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Dealing with slabs and waste

Started by Percy, November 29, 2021, 09:01:54 PM

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Percy

I mill with two other companies on the property shared by the three companies. We produce a significant amount of waste. In past years we burned it but last year, we had an abnormally high amount of waste.  Complaining neighbors and poor atmospheric conditions (venting they call it) got us an 1100.00 fine last February. So my son Warren, who has three sawmills on the property put together a plan to deal with the waste in a manner that keeps us out of hot water. The waste is being used by a pellet manufacturer and right now it basically a break even situation, it's still better than making the locals angry. I'm loving it.  https://youtu.be/MhWYgzQcSxM
GOLDEN RULE : The guy with the gold, makes the rules.

KenMac

Looks like a winner to me. I only generate a minute percentage of that much waste and burn what someone doesn't haul away for siding or other rough rustic use. Never had a problem with complaints,
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thecfarm

Model 6020-20hp Manual Thomas bandsaw,TC40A 4wd 40 hp New Holland tractor, 450 Norse Winch, Heatmor 400 OWB,YCC 1978-79

GAB

Percy:
How much is the fine for a second or third offense?
That is your profit.
Were you affected by the recent BC floods we read about?
Glad to see you have been busy.
GAB
W-M LT40HDD34, SLR, JD 420, JD 950w/loader and Woods backhoe, V3507 Fransguard winch, Cordwood Saw, 18' flat bed trailer, and other toys.

Crossroads

I like the idea of turning them into pellets. I've thought about getting set up to make the firewood bricks. I just don't make enough slabs to make it pay considering I'd have to buy a chipper and the press. 
With the right fulcrum and enough leverage, you can move the world!

2017 LT40 wide, BMS250 and BMT250,036 stihl, 2001 Dodge 3500 5.9 Cummins, l8000 Ford dump truck, hr16 Terex excavator, Valley je 2x24 edger, Gehl ctl65 skid steer, JD350c dozer

longtime lurker

We have a fire that never goes out and I vaguely worry about smoke, but there's a little bit of zoned right for a sawmill, little bit of "We were here first", and an awful lot of having good neighbours who get all the free firewood they can use.

But I kinda know that at some point someone will move in and complain and I'm going to have to do something. That big chipper visiting sometimes looks good, dunno the economics of that here but parking it on the boundary with whomsoever complains for a week might be a problem solver :D
The quickest way to make a million dollars with a sawmill is to start with two million.

Lasershark

We looked into pellet manufacturing and we found the startup capital investment to be outrageous when compared to return on investment. So now we make sawdust/shavings-based gardening soil for zero $ investment.
2020 LT-50 Wide, 38 HP Gas, with debarker, lubemiser and operator's seat,  2002 Dodge Ram, Echo chainsaw, Ogam multi-rip Gang saw, Cook Manufacturing Sharpener/Setter Combo.  RS-2 resaw attachment.

chep

@Lasershark  whats your recipe for making soil? 
I have started to pile my sawdust in place to be able to turn it. Was hoping to add large amounts of grass clippings to get my nitrogen to carbon ratio correct

bannerd

A fine for a pile of wood?  That is insane.

Lasershark

Quote from: chep on November 30, 2021, 11:17:35 AM
@Lasershark  whats your recipe for making soil?
I have started to pile my sawdust in place to be able to turn it. Was hoping to add large amounts of grass clippings to get my nitrogen to carbon ratio correct
65-70% carbon from sawdust
28% nitrogen from grass clippings and leaves
2% biochar and potash
as described in the video: potting soil recipe
2020 LT-50 Wide, 38 HP Gas, with debarker, lubemiser and operator's seat,  2002 Dodge Ram, Echo chainsaw, Ogam multi-rip Gang saw, Cook Manufacturing Sharpener/Setter Combo.  RS-2 resaw attachment.

Sixacresand

If I live long enough, I suspect my pile of slabs will come back and bite me in the butt.  In Georgia, it is unlawful to burn sawmill waste, so I don't.  However, the Forestry Commission will gladly burn it for me for $50/hour.  Go figure.
"Sometimes you can make more hay with less equipment if you just use your head."  Tom, Forestry Forum.  Tenth year with a LT40 Woodmizer,

mike_belben

Quote from: chep on November 30, 2021, 11:17:35 AM
@Lasershark  whats your recipe for making soil?
I have started to pile my sawdust in place to be able to turn it. Was hoping to add large amounts of grass clippings to get my nitrogen to carbon ratio correct
We all know about C:N ratio but are slowly coming aware of B:F ratio.   That is fungal to bacterial ratio.  Then there is aerobic and anaerobic.  Anaerobic is pretty much always bad in that it produces a higher incidence of pathogenic bacterial and fungal breakdown.


So we want air, thats why we turn the pile.  Bacterial decomposition is hot, its the body heat of countless bacteria feasting on the pile.  However our soils have become depleted of critical fungal biology from tillage which kills fungal microbial life but not bacterial.  Bacterially dominant soils produce weeds, fungally dominant soils are required for an old growth climax forest. The F:B ratio dictates the species mix of a site.





The point im getting at is that as awareness grows about how deminerilized soils produce demineralized people which is sorta the definition of long term disease, the demand for fungally dominant soil ammendments can only grow and bring a real premium among very small percentage of the population who is aware of what theyre lacking.   At present you cant really buy a fungally dominant compost at the big box and very few producers are making it. But thats the future.


Fungal piles are much slower than bacterial ones because turning retards the breakdown yet they need air.   Those who are doing this have windrows over perforated french drainage pipes and they move blowers down the line to each windrow preiodically.  A leaf blower could work.  

The big thing is go out to an oak woods and get some leaf litter and humus, some punky stuff with white fuzz under the bark, spread that around.  

Or call your local stump grinder for a load of free or cheap grindings and shovel that around as an innoculant ontop your piles.  Keep them in shade if possible and maybe water with a tote from the gutter in dry summers.  

A fungal pile will take a year of sitting and can be mostly chipped wood.  I composted i think 7 or maybe 8 triaxle loads of wood chips by dozing it into the highest pile i could and doing nothing else.. 2 years or so.

A bacterial pile will take a lot more greens and manures, a lot less time and can be turned with a machine.  

I started with small hand batches of sawdust and grass.  In summer i can bang one out every 3 weeks with turning every other day. Too much work.  Any grass will help but somewhere around 50/50 adjusting for smell and temp is where i end up.  Hot but not ammonia.


I now use a 55gallon drum of rainwater with a fishtank pump and 2 bubbler stones in the bottom to make compost tea from the small batch to innoculate truck piles for the right decomposition.  few shovels of good finished compost into a mesh laundry sack clamped to the rim of the rainwater drum for a day or two with the bubbler going. No oxygen means the biology ya wanna grow will just die in a few hours.  But if oxygenated it grows exponentially for a few days.  

I pour that through a T shirt into the atv sprayer and then go hose everything down that i want to decompose.  There are truckloads getting dumped here every few weeks so speeding things up helps me from getting buried.


To do pure sawdust piles i would get woodchips dropped off or chip my slabs and mix it in for the bark/cambium which has sugars that favor mycorhizal fungi, and for the porosity to create airspace in the pile.  sawdust alone clumps way too hard.  I have a few gaylord crates of highly packed anaerobic cabinet shop sawdust [that i was blending with waste veggie oil for heating fuel and mostly settled oil disposal.]  That sawdust grows a bad blue or black mold, or carmelizes to a brown putty from anaerobic fermentation if you are lucky.


Praise The Lord

Peter Drouin

I chip it all. I keep some bundles for the spring to make Maple  digin_2


 
Load the trucks sell to the power plants

 



A&P saw Mill LLC.
45' of Wood Mizer, cutting since 1987.
License NH softwood grader.

YellowHammer

What does a chipper on wheels like that cost per hour?  I'm assuming they come once or twice a year?

Can the chipped slabs and sawdust be sold at any kind of profit, or is it all break even?

Are their processes to make large scale compost?  I've got plenty of land, if I could generate a couple hundred tons of high quality compost a year, make a pile, let it age for a year, and sell it the next, that seems like a very sellable product and low labor process. 

YellowHammerisms:

Take steps to save steps.

If it won't roll, its not a log; it's still a tree.  Sawmills cut logs, not trees.

Kiln drying wood: When the cookies are burned, they're burned, and you can't fix them.

Sawing is fun for the first couple million boards.

Be smarter than the sawdust

kantuckid

Thread reminds me of when I first moved to KY what with sawmill teepee's at all the larger mills. A few were charcoal, most not. 

One site about 15 miles from me is a sawmill bark and dust processor. They pile and grind the stuff until it's either natural mulch, which is nearly as black as the dyed version they also make along with red mulch. That site was a mill site that was abandoned and had deep sawdust which was unable to stop burning for many years until someone (taxpayers) paid to have dozers go down very deep. It was weird to drive by daily as the smoke holes in the earth were sort of like Yellowstone NP. the spot is basically shale and worthless for ag use, but now it's been productive for over 20 years. It's independently operated now, not mill owned as in the beginning. 
My county is in the Red River Gorge Geologic Area and sandstone rock climbers come here from around the world to climb the cliffs. Old sawmills used those cliff areas to dump slabs over in huge piles. Some are still there in remote spots. Must be termite heaven? ;D
Kan=Kansas;tuck=Kentucky;kid=what I'm not

moodnacreek

The Tracy sawmill in the Adirondack park put in a slabwood saw many years back [they built it] to saw campfire wood from their slabs because the state would not let them burn.  They give the cut wood away and it all gets burned anyhow.

mike_belben


QuoteAre their processes to make large scale compost?  I've got plenty of land, if I could generate a couple hundred tons of high quality compost a year, make a pile, let it age for a year, and sell it the next, that seems like a very sellable product and low labor process. 


absolutely.  There are plenty of compost only operations in the world usually catering to progressive urbanites.  But compost is not wood mulch for landscapers. Youve gotta respect that distinction because the buyers of finished compost want something totally different, not some cutesy dyed tub grinder fodder.  That stuff is very cheap.  

Theres a market gardener in quebec i occasionally listen to and he seems to represent this growing dreadlocked nose-ringed class of consumer. Pays $2k canadian for a tandem load of very good compost and makes his living full time gardening every inch of 10 acres with purchased soil.  Judging by his sold out lectures, this fee is a hot topic.  He is a numbers and records guy.. instructs them that the backyard commercial gardener makes more money growing tomatoes on every inch then giving up half his land to compost and never be able to produce enough.


Karl hammer of VT compost company is another industrial sized operation who gets his money from mostly "regenerative agriculture" customers with very high quality finished compost. Justin rhoades youtube has a walkthru of his place.  He has run 600-1200 wild chickens on the compost pile and a percentage of his income is eggs.  Theyre feeding on food scraps and moonscaping for black soldier fly larva which eliminates black flies by secreting a pheromone like how walnut juglones the competition away.   You want soldier fly to keep other fly away.  I raise them.  Soldier fly reduce salmonella and ecoli etc. Theyre a santizer and a rapid decomposer of literally anything. When a deer withers away on the road shoulder in a few days, its thousands of soldier fly doing it.  Excellent poultry and fish feed.


May not be for you but i will say it doesnt take much of my time. Accepting a load now and then is maybe half hour and mostly chit chat making buddies with the people who bring me stuff.   Pushing the pile a bit when i happen to be driving by.  There are PTO sidearm windrow turners to aeriate but a wheel loader or dozer works fine.


to do this type of operation you build out the space for a first in first out layout with access from both ends of a row. then you find who needs to dump large food waste volumes and charge a tipping fee. (I dont.. Im too far from town)  This may well be shmoozing with the town or school dept or university or corporate or hospital bureacrats who wanna please their green donors by creating recycling programs.  You arent a landfill, you dont want trash.  Nor do you wanna hire trash sorters.  That means you need children or cafeteria workers or hospital patients or restaurant staff to scrape food off a plate into a hopper for you.  Some will get through and you have to just accept it. There is also fruit, veg and meat packing plants who will have reject bins.

To make actual money in compost year round you need tipping fees from the dumpers of anything organic, plus selling fees of finished product.  A screening plant and bagger are the biggest expenses of going from low margin bulk deliveries to high margin retail, but you are a retailer at heart. Have pallets of it bagged at your store next to DIY raised bed planter kits.  Have tomatos squash and cukes on the checkout counter for sale from your favorite gardening customer.  Youll have to hire help as the demand pushes you into a garden supply center.  Killing trees and growing food are a symbiotic cycle.  The death of a tree is designed to grow more.  


You could do without the food additions but it wont have the same nutrient analysis as high value stuff and waiting on pure carbons (wood) to breakdown is very slow so you need nitrogens. but in ag country nitrogen is gold and you need it freely delivered or paid to haul off. Food and guts makes up the bulk of things that are so rejected by even farmers that instititions pay disposal.


Slaughter waste sounds terrible and indoor rendering is gross but on-farm mortality composting is barely noticeable.  The ag universities are putting out videos on how to do it so bureacrats cant cry environmental foul.  The earthy crunchies who would complain are in with composting everthing from human poop to human corpses.  "Soilfoodweb" is a good search term.

I composted pig guts in a cut barrel this fall in 2 months for a trial run with 4 buckets of sawdust. No smell unless disturbed. You can put a cow or horse on a foot thick bed, put a mason dump sawdust load ontop and in a year rake out some bones with a screener bucket. Bones can go through a chipper and go on your fields for calcium and phosphate.  Charge a large animal mortality drop off fee.


$60/week is what valley proteins was charging to pick up any quantity of slaughter waste from 1 drum to hundreds, that was about 3 months ago.  I composted pig guts in a half a wheelbarrow of sawdust this fall.  Couldnt smell it unless turning it over. Took 2 months.

Praise The Lord

btulloh

I have a friend with a large scale compost operation among other things. Thousands of yards per year. Does it like Mike describes. Long windrows and turns it with wheel loaders and excavators. He gets a lot of his N contribution from spoiled produce from grocery store chains. Has contracts with several. They pay for the privilege of sending waste produce to him, probably just covering trucking costs.  His C comes from clearing companies and landscapers who pay to dump their limbs, stumps, etc. which all gets ground in two max size tub grinders. 

PS.  He's had a couple spontaneous combustion incidents in the grindings piles. 



 

 
HM126

Machinebuilder

In the Knoxville/Maryville area Kellems Mulch is a big operation. 30k tons/year. Mostly sell to landscapers etc.

I think much of their input comes from local municipal pickup.

A few years ago there was one operation that spontaneous combustion burnt for months.
As I recall there was a lot of storm cleanup that year and they couldn't keep up with turning the piles.
Dave, Woodmizer LT15, Husqvarna 460 and Stihl 180, Bobcat 751, David Brown 770, New Holland TN60A

PoginyHill

Quote from: Lasershark on November 30, 2021, 02:59:16 AM
We looked into pellet manufacturing and we found the startup capital investment to be outrageous when compared to return on investment. So now we make sawdust/shavings-based gardening soil for zero $ investment.
A big, or probably the biggest, cost/headache to make pellets from green wood is drying. If you have dry mill waste, it's not that bad - just need to grind it small enough. Making mulch, I think, is a little less cumbersome than making compost or soil. I know of times where a mills' mulch operation made more money than the mill itself.
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mike_belben

a serious compost facility should incorporate a runoff pond, perhaps centrall located, to collect the leachate, and a diesel irrigation pump or maybe PTO tank sprayer with a water cannon.  if you cant turn your stuff you can at least hose it down which will set the temps back and slow the high temp bacteria strains that are a fire hazard.  the pond with a liner will go a long way to quiet any cries of fire risk, of watershed pollution and so on.  and its valuable leachate.  spray it back onto the new piles to innoculate.

Praise The Lord

bannerd

Kindling was a really nice way to do business and people loved buying it.  Seems like everyone has gone to a propane torch for getting the fire started these days... you don't see much of it anymore.

Wood chips would be the best path, sell them for dirt cheap and people will use them for bedding, trail cover, filling in swampy holes... the use is endless.  Saw dust I would use for composting, great stuff!

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