Feature-Horse Logging, Easy on Environment, Enjoys Revival
3/3/97
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Headline: Feature-Horse Logging, Easy on Environment, Enjoys Revival
Source: Reuters
Byline: Jeanne Sather
Date: 3/3/97
Copyright 1997 by Reuters
SEATTLE (Reuter) - The scene resembles a 19th century
pastoral painting as Joe Warness begins another work day by
harnessing up his team of draft horses, two black geldings
named Tom and Jerry, and heading for the woods.
Warness, a 45-year-old contract logger, spends the day
thinning stands of Douglas fir on a tree farm near Chehalis
in southwestern Washington. He works alone with the team,
felling trees, cutting them into 40-foot lengths and using
the horses to haul them out of the woods to the nearest
logging road.
``I always wanted to work with draft horses,'' said the
bearded, soft-spoken Warness, a logger off and on for the
past 25 years who began using horses four years ago. Horse
logging, the norm in the United States 100 years ago, never
completely disappeared, but it is enjoying something of a
revival because it is easier on the environment than
mechanized logging.
``There's not as much root damage, not as much soil
compaction and not as much mud,'' Warness said. ``And when
you're done, it looks more like a park than a logging
site.''
The actual number of horse loggers ``ebbs and flows a
little bit with the general logging economy,'' said Glenn
French, 54, president of the Otis, Oregon-based North
American Horse & Mule Loggers Association, which has 108
members, up from 20 when it was founded in 1991.
He said there were three people logging with horses in
Washington state, including Warness.
MORE SENSITIVE TO ENVIRONMENT
``Horse logging is a little more sensitive to the
environment,'' French said. ``We've always appealed to the
small woodland owner who's sensitive to what happens on his
woodlot. That's what we try to sell.''
French, who has logged with horses since 1973, does a lot
of what he calls ``danger tree removal'' -- removing trees
near houses that might blow down in a storm.
Warness said he had thought private landowners would be his
biggest customers but many balk at the higher cost of
logging with horses. Typically, he said, a contract logger
will charge a percentage of the wood's value, perhaps 35 to
40 percent if the harvest is small trees destined for local
sawmills. He charges 45 to 50 percent for the same job.
``They sit there and think about that extra 10 percent,''
he said, ``(but) then they're sorry about the mess they're
left with'' after mechanized loggers are through.
For the past two years, Warness has worked almost
exclusively for Seattle-based Port Blakeley Tree Farms, a
private company that has used horse loggers for more than
15 years, according to Court Stanley, a forester in its
Chehalis field office.
``They have their niche,'' Stanley said. The company hires
Warness to thin stands of 25- to 35-year-old trees on
smaller parcels of fairly flat ground.
``They can fit through smaller spaces,'' Stanley said of
Warness and his team. ``We don't have to take trees out for
the equipment to fit through. He can weave through the
trees.''
NO DAMAGE TO TREES
Stanley also praises Warness for not damaging the remaining
trees. ``We don't want damage on our trees, on the ones
that are going to stay. Joe does a really good job of not
damaging any of the trees that are left.''
Warness speaks with some frustration of the limitations of
working with horses. ``The conditions have to be just
right,'' he said. ``There's such a narrow window you can
work in with the horses.''
That ``window,'' he said, is trees up to 18 inches in
diameter. Smaller than that, he cannot make enough money.
Larger than that, his Percherons cannot pull the load.
Even with a sideline of shoeing horses, he said his
business, which he started with an investment of $30,000
four years ago, has not been profitable so far. ``I would
like the job really well if the profit was better and I was
going home every night,'' said Warness, who sleeps in a
trailer near the job site and sets up a temporary corral
for his horses.
His dream is to farm using the horses. ``Horses are
starting to make a comeback on small family farms,'' he
said. ``And it's kinder and gentler on the horses.''
But sometimes he cannot help comparing the extra work horse
logging demands with mechanized logging. ``You have to get
up before work and feed 'em, and after work you've got to
unharness and groom 'em and feed 'em. And if they throw a
shoe on the job, you're done for the day.''