This Week in the Woods
Spring is here and we know what that means…. time for Randy to spend too much money! Winter doesn’t seem to fully want to let go, but the soft ground is now not workable, particularly for our whole tree crew. Our cut to length system is still able to get wood out but they are going to stop here soon and come home for some maintenance…. and thus - the spending too much money! Can we just talk a minute about the absolutely insane prices of maintenance items?! Oil, filters, parts, and pieces are just out of this world expensive. Because of the extreme cost of parts and even labor for repairs, that forces you to make business decisions that you might not have made 5 years ago. Five years ago, financially it would make sense to keep a piece of older equipment and throw some parts at it now and again. At this point, the threshold for it being worth it is so much lower. This is why we bought a new truck last year- the downtime, labor, and parts were costing us soooooo much money! And it is why this year, we are buying a new processing head. One thing to know about logging is that time is our most precious resource and the clock is always ticking. If you spend a quarter of your time working on a machine, you will never regain that time back in terms of production. I say all of this to say, that when you see a logger spending money, it’s usually an effort to save money!
Another day, another mill closure. It has been reported that the ND Old Town mill is closing for an extended amount of time. They will re-assess…. that doesn’t sound too hopeful. This mill is a consumer of soft wood pulp and it is a market we can’t afford to lose since the loss of the Jay mill and the volatility of the biomass market. I swear, just when you think things are getting better- BOOM! The pine log market, however, is strong and it is a fantastic time to harvest mature pine.
Did you see Randy’s news performance? Channel 8 came out to visit us a few months ago to talk about how the climate is impacting our work in the woods. It is a great little segment and I have attached it below if you’re interested!
Earlier this past month we attended a legislative breakfast where we got the opportunity to present to and talk to our State Representatives. We had some lively discussion about what the Government’s role should be in our industry given that we are a Capitalist society. They heard about a lot of the issues that plague the industry and got a sense for the turbulence we have endured and will continue to endure. At the end of the day, one representative got a bit passionate about the fact we want to be a Capitalist society so then they shouldn’t get involved with supply and demand issues, they can’t make the mills pay more, they can't prevent them from buying from another county and so on…. I continually get the impression that those in our government assume their job is to fix our problems. Problems they really know nothing about. We are fully capable of solving our our issues, but what we were asking of them, is to not make it harder. When the logging community opposes something they are proposing, it is because have the foresight to see the unintended consequences that they cannot. We don’t want the government imposing on the free market but they keep doing it by throwing money every where, buying votes, picking winners and losers. We just want to maintain a level playing field. We are simply asking them to stop and it will balance out! As a side note- we were very disappointed to not see a single one of our local representatives who constantly pounded on our doors during campaign season, promising to support us. They weren’t shy to grab photos with us and post them all over the place to show how great they are. It is pretty hard to support an industry if you don’t make an attempt to learn about it.
All in all we have had a great winter and are looking forward to a little R&R before opening our Ice Cream store and getting back in the woods!
