Made to Measure Logging
Moggie Valley Timber runs a flexible CTL logging side that can be dialed up or down to meet the needs of its own two-line sawmill.
by Scott Jamieson
If the lumber sector has been slow to bring production in line with demand lately, don't blame Moggie Valley Timber. The one-stop plantation harvesting and timber milling concern a few hours northwest of Toronto has the ability to scale both logging and sawmilling production to match the market. When CFI dropped by in early June, that's exactly what the crew was doing - keeping production just high enough to fill specific orders and maintain as much of its key forestry and mill staff as possible through the down market.
"We're down to a skeleton crew to keep things running," says Rob Beirnes, forest operations manager and part owner as we walk through the large mill yard. On the logging side that means running the single cut-to-length (CTL) system just enough to wood the mill on reduced shifts, and finding other jobs for it in the meantime. At the mill, a single crew is alternating between the two simple lines, filling orders and working the mill's full log profile.
"The idea is to run this way, and keep costs down, until the markets pick up," he adds, "and then we can get back to normal operation.
A Square Deal
Normal for this operation is producing up to 10 million bdft/yr of mostly square timber (4x4 and 6x6) of various lengths for the wood treating sector, as well as some incidental 1- and 2- inch air-dried lumber. Moggie Valley is a privately held company started over 10 years ago by Beirnes and partners Jerome Moran and Bill Ottewell, who look after the milling and planning operations. A few years ago the trio was joined by a fourth partner, Peter Angus Forest Products, a lumber wholesaler from Toronto that now owns 52% of the company and markets all its production.
Aside from the odd run of cedar, the overwhelming majority of Moggie Valley's production is from the region's plentiful supply of red and white pine plantation wood. In fact it was this maturing log supply on both private land and community forests that convinced Beirnes and his partners to launch the operation in the first place. At the time, harvesting and use of the region's pine was minimal. John Houston, a commercial thinning contractor based almost two hours southeast of the mill, was thinning some area plantations at the time, but as Beirnes explains, the economics weren't right for the long haul.
"He was thinning for the County of Grey (the area around Owen Sound). The county owns 8,000 acres of plantations, and they really needed to get started on a thinning program at the time, as the timber was more than ready. John started, but it was too much trucking it all the way to the mill he was supplying in the south," explains Beirnes, who was running a manual logging and thinning operation at the time, and wanted to kick start a bigger thinning program. "We needed a way to mill the wood locally, and I knew a guy with a portable scragg (twin circular saw), and we just started with that."
From there, the mill continued to grow and improve, first by adding the fixed scragg mill, a greatly improved version of which still runs today, complete with a Forano/USNR ring debarker and neatly plumbed, automated residual handling systems. As the logging crew moved into second and third thinnings, they added a second sawline to deal with the larger timber in-house: A Select horizontal bandmill with some used T.S. Manufacturing downstream lumber processing and handling gear.
"We had been sending the larger logs out to some small area mills for sawing, but the extra handling and transport was killing us, and we were losing the by-products (chips, sawdust, and bark hog fuel), which in the pine market can be the profit margin at times. The wood's not getting any smaller, so this allows us to handle it all in house."
The mill also has a small planing and resaw operation for special orders. The end result is a simple yet flexible mill for making high-quality squares in a wide range of lengths.
The company's harvesting side has also been adjusted over the years to handle growing log diameters and volumes. The crew's first CTL system was a pair of Rocan T harvesters, a small thinning machine based on the Versatile tractor and designed for first thinnings and ghost trails in the Maritimes. They typically ran with small Pan or GM 828 harvesting heads from Log-Max.
"They were good machines, but in the end the timber here was just too big," he says of the red and white plantations, some of which date back as far as the early 50s, and feature large, limby wood. From Day One, Beirnes has worked with seasoned harvester operator Clint Middleton, so the pair sat down and decided that a full-size system was in order. They went back to RocanForestry and opted for a Rottne SMV rubber-tired harvester with LogMax 5000 head, a machine that could handle a steady diet of the region's wood, and also wrestle the odd 65 cm (25-in) tree if required. Forwarding is handled by another Rottne, a 12-tonne Rapid with over-sized crane, a machine that now has over 17,000 hours on the dial. The logging side is rounded out by a pair of Western Star trucks with Timmins trailers and Serco self-loaders.
In the summer of 2006, the Rottne harvester was over five years old, and was overdue for replacement. Again Moggie Valley went to Rocan, this time opting for the distributor's new EcoLog line.
"I can't say enough about Rocan," Beirnes explains. "For parts and service, they are just excellent. We can get parts in Ontario from Kapuskasing, which works well by bus if we're not in a hurry, but it's also too easy to get parts direct from Moncton. They are right at the airport, so for example we broke a pin on the forwarder clam yesterday afternoon, and this morning it is waiting for us in Owen Sound."
With that relationship in the bank, Beirnes says they were not worried about trying the new harvester. The EcoLog design is based on the original Skogsjan harvesters made famous by their pendulum arm, go-anywhere suspension designed to crawl over any kind of broken terrain. The machines are now built in Sweden by EcoLog, a daughter company of LogMax AB, itself a subsidiary of the recently formed LogMax Global, a merger of Canada's Rocan Forestry and LogMax (see www.logmaxglobal.com). EcoLog makes five harvesters ranging from the 200-hp 550B 4WD to the 301-hp 6WD 590C introduced at Elmia 2005 as the world's largest harvester. Moggie Valley runs the second-largest model, the 580B 6WD harvester, a 225-hp machine with an available 11.3-m crane and a LogMax 5000C head. LogMax says the head best suits a steady diet of trees in the 10-40 cm diameter range (4 to 16 in DBH), but can handle trees to over 60 cm (24 in) if required. Like all EcoLog harvesters, the 580B features a Cat engine and levels to 15 degrees fore and aft, 25 degrees side to side. Thanks to the pendulum arm suspension system, EcoLog harvesters boast some outrageous ground clearance numbers, to 120 cm (4 ft) in some cases. The supplier also offers four 8WD forwarders, from the 554B 10-tonne thinning forwarder to the 594C 19-tonne model.
According to both Beirnes and Middleton, the biggest difference between the older Rottne model and the new EcoLog is the cab-boom layout. In contrast to the pedestal-style crane on the Rottne, the EcoLog boom is mounted to the side of the cab and rotates with the cab and operator.
"It takes some getting used to," Beirnes notes, "but the visibility you get is excellent with the design." Middleton says he found the swing pendulum axle leveling system the biggest change, but he had a handle on this by the time CFI visited, and added that the boom layout took him little time to get used to. "I've run excavators before, and it's similar to that, so it was no big deal. The air conditioning in this cab is sure nice, though - it keeps you good and cool," no small feat on this late spring day with a forecast high of 30 degrees and Middleton processing tree length in the mill yard without any shade.
In almost 12 months of operation, Beirnes says the EcoLog has been very reliable. They both add that the diameter measuring system has been improved on the new generation Log-Max 5000, an important attribute for an operation looking to produce squares of a given length.
"Mostly we produce 10s and 12s," Beirnes says, "and you need to be sure of the diameter breaks if you want to get 4x4 or 6x6 end products. Today in the large mill we're doing a special order of 16-ft 6x6s as you saw, so we just set-up the harvester to target that, but you don't want to be off with the top diameter measuring, otherwise you get a lot of waste."
The CTL system runs single shifts, a decision that Beirnes says has a lot to do with how reliable a producer Middleton is.
"He's a key guy in our operation. When we tried adding a second shift, you're bringing in an inexperienced operator for the nights. Clint was spending the first few hours fixing things, so our main producer wasn't productive, the night guy barely cut enough to cover Clint's lost time, and Clint wasn't happy. It just didn't work."
That also explains how Clint was able to get over nine years on that first CTL harvester. When the mill is running full out, Beirnes brings in purchase wood from other area contractors who also bid on the county and private land. Now that things are slower, however, he's backed off that supply, and runs 100% on his own crew's production.
"It just doesn't make sense in this market to be bidding against another logger, and then turn around and buy the wood off him in the end, so for now we just aren't buying."
In fact, Moggie Valley is having a tough time keeping its own crew running just in pine for the mill, so Beirnes has been scouting out some non-traditional work. The week following our visit the crew was scheduled to travel north for a few weeks cutting hardwood.
"We don't normally do hardwood, but the wood we are going to is not too limby and I think the LogMax will do it. It keeps the crew going, and in times like these, you just have to do whatever it takes."
With an attitude like that, flexible operations, a core staff, and a solid business partner in Peter Angus Forest Products, Moggie Valley seems positioned to outlast the market.
