a measurement for firewood. Length, diameter and amount etc. This I tell you is one of the weirdest sets of measurements I have dealt with. Whoever came up with cord, face cord, rick and rank had to be a fan of the bottle because it just does not make sense. Even looking it up people cannot figure out what the standard measurements are and it also depends on the part of the country or world you are in. So figuring that out was a process. What I have transitioned to is cubic feet, it seems to be the least amount of argument across my research. 128 cubic feet and it translates perfectly to the measurements of a cord. Now for a rick or rank. That is something I think is made up for our little ozark community. My theory is they just wanted to be different either way once this was accomplished I went out to cut what I thought was a cord.

I set up pallets and pine tree branches to mark the dimensions and filled it up to get a handle on the size. I am a perfectionist in certain areas. I also want to provide customers with the best. My poor wife gets to deal with me combing through split firewood asking if it is too dead, too wet or some other crazy question. She just laughs now as no matter how many times I measure the pile of wood I always seem to add more. The reason is I do not ever want to show up with not enough wood.

We started with a customer that was small and that went well. The second customer wanted 5 cords in a weeks time. This I took on because I wanted to see if it could be done. I cut and hauled the wood to the splitter that my wife ran non-stop. It took 3 days to get 5 cords ready and we delivered 5 cords in one day with two trailers, an F150 and a F250. It was a long week but it was a nice little payday. From there we have been slowly gaining customers. I set an outrageous goal to sell a certain amount of firewood this year and not for the lack of trying we may come up short in that area. We are halfway there and not a lot of time left in the year.

There are still some kinks to work out along the way as there are in anything. We did purchase a flat bed trailer that we built braces, sides and a gate for the back. It allows us to move one full cord stacked neatly and efficiently. We would love to have a tractor on property to help us out and an upgraded truck to haul more. It is a little much for our F150 even though she is trucking along.

The biggest issue which is not really an issue is that we cannot keep enough piled up for orders. I am not kidding whenever I start to get a decent pile it all sells and then I am rushing around trying to get more cut, stacked and ready. Each week it seems like we figure out a better process. We have the trees knocked down. They sit and season for several months. They then are cut to firewood length. Which again they sit for several months. Split and put into piles for there remainder drying period until they are ready to move for delivery. Having plenty of wood on hand is something that will become an issue down the road.

So to combat that we have many more trees that will come down. We have started to experiment with taking lumber from other peoples property and bringing it back to sell. This is something that is a learning process and not exactly sure how that will go. The biggest thing is there is something coming from the trees that have been knocked down. They are being used to heat the homes of people all over this county.

Logging may happen another time but not for awhile. Firewood is what we are more set up to do and capable of handling. Even though it is hard work it is something that allows us to accomplish what we want on our property, help others in the community and make some money in the process. This I would call a success even though it took almost four years to get to this point, but hey sometimes the things worth doing are hard work. It was never said that things were going to be easy actually we are told it will be otherwise in life. I will finish with this Proverbs 14:23 "In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury"

Firewood piles that seem to just stack up.