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March 2010 Classifieds

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Our best leisure reading from our not-so-sharp minds

Of course I look familiar; I was here just last week cleaning your carpets, painting your shutters, or delivering your new refrigerator.

Hey, thanks for letting me use your bathroom when I was working in your yard last week. While I was there, I unlatched the back window to make my return a little easier.

Love those flowers. They tell me you have taste, and taste means there are nice things inside. Those yard toys your kids leave out always make

Planting Seedlings Of Success by May Donnell

Recession? What recession? These are boom times for Singleton Forestry Services, LLC, a mechanized planting and spraying operation out of west central Georgia.

“Two of the best years I’ve had are last year and this year,” says owner Steve Singleton. “Next year should be good, too.”

Singleton has been planting pine seedlings for a living since his 1986 graduation from Tri-County High School in Buena Vista. He could have stayed on the family farm in Marion County and raised peanuts, soybeans and corn with his father but he chose to strike out on his own and raise trees instead.

Refining The Status Quo

Consider the word attitude, which Webster describes as a “feeling or emotion toward a fact or condition.” Attitude is to opportunity like ice cream is to cake. Winston Churchill is credited with saying, “The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.” It’s true that the state of our respective lives, and often our businesses, is usually a reflection of our individual mindsets, our dispositions.

There are three reasons why attitude is so important: 1) attitude often determines what we see more than our eyes because we tend to see what we’re most looking for; 2) attitude often determines what we hear more than our ears because we tend to hear what we’re most listening for; and 3) attitude, more than the facts, often determines what we discover, how we build our lives and businesses and how we deal with opportunities that present themselves.

Still Standing Tall by Jennifer McCary

The first time Southern Loggin’ Times visited the jobsite of T. J. Miller, Inc. roughly 23 years ago, Miller had just survived the worst year of his career. When SLT revisited Miller in January, the 62-year-old owner and son Chris had survived yet another of those “worst year” challenges.

Falling oil prices and a boiler room mishap at his primary wood fuel chip market in 1986 stabled Miller’s whole tree chipping operation for seven long weeks. Although markets regained some strength, the chip market had essentially peaked and the logger eventually shut down the chipping crews and streamlined his operation.

Current Industry News

Momentum is building rapidly for Timber & Biomass Expo Southeast, a live/static event where providers of forestry equipment, technology, supplies and services interact with customers and potential buyers. The show begins on Friday morning, June 11 and concludes the next day. It takes place on a Langdale-provided tract located a dozen or so miles east of Valdosta, Ga. and four miles south of the intersection of U.S. highway 84 and Georgia highway 135.

Reflecting the emergence of the wood-to-energy sector, which appears to be a major market in waiting for south Georgia and north Florida, the show includes a dedicated biomass arena where various makes and models of chippers and grinders will operate in a cluster clear of standing timber. The latest companies to take advantage of this arrangement include Fecon, Inc. and Precision Husky Corp. Vermeer Southest, Bandit and Morbark earlier had committed to the dedicated biomass arena.

Analyze, Then Repair

When a machine fails, the result is downtime and repair costs. Making a repair, without analyzing the cause, can result in further costs. Avoid this by following eight steps to gather the facts, determine a sequence of events and then identify and correct the root cause.

State problem—The problem should be stated in a clear, concise manner in two parts: the failed components and symptoms.

Book accentuates a lifestyle that lingers in the memories of remaining former residents and their of

Documented by the U.S. Bureau of Corporations in a monumental report of 1914, Southern lumber companies, national lumber companies and railroads formed an interlocking network that gave credence to the Brotherhood’s claim that they battled not independent lumber companies but a “Southern lumber trust.” As labor historian Geoffrey Ferrell accused (and to an impressive degree, substantiated), this linked network of companies was involved in “undermining competition, fixing prices, curtailing production, manipulating the press, influencing legislation, and battling labor organizations.” Ferrell documented that the lumber companies traded with each other, exchanged personnel, sat on each other’s boards, ex­changed information, socialized with each other, and ar­ranged for sons and daughters to marry each other.

SCTPA Annual Meeting: Licensing, Economy, Biomass, Awards, Job Efficiency & More

Drawing the most interest, and perhaps the topic most discussed—formally and informally— was the issue of logger licensing, the debate over which has intensified in South Carolina over the last several years. The SCTPA board has unanimously endorsed the concept, which was presented and vigorously discussed at district meetings in 2009. The initiative, which uses the state’s general contractor license as a model, has drawn both positive and negative reaction within the logging association, not to mention the state forestry commission and forestry association and the consuming mill community. Of course, members of the state general assembly have taken note as well.