Table of Contents

January 2009 Classifieds

Download the Southern Loggin' Times January 2009 IronWorks classifieds here!

The Lighter Side of Logging

Rule# 1 – When you are in deep trouble, look straight ahead, keep your mouth shut and say nothing.

Extra Sorts

Two knuckleboom loaders and a loader/ delimber combination graced the landing of Anthony Nutt Co., Inc. when SLT visited the operation in early December. A fourth loader is available for peak summer production or as a backup. Some might say that’s a bit of overkill, but the fourth generation owner says it’s necessary with his set-up that typically makes eight or more product sorts.

For the last five years, Nutt has contracted with Plum Creek, an REIT company known as an expert in timber utilization. The logger and his dad before him had been Georgia-Pacific (G-P) contractors since that company bought out Fordyce Lumber Co. several decades back. In the late 1990s G-P reorganized its timber holdings as The Timber Co., which later sold to Plum Creek. In 2003, Nutt decided to go with the landowner who controls the timber tracts that are available to harvest.

The Dierks Legacy by DK Knight

According to Don Dierks, Jr., a descendant of the Dierks family that left its landmark imprint on the hilly pine forests in Indian Territory (later to become Oklahoma) and Arkansas, farmer Peter Henry Dierks left Germany with his wife in 1852 and settled near Lyons, (now Clinton) Iowa, not far from the Mississippi River. With them was Hans, the couple’s two-year-old son.

A booming sawmill industry soon sprang up along the river in the midwest. Mills cut massive white pine logs that had been lashed together in rafts and floated south from origins in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Hans and other Dierks children born into the family were no doubt serenaded daily by mill steam whistles. It’s possible that Hans and perhaps his brothers—Herman, Peter, Henry and John—worked part time in those mills and thus developed a love for the whine of saws and the smell of freshly cut lumber.

Uphill Climb by David Abbott

For many loggers, the day-to-day grind of the job is an uphill climb. For Stephen Howard, 44, owner of Mt. Calvary Logging, that’s literally true. When Southern Loggin’ Times visited his job site in late October, he was working a spot with skids up steep inclines, forcing him to use bulldozers with cables for much of the work. Howard was working near Jackson, just above Hazard and about an hour from his home in London. He works mainly on steep ground in southern Kentucky, with a good mix of hardwood and pine pulp and sawlogs.

The tract he was working when SLT visited is actually a research project for the University of Kentucky (UK). The land, which is adjacent to a large coal mining operation, has not been touched in 85 years. According to Howard’s academic contact, Daniel Bowker, management forester at UK’s Department of Forestry, the property in question is the Robinson Forest, a15,000 acre tract lying in Breathitt, Knott, and Perry counties in eastern Kentucky. It was lo

Current Industry News

I am certainly grateful that the exorbitant fuel prices of this past summer are only a bad memory but my real fear of the current situation is that we will be all too quick to forget how painful getting and paying those fuel bills were. Many dialogues were started on varying fronts to find alternatives as a result of $140+/barrel crude and many of the proposed solutions only made financial sense because of the extremely high raw material costs for typical fossil fuels. Now, even though we are currently at 2004 prices (didn’t we complain about that price then?), we need to keep focused on developing alternatives that can keep America independent from the extortion of the OPEC group and its manipulation of the oil supply.

What I fear is a situation similar to what happens here in the Southwest during an extreme wildfire season: When the sky is full of smoke and homes are being threatened or lost, the poor forest condition is front page news; but when the summer monsoons start

New Forests, Stories And Show by Tonya Cooner-Vots

Happy New Year! Hope you and yours had a warm and wonderful holiday season, and as Monday follows Sunday, we undeck the halls and head back to the grindstone, or the logging trail as it is in this case.

What will 2009 bring to the logging and forest industry? First of all, planting season is wrapping up. For all the acres that were cut in 2008 and some left over from 2007, there’s only a small planting season window, usually from late November through January, sometimes into February if the temps remain low. Millions of pine seedlings are set by machine or manually using dibble-bar or hoe-dad. Planting crews are out early to wait for the morning frost to thaw in order to get these carefully nurtured pines started on their long journey.