Ken Gotberg wrote:
Turn the trees into pellets?Brian You should consider turning the trees into pellets. There is a lot of info on this from Danish and Swedish websites. Let someone else mess with boilers etc.Ken This is a nice idea but give me more info to work with please. I can take the bait if you like. I was waiting and hoping for a chance to enter into a discussion in this group in which I might be able to inject some of my family knowledge. You all have seen hints of my family’s sustainable living philosophy in my writing before. I am new here so I will spare you the long winded version. My wife says we tend toward the socialist side when it comes to living and working conditions. What I know about pellets is that the forest is harvested using big nasty looking machines. I have seen these forest eaters in action just a few miles from here. The harvesters use hydraulic snips or power saws while a large hydraulic mechanical arm lift the tree up and over the cab into a chipper. Ok, now that I drew that mental image for you I hope we can see that pellet creation is for big business not the kind of fodder I have seen tossed back and forth at the Biofuels group. It is our opinion people need to process the excess wood by hand thus creating jobs while getting more people outdoors and in the forest. A couple of days worth of good old fashioned hard work and one man with a power saw and a pickup truck can process enough firewood fuel to heat his home for a few months. Mind you that the Southwest does not have the same problems with de-forestation that the rest of the world has. In fact I only know about the world’s forest issues from what I have read. Our family tends toward local forest issues. We have plenty of these issues to keep us busy. The majority of the forest land of the Southwest United States have been clear-cut on two occasions, both times for the rail system. I won’t get into how we were cheated out of any benefit from those rail systems by the auto industries. I will leave that for another time. The first time in the trees were mowed down was in the early nineteen hundreds, the second time around fifty years ago. Loggers worked the ‘easy’ trees on the first run through the forests. Similar to the way oil companies get the easy oil first, after the artesian wells run dry, oil rigs pump, then the oil gets more expensive quick. Energy economy I think an environmentalist pal called it. It was the same with the trees, the harvested the big boys down by the rail tracks first, as time went on teams of loggers travel further up the hill to drag the by mule down to the rail. I found some interesting material about logging in the Sacramento mountains during this time. http://www.mountainmonthly.com/logging.html One thing which seems to set our forests apart from other forests is that ours grow back pretty fast when well managed. I have hiked many of the forests in our area and on several occasions with my buddy the sawyer. He knows about logging. So, if what I am seeing with my own eyes is true, these trees are a renewable resource. It takes the average Ponderosa Pine tree thirty years to reach maturity. What the tree huggers call old growth trees in the Southwest are in fact only fifty-year-old trees. How can I say this? Poor tree hugger couldn’t be wrong, could he? Remember I am with a logger now, in the forest. When a Ponderosa Pine, a Douglas Fir, or any of the species of the Southwest reach a hundred years old, they generally fall over dead, tree hugger with it! Hiking through the forests up in the high country is breath taking. Not unlike down here at the ranch where we have selectively pruned and thinned. Most of the Forest Service land of which there are huge tracks all around us here in New Mexico are in total chaos. After the Railroad came through on what was their final logging run, the forests were left in a shambles. The rairoad must have had a plan however, because the forests did grow back after the first run. However, this process was stopped in its tracks to use a bad pun. The forest went through a new era during the seventies through the nineties, an era without any form of management. Those of us that live here see the devastating results of this lack of management everyday. The forests, instead of recovering like they did the first time the railroad came through, are stagnant, stunted, and ugly for the most part. No trees worth hugging anywhere to be found. There are plenty of well documented studies which can show you exactly how this happened. Check out any of the USDA Forest Service sites for the Southwest. Those foresters know what happened and take plenty of blame for it. On an upbeat note, the Forest Service has made huge strides in correcting its mistakes and are to be commended. One area I disagree with the Forest Service is in the use of Forest Harvester. Again, I think we need to get more people in the forests working by hand, not big corporate machinery grinding away the trees. You are sorry you got me going aren’t you? Brian Rodgers |
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