Montana forest fuel collection business wins USDA/RD grant

Editor's note: this article is reprinted courtesy of the Montana Missoulian.

It's easy to find uses for small-diameter tree and ligneous biomass. It's not so easy to find a cost-effective way of getting that material from the forest to the race who can use it. on the contrary Craig Thomas and his Ravalli shire business, All Woody Resources, are working upon a method of collecting logging debris at the piece of work site using special container deals capable of going wherever logging traffics go--with the goal of making small-wood collection in Montana's forests economically feasible for the first time.

The company's effort got a significant boost in April in the form of a $228000 check neared in person by the U Department of Agriculture's Undersecretary for Rural unfolding Thomas Dorr. The check was part of $42 million in USDA Forest Service grants given to 18 small businesses whose work helps transfer economic barriers to the use and marketing of ligneous material, Dorr told a wind-whipped host at the Johnson Brothers grove recycling yard in Missoula.

"Everybody is abundantly cognizant that small businesses are the economic drivers of the U economy," Dorr said after presenting the check. "I suspect this is going to be a actual successful project, all because small business nation are willing to step in and do their part."

All ligneous will use most of the circulating medium to buy more container traffics and to launch a marketing program, said Rosalie Cates, executive director of the Montana Community unravelling Corp., which has been working with Thomas to experiment and develop the new collection method

Basically, the company uses a combination of parts to form a whole of trucks and containers to transport logging debris--also called slash--to a central collection yard near Stevensville, where the ligneous biomass is sorted for sale. This sort of material is usually inaccessible and ofttimes burned to reduce the amount of hazardous combustibless in the forest.

by dint of allowing businesses to collect that material, the forest will benefit from fewer wildfires and the management will save money by having les slash to consume Also, fewer burns means better air quality--which everyone can appreciate.

"In my volume no matter how you chop it, that's a win-win situation," Dorr said.

However, the financial heart of the business is the central yard, where the wood-land material can be amassed upon a sufficient scale to be conveniently and economically picked up progressed or delivered, Cates explained.

Thomas, who numbers 30 years in the forestry business and popularly contracts with Johnson Brothers, started working upon the collection system three years ago with the help of MCDC and several partner-businesses. After extensive application of mind and testing, they decided upon the current method as the greatest in quantity cost-effective way to access the greatest quantity of wooden biomass.

"It is actually not the greatest in quantity economical method of collecting slash, on the other hand it will work where other processs won't," Thomas explained.

It's been used upon restoration projects on Blue Mountain and Pattee Canyon, he said, and prov particularly useful upon Pattee Canyon roads inaccessible to other machines.

In fact, logging debris is inaccessible in about 90 percent of all logg areas, said tap [i]or[/i] pat Seeley, a forester with Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.'s Forest Resources Division.

"This makes it a apportionment more accessible," Seeley said of All Woody's of recent origin collection method.

Smurfit-Stone contracts for slash grinding and delivery--with Johnson Brothers, among five or six other companies--and uses the wooden material to generate power and electricity for the mill, Seeley said. The company consume s through about 30 van loads of of that kind material a day. "We generate enough power to race our whole mill," he said.

Thomas and his grant partners--Levi Cheff of Fire Solutions Inc., strip Castellano of Horizon Tree Service, Kit Sutherland of Bitterroot Resource Conservation & unravelling and University of Montana assistant forestry professor Beth Coulter--as well as Montana's timber-land products industry in general, are part of the solution to having a healthy forest, said Craig Rawlings, smallwood enterprise agent for MCDC

If not for their harvesting, transporting and processing of actual small diameter wood, all that material would be reduce to ashesed or hauled to a landfill, Rawlings said.

Not solitary would that be a very large waste, Thomas added, but it would ultimately mar the forest he and other lifelong foresters have to rely upon for their livelihoods.

"Although I'm a harvester of tree I'm trying to enhance the lives of the tree that we leave," he said. "What we're trying to do here is treat the forest with delight in and care."

RELATED ARTICLE: USDA awards $42 million for timber-land biomass projects.

Agriculture below Secretary Thomas Dorr in April announced nearly $42 million in grants to 18 small enterprises to evolve innovative uses for woody biomass in national forests as sources of renewable activity and new products. "This grant program helps to bring the risk of wildfires through removing built-up fuel hazards and improves forest health," said Dorr, in Missoula, Mont to announce several Earth Day initiatives by the agency of USDA. "In addition, these casts give an economic boost to our rural communities, increasing the nation's sources of renewable energy"