Why are mills so far from the trees?

[Nealm66]

120 miles wow! That would definitely make milling onsite debatable here. At least for our lower domestic. I remember a buddy of mine working for a guy that had a dimensional mill and a garret 15 for a while back in high school in the late 70's- early 80's. I suspect I owned the same skidder in the late 90's for a while but hard to say for sure and a guy I cut with bought and still owns the dimensional mill. Retail prices have dropped in 1/2 here in the last 3-4 months and mill yards are plugged. Exports down $1-200.

[Ianab]

Locally they figure that trucking much over 50 miles starts eating into the value of the logs significantly. Logs from the Whanganui area however are carried by train ~100 miles to Port Taranaki for export. Once a log is loaded on a train, then an extra 100 miles doesn't matter. For a boat it's a few thousand miles.

[Autocar]

I remember a mill north of me that sets in flat farm county and you could see a mile vor more and not see a woodlot and I asked the old fellow why he set it up in that area. He moved his arm across the land scape and said when I came here form Kentucky there were trees as far as you could see, [ With a smile from ear to ear  :D ]

[Kodiakmac]

Trucking Costs! It's enough to make a guy go back to log drives on the rivers.  Now, if I could only get logs to float UP river, I'd be all set.

[barbender]

 Here, it's usually not far out to a highway. The longest off highway woods roads I've worked on were probably 7-8 miles. But once the trucks get out to the highway, it's flatland and smooth sailing for them.

The NE part of the state known as "The Arrowhead" has more rugged terrain and mountain like roads. There is a mill up there that buys pine logs, and trucks do not like making that run from our area as it is a one load day. There's not many places to pass on highway 61, that is the main artery up the North Shore on Lake Superior.

[stavebuyer]

There really isn't much "waste" anymore. Bark, dust, chips, and lumber all go back to town so what you save on log freight you pay for on processed goods. Only real benefit used to be that you could find labor that wasn't allergic to labor. Those days are gone.

[teakwood]

that you could find labor that wasn't allergic to labor.

😂😂 good one, allergic to labor!

[SwampDonkey]

The camp life in the woods business mostly died out in the 80's around here. We still had a couple contractors with camps in the bush in the 90's-early 2000's, but I know a lot of those guys travelled home and never lived in the camp. Most fellas lived within 50 miles anyway. I know those camps in the upper Miramachi weren't 50 miles from home for most. The Miramachi was once the forestry hub of the province, that slimmed down in the 90's and early 2000's and probably will never return to the glory days. In my area there is only one family run mill that has been around longer than anyone else. Not Irving, they never had a mill here in the two counties as it is mostly private land. They have rail road land and some traded lands for crown land over the years, but no mill sitting on any of it.

[Ron Scott]

Mills are often located in or near large acreages of National Forest system and State Forest lands where there is a more guaranteed supply of long-term species and volume wanted.

Feasibility studies are usually done years in advance for a proposed desired mill location. Some National Forests have also entered into 25-year timber sale contracts to encourage and maintain a local mill's wood supply. 

[Firewoodjoe]

A lot of wood gets trucked a long ways around here. Over 100 miles dead head is about the cut off for profit unless it's logs. I knew of loads going from mid michigan all the way into Canada. Then have a back haul back. As long as the truck is loaded someone will truck the miles.

[Southside]

There are, or at least not all that many years ago were, White Pine logs that would travel from Ohio to Mass to be sawn.

[SwampDonkey]

Miller Veneers in Indianapolis, IN has trucked veneer all the way from NB. The veneer buyers never paid the money they do in southern Ontario, but Miller paid more than Columbia Forest Products that is 25 miles away in Maine. There's not much supply up this way, a lot of times Columbia would hire a truck to fart around with a handful of logs. Probably why they could not pay top dollar.

[peakbagger]

I had a project a few years ago back down in Erving Mass which I had to visit frequently (weekly at times) for meetings. The "fastest" way from Northern NH was to go north on Interstate 93 to its northern end and get on I 91 in St Johnsbury VT then drive south the length of VT into Mass. I saw a lot of logs headed north destined for Columbia Forest Products in Newport VT (near the Canadian border) which is another hour of so north of St J. Really nice looking veneer logs and many were going the length of I 91 in VT which is about 170 miles

When I used to work with biomass power plants, the general rule of thumb for locating them and sizing them was to look at the availability of low grade wood within a 100 mile radius. When wet green chips are trucked more than 50 or 60 miles, the price and BTU content of the chips starts to exceed the value of the power coming out of the power plant. One plant in particular in Sherman Mills Maine was the outlier, it was sited next to very old very large sit of sawmill. They ran for 20 years without buying wood, they just reclaimed all the wood from the piles of waste wood that had been dumped for nearly 100 years. When the ran out of reclaim the original owners who had long since paid for the plant, sold it to another firm for cheap and within a couple of years they shut it down. Last thing I knew 20 years later it is still sitting a field mothballed.

[Southside]

Was that one of the Beaver plants?

[SwampDonkey]

Was a successful one in Fort Fairfield operated by a Quebec firm for years. Sold it to an outfit in NY and soon closed up. Most the the fuel was hauled in from NB. I know a guy that went around chipping red pine plantations. Was old fields and the pine was as heavy as red maple, so paid good. I know red pine is quite heavy, I've burned it after it was dried a year. It was still heavier than aspen wood. Not easy split'n either.

[peakbagger]

I think Fort Fairfield may have been a sister Wheelbrator plant.  I think the firm that bought Fort Fairfield was Boralex, they also bought Sherman Station and one other biomass boiler. The plants they bought had contracts for power that were running out, they ran them until the contracts were up and then sold them. Wheelabrator had a clause in the sales contract for Sherman Mills that they had to keep the employees for a couple of years even if they did not run it, when the contracts ran out they shut the plant but paid the employees to mothball it for several months. Unlike a lot of plants where the owners just walked away, Sherman Mills was really well preserved but when I looked at the plant, it was going to need a major going over. Boralex had been borrowing parts to keep their other plants running and the entire control system was in serious need of replacement.

Sad to see how much money was invested in local biomass renewable power plants in Maine (and NH) that mostly are idled or scrapped.

[David B]

In the southwest it seems the trees are up in the mountains and the mills are down in the valleys. Lot of wasted trucking it seems. Can commercial sawmills not be semi trailer mounted like a giant wood mizer?

 :D :D :D
Are you for real, or just from CA ???

Not everyone from CA fits the coastal stereotype. You have, ahem, geniuses in your big cities too. 

[David B]

It would be safe to say, just from Ca, which explains it.

I fail to see the humor. I'm from the PNW, lived in TX....

[David B]

The mills that are the subject of this post were small, not PNW mills. The castoffs were laying about in stacks with no apparent use, or a chipper. I was running opposite the log truck traffic, and continued to see log trucks for about 3 hours of driving time. Come to think of it, someone tried to make a go of a circular sawmill here locally a few years ago. They were milling fire salvage pine for pallets to be made just across the border in Mex. I think the distance was too great, and the sawmill should have also been in Mex...maybe too much red tape importing logs. 

I know a little about the power requirements, etc. of large plants. 

https://youtu.be/EBQaLIx2sVk?si=dTQPmyLoYdps-7wG

[clearcut]

In California at least, most of the largest mills are located near common carrier railroads. Trains prefer flat ground. The Central Valley is relatively flat. 

The lumber and wood products get shipped across the country and to nearby ports, serviced by rail. Rail transportation of finished forest products that are heavy and bulky is the most efficient and least expensive method. 

Locating in a valley facilitates a mill drawing from multiple watersheds, rather than the one they sit at the bottom of.

The bulk of logging in California from the 1860s through the 1930s was conducted via logging railroads feeding into the mills located on common carrier routes. Railroad logging continued here until the 1960s.

[rusticretreater]

I want to build a million dollar saw mill in the mountains near trees in a state known for huge wildfires every year.  Just sayin.

[moodnacreek]

The standard sawmill, if there is such a thing, was 45 ' long done in 3 sections bolted together with fish plates. The husk was about 7' long and say 10' wide and it's lower beams slid under the track ways. The carriage would be 15'. Everything was framed with wood. These mills where considered portable. Everything bolted together and advertised as easy to move!  They did move them and back then men where men but besides being strong they knew how to move heavy things with little or no machinery.

[longtime lurker]

Oh you can clear a mountain top, build roads, run powerlines, all of the things required to build a mill in a valley can be got to a mountain top.

Then all you have to do is build the camp.to hold your staff and away you... yeah nah hard enough to staff a sawline on the edge of town much less out in the boonies.

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. 

Lessons learnt the hard way and alla that.

[moodnacreek]

Another thing is that the markets are often not back in the woods.  I have found that the demand here is not for the wood that grows here [excepting walnut]  . So either logs or sawn lumber has to be trucked.

[Ianab]

Webcam this morning overlooking Port Taranaki in New Plymouth. That's stacks of logs being loaded onto a bulk carrier and bound for China / Japan / India probably. The economics of shipping logs for thousands of miles must make sense to someone, although bulk sea freight is basically the most economic methods.