A horse logger directing his team through a forest. (Photo courtesy of Troy Firth.)
Some forest owners are going back to past practices to do less damage to their land. Commercial horse logging is finding a viable niche in woodlands around the country. Ann Murray has this story:
Transcript
Some forest owners are going back to past practices to do less damage to their land. Commercial horse logging is finding a viable niche in woodlands around the country. Ann Murray has this story:
In a hardwood forest, Troy Firth points out trees he’s marked for cutting.
“We put a blue slash on the trees that are designated as log trees.”
Firth is a sawmill owner in Northwestern Pennsylvania. He’s an advocate of sustainable forestry and says it takes excellent silviculture and mechanics to harvest timber.
“Silviculture has been defined as the art and science of growing trees. Mechanics is the way the logs are moved out of the woods once they’re cut.”
Firth believes the best way to get logs out of the woods is with horses. He contracts about a dozen men who use workhorses to haul or “skid” logs to road sites. One of his long time horse loggers is Ray Blystone, a brawny guy with a long ponytail. Today, Blystone and his team of Belgian horses are working with Jeremy Estock, an experienced chainsaw operator.
“I just need to bring the horses to come around and get ’em hooked up and out onto the skid road.”
The chainsaw is really, really loud, but Blystone’s well-trained horses calmly munch on leaves. The massive caramel colored animals are harnessed to a small open-ended cart called a log arch. Once Estock has cut down a tree and sawed it into useable lengths, Blystone hammers spikes into one of the logs. Then he attaches the timber to his cart with chains.
“It’s basically just to get the front end of the log off the ground. It makes it so much easier for the horses.”
Blystone stands in the cart. He looks a lot like a Roman gladiator. He gently urges the horses back to shorten the chain and then signals them to get going.
“Git up Billy, Kate.”
The surprisingly agile Belgians step around chopped wood and low bushes. The horse-drawn cart and log make a trail through the woods that’s barely six feet wide. There aren’t any visible ruts.
Troy Firth, who’s on site, says that’s one reason he prefers horses over heavy mechanized skidders. He motions toward another skid road in the forest just a few feet away.
“We have a skid road that was used by a rubber tired log skidder on a previous logging job and the tracks are still here from 30 years ago.”
“So damage could last for 30 years? That’s how much they’re compacting the soil?”
“It will last longer than that.”
Firth says when mechanized skidders compact the soil, it can make it harder for tree roots to grow, and these big machines can do a lot of damage to nearby trees that aren’t cut. But, that kind of power also means that motorized equipment can haul timber much faster than horses and with less cutting.
“Simply because you have so much power, you can bring a whole tree out at once. It’s the mechanics of getting through the woods.”
Getting trees out of the woods faster can mean a cost savings of nearly 25% over horse driven skidders. But Ray Blystone says he has more work than he can handle. He’s found that more and more landowners recognize the long-term low-impact benefits of horse logging. And besides all that, he really likes his job.
“It means a lot to me. I enjoy being around horses, and it’s important to me that I do something for a living that’s environmentally friendly.”
Although no one seems to have an accurate count, there are hundreds of commercial horse loggers in the United States. Most work in the northeast and the Pacific Northwest. They’re part of a small but growing movement going back to logging’s roots.
For The Environment Report, this is Ann Murray.