Forestry work

Logging covers a narrower range of work than people often expect, and a more varied one within that range. These are the operations the trade plainly involves.

Clear felling

A mature block is taken down in its entirety. It is the most straightforward of the operations and the one where output is highest, because the machines can work continuously and the extraction routes can be planned once and used throughout. The complications are usually at the edges: boundaries, watercourses, power lines, public paths and retained areas all have to be respected, and they set the order of work.

Thinning

Thinning takes selected trees out of a young or middle-aged crop so that the remainder grow on. It is slower and more exacting work than clear felling. Trees have to be chosen, felled and extracted without damaging the ones that stay, and the racks the machines run along have to be planned so the crop is not opened up more than intended. Damage done at thinning shows in the standing crop for the rest of its life.

Windblow

Wind-thrown timber is the most hazardous work in the trade. Stems lie under tension, root plates stand up on end, and trees hang up on one another in ways that are not obvious from the ground. Each stem has to be read before it is cut and released in an order that lets the tension out safely. It is slow by necessity, and no useful estimate can be given without seeing it.

Felling

Clear fell, thinning and windblow, cut to the buyer’s specification.

Extraction

Timber brought from the stump to a roadside stack a lorry can reach.

Chipping

Brash and small material reduced on site rather than carted away.

Conversion and specification

Once a tree is down, what it becomes is decided at the stump. The stem is snedded and then cross-cut into products: sawlog to the length and minimum top diameter the mill wants, small roundwood for fencing or pallet, and the remainder to pulp or biomass. Getting this wrong is expensive in both directions. Cutting a sawlog short loses most of its value, and leaving length on a pulp log wastes lorry space.

Specifications differ between buyers and change with the market, so they are confirmed before cutting starts rather than assumed.

Extraction and stacking

Timber is brought out by forwarder where the ground carries one, and by skidder or winch where it does not. Ground damage is the constant concern: brash mats are laid along the racks to spread the load, and on wet ground the work may have to wait for a drier spell or a frost. Stacks at the roadside are built in product runs, square and stable, clear of the running surface and where a lorry crane can reach them.

Site tidy

What is left after felling matters to whoever owns the ground. Brash is chipped, matted or windrowed. Ruts on extraction routes are made good. Culverts and drains are cleared where machines have crossed them. Gates and fences disturbed during the work are put back as they were.

For an enquiry, the useful things to say are where the wood is, roughly what is standing, and what access a timber lorry has. Contact us.