Montana forest fuel collection
business wins USDA/RD grant
By Tyler Christensen
Montana Missoulian
Editor’s note: this article is reprinted courtesy
of the Montana Missoulian.
t’s easy to find uses for
small-diameter trees and
woody biomass. It’s not so
easy to find a cost-effective
way of getting that
material from the forest to the people
who can use it. But Craig Thomas and
his Ravalli County business, All Woody
Resources, are working on a method of
collecting logging debris at the job site
using special container trucks capable of
going wherever logging trucks 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 $228,000
check presented in person
by the U.S. Department of
Agriculture’s Undersecretary
for Rural Development
Thomas Dorr. The check
was part of $4.2 million in
USDA Forest Service
grants given to 18 small
businesses whose work
helps remove economic
barriers to the use and marketing
of woody material,
Dorr told a wind-whipped
crowd at the Johnson
Brothers wood recycling
yard in Missoula.
“Everybody is fully cognizant
that small businesses
are the economic drivers of
the U.S. economy,” Dorr said after presenting
the check. “I suspect this is
going to be a very successful project, all
because small business people are willing
to step in and do their part.”
All Woody will use most of the
money to buy more container trucks
and to launch a marketing program,
said Rosalie Cates, executive director of
the Montana Community Development
Corp., which has been working with
Thomas to test and develop the new
collection method.
Basically, the company uses a system
of trucks and containers to transport logging
debris — also called slash — to a
central collection yard near Stevensville,
where the woody biomass is sorted for
sale. This sort of material is usually inaccessible
and often burned to reduce the
amount of hazardous fuels in the forest.
By allowing businesses to collect that
material, the forest will benefit from
fewer wildfires and the government will
save money by having less slash to burn.
Also, fewer burns means better air quality
— which everyone can appreciate.
“In my book, no matter how you cut
it, that’s a win-win situation,” Dorr said.
However, the financial heart of the
business is the central yard, where the
wood material can be amassed on a sufficient
scale to be conveniently and economically
picked up, processed or delivered,
Cates explained.
Thomas, who counts 30 years in the
forestry business and currently contracts
with Johnson Brothers, started
working on the collection system three
years ago with the help of MCDC and
several partner-businesses. After extensive
study and testing, they decided on
the current method as the
most cost-effective way to
access the greatest quantity
of woody biomass.
“It is actually not the
most economical method
of collecting slash, but it
will work where other
methods won’t,” Thomas
explained.
It’s been used on
restoration projects on
Blue Mountain and Pattee
Canyon, he said, and
proved particularly useful
on Pattee Canyon roads
inaccessible to other
machines.
In fact, logging debris
is inaccessible in about 90
percent of all logged
areas, said Chuck Seeley,
a forester with Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.’s Forest
Resources Division.
“This makes it a lot more accessible,” Seeley said of
All Woody’s new collection method.
Smurfit-Stone contracts for slash grinding and delivery
— with Johnson Brothers, among five or six other companies
— and uses the woody material to generate power
and electricity for the mill, Seeley said. The company
burns through about 30 van loads of such material a day.
“We generate enough power to run our whole mill,”
he said.
Thomas and his grant partners — Levi Cheff of Fire
Solutions Inc., Rob Castellano of Horizon Tree Service,
Kit Sutherland of Bitterroot Resource Conservation &
Development and University of Montana assistant
forestry professor Beth Coulter — as well as Montana’s
wood 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 very small diameter wood, all that material would be
burned or hauled to a landfill, Rawlings said.
Not only would that be a huge waste, Thomas added,
but it would ultimately hurt the forest he and other lifelong
foresters have to rely on for their livelihoods.
“Although I’m a harvester of trees, I’m trying to
enhance the lives of the trees that we leave,” he said.
“What we’re trying to do here is treat the forest with love
and care.”
USDA awards $4.2 million
for wood biomass projects
Agriculture Under Secretary Thomas Dorr in April
announced nearly $4.2 million in grants to 18 small enterprises
to develop innovative uses for woody biomass in national
forests as sources of renewable energy and new products.
"This grant program helps to reduce the risk of wildfires by
removing built-up fuel hazards and improves forest health,"
said Dorr, in Missoula, Mont., to announce several Earth Day
initiatives by USDA. "In addition, these projects give an economic
boost to our rural communities, increasing the nation's
sources of renewable energy."
This year's recipients were selected based on a number of
factors, including those that make it economical to remove
woody biomass from forest lands and turning it into marketable
products, while reducing the costs of recovery. In
addition, grants were awarded for projects targeted at removing
economic and market barriers in using small-diameter
trees and woody biomass.
All 18 grant recipients must match the federal portion by at
least 20 percent. Together with the non-federal matches,
approximately $13 million will be spent on this effort. For a list
of grant recipients and more information on the program, visit:
http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/tmu/grant/biomass-grant.html.
