Why are mills so far from the trees?

[B.C.C. Lapp]

Freight is cheap, even today. Cheapest it's ever been really... compared with horse drawn sleds and wagons or river drives or building flue systems road transport is cheap as chips. And it's door to door... log goes onna truck in the bush and comes off in the mill yard and all it takes is one man to get it from A to B. More tons well send more or bigger trucks... still cheap. And it's cheap because it's labour efficient.

And because the mill is fixed it can also be labour efficient... big enough to run the saws and resaws that allow low unit costs of production and gain fibre efficiency because of it.

I've done my share of portable milling and a lot of it in places remoter than would exist anywhere in the USA.. nearest fuel 3 hours round trip, nearest hydraulic hose best pack lunch cuz you got 10 hours of driving ahead of you. And I'm telling ya I can ship a log 500 miles down unsealed roads and be more profitable than if I drop a mill beside the stump and only freight away the sawn lumber.

Longtime lurker makes some good points.  But, like so much of what we talk about here, weather or not its accurate  or applies depends an awful lot on where your standing. In my area  there are plenty of reasons to take the mill to the trees.    On SOME  jobs.  Most jobs I'd say it wont save you money or time.  Some other jobs its the only way.  One of our biggest problems here is that every township, borough, and county has its own ideas about road bonds and what they charge and what they require.   Most are professional and easy to work with.  Some are the opposite.    They do any thing and everything they can to hold you up or stall the paperwork.    Some even try to refuse to let us use the roads with log trucks.  Which isn't even legal.  But some townships try it.    Moving in a mill to the job an using light trucks with gooseneck trailers to more the lumber is the quickest and surest way to get around these guys.  Some townships don't even require road bonds from loggers.  They are only concerned that you use common sense and if you mess up the road, why, fix it.  And we do.
 I've also done jobs with private right of ways that several land owners share.   And this can be problematic because the other land owners don't want the log trucks on their road. And sometimes the cost of having to beef up the base of a private road like this is more than a small timber job is worth.   Once again light equipment fits here.   Mobile mills are like every thing else, one more tool in the tool box.

[longtime lurker]

Those numbers are somewhat different I think, having more to do with low cost processing than cheap freight.

Stumpage, harvest and haulage price would be the same whether they go on the boat or go into a mill yard, but shipping them offshore gets them to places with low wages cost, cheap electricity, and less red and green tape. It also allows for economy of scale you can't get any other way... the mill they will go into will eat that lot and start on the next lot from North America, the Baltic, South Africa, wherever they can but it from. And when it gets to Zhangzhou or Lanshan there's not just one sawmill... there are hundreds of them clustered around the port cities and the logs are graded and sold in lots. So you've got mills that are optimised for a certain log class which enhances recovery considerably, crewed by guys working for a bowl of rice, and the world's largest domestic market on tap.

Globalisation is - believe it or not - the friend of small local mills. The pressure of having to compete with international log buyers and cheap imported lumber is felt more by big domestic operations than little ones. Small to mid sized domestic processors don't need the volume of the big guys to keep the doors open and don't have to find space in the market for the resulting huge volume of lumber.

I've been aware of that for years... all I have to do is find a couple thousand ton a year to keep the girl fed not 100,000 ton of log. And all I have to sell is the equivalent of a truckload a week regionally rather than truckloads a day nationally to keep the bills paid. Sure I have to compete with the big mill and the export buyer for logs, and I can't set unrealistic prices for my product but by staying lean and mean I can make a living on what they wouldn't be bothered with: There's gaps in every market if you're skinny enough to squeeze through them.

Really that picture of a boat loading to take logs around the world is one the perfect answer to why no-one is putting a mill on a mountain top, cuz guys with bigger chequebooks then us and all the resources that go with it are putting the mill halfway around the planet.

[longtime lurker]

Freight is cheap, even today. Cheapest it's ever been really... compared with horse drawn sleds and wagons or river drives or building flue systems road transport is cheap as chips. And it's door to door... log goes onna truck in the bush and comes off in the mill yard and all it takes is one man to get it from A to B. More tons well send more or bigger trucks... still cheap. And it's cheap because it's labour efficient.

And because the mill is fixed it can also be labour efficient... big enough to run the saws and resaws that allow low unit costs of production and gain fibre efficiency because of it.

I've done my share of portable milling and a lot of it in places remoter than would exist anywhere in the USA.. nearest fuel 3 hours round trip, nearest hydraulic hose best pack lunch cuz you got 10 hours of driving ahead of you. And I'm telling ya I can ship a log 500 miles down unsealed roads and be more profitable than if I drop a mill beside the stump and only freight away the sawn lumber.

Longtime lurker makes some good points.  But, like so much of what we talk about here, weather or not its accurate  or applies depends an awful lot on where your standing. In my area  there are plenty of reasons to take the mill to the trees.    On SOME  jobs.  Most jobs I'd say it wont save you money or time.  Some other jobs its the only way.  One of our biggest problems here is that every township, borough, and county has its own ideas about road bounds and what they charge and what they require.  Most are professional and easy to work with.  Some are the opposite.    They do any thing and everything they can to hold you up or stall the paperwork.    Some even try to refuse to let us use the roads with log trucks.  Which isn't even legal.  But some townships try it.    Moving in a mill to the job an using light trucks with gooseneck trailers to more the lumber is the quickest and surest way to get around these guys.  Some townships don't even require road bonds from loggers.  They are only concerned that you use common sense and if you mess up the road, why, fix it.  And we do.
 I've also done jobs with private right of ways that several land owners share.  And this can be problematic because the otherland owners don't want the log trucks on their road. And sometimes the cost of having to beef up the base of a private road like this is more than a small timber job is worth.  Once again light equipment fits here.  Mobile mills are like every thing else, one more tool in the tool box.

Here's what I can tell you right... when I was doing the remote area thing we fed in logs and shipped out boards. Average recovery of a eucalypt processor in Queensland is about 30% - 10 cube of logs in the gate 3 cube of grade lumber out - so you'd think that doing so would save a considerable amount of money over a thousand ton because that's 700 ton of waste you don't freight any further than you have to. But in fact it's cheaper to ship it to a real mill for a whole range of reasons.

See "waste" is a relative term. That waste sawdust we burnt in the bush is a byproduct I have markets for when I'm fixed. That waste trim and edging turns into  downgrade product because I am able to recover and handle it in a cost effective manner. And because I have a storefront bricks and mortar location I have customers who know where to find me, which means I can take those small homeowner type orders at a retail price point instead of having to ship all of it at wholesale price to a lumber yard.

And I don't have the headaches of remote operating... I can have 20 packs of lumber going so each piece goes into the right pile first time. I don't have to saw out logs that don't suit today's orders because we aren't leaving here next week. Need a part, drive to town. Raining... no matter we have a roof.

I also agree there's still a place for portable milling, but I think that place gets smaller every year. Even in some of the truely remote places I've operated from I still haven't seen one that was really viable without infrastructure. you just can't get the volume out of a mill without greenchains and resaws/edgers and then you need guys to operate them and those guys need to work regardless of weather. But every situation is different and there's an exception to every rule.

What I toy with now is a transportable mill rather than a portable one... truckloads of equipment and a week to set up on a prepared site rather than tow it in with a 4x4. Big enough to punch tons but able to be relocated in the off season when it's too wet to log and the road network is closed. I know a couple places where that would be a viable option 

[Frickman]

One thing that benefits a stationary mill in a fixed location is the location.  In our Appalachian hardwoods mills we sort for a lot of markets, not just lumber but logs too.  We use our log yards to sort, store, and load logs for other markets.  At my mill I never sawed 100% of the logs coming in.  Often I only sawed 50% of the incoming logs.  The rest were sold in to other markets.  So, if you park a mill out in the woods you need to be able to sort and store logs too. 

[Gary Davis]

 Its so the truckers can make money

[oldgraysawyer]

Oh! wait, wait I know this one.

It's because inflation has caused the mill prices to go through the tree tops and that's why they are out of sight.

No, that ain't it either. Shucks.