Smallwood Utilization Network: a project of the Montana Community Development Corporation in Missoula, Montana

On the one hand, the Congress, the President, and the Forest Service chief were pressing for restoration and fuels reduction — and for using the resulting biomass in constructive ways, including renewable energy production.

On the other hand, the Forest Service itself was spending fossil fuel to pile slash, and then spending time and money to go back into the woods to burn it.

“What we were doing was just not lining up,” according to Sells, the Assistant Director of Forest Management for the Service’s Region 1 office in Missoula, Montana. The country had shifted its objectives for forested land. For Charlie, the challenge was to find ways to implement those new objectives.

The devil, as always, was in the details. For example, it would take extra handling to get non-saw timber out of the woods, and extra handling meant more expense. How to minimize the cost?

Technology had already provided one answer: New equipment allowed whole trees to be cut and taken to landings for processing, allowing one step to be skipped. Another answer came from an enterprising forester’s solution to a messy problem.

Deck of Small Diameter Logs SORTING IT ALL OUT

CAPTION 2: This deck of small diameter logs will not be burned as slash.

In the mid-1990s, a sawmill in Eureka, Montana began purchasing eight-foot logs with top diameters smaller than the standard five and a half inches. The innovative program spurred independent contractors to sort through slash piles for the useable tops of trees. But the tangled slash proved too hard to pull apart, so the contractors asked for help from Ralph Gelderman, a forester in the Fortine Ranger District of Region 1’s Kootenai National Forest.

Ralph had been influenced by the work of Barry Wynsma, a Kootenai forester who had pioneered techniques for utilizing smallwood. So Gelderman incorporated some of Wynsma’s ideas in his own solution. He required loggers to cut and then haul whole trees to the landing, in a process called whole tree yarding. Then, after delimbing, treetops that tapered from five and a half inches down to three inches were to be placed in a separate deck and offered at a separate price. If the logger didn’t want this “topwood,” it was to be offered to others. Within a three-year test period, 95% of the Fortine district topwood was sold and used.

The concept of separating out topwood began to spread up the chain of command. First it was championed by John Craig, the Sale Preparation Specialist for the Kootenai National Forest. Craig wrote a contract incorporating topwood utilization and submitted it for approval to the Region 1 office. There, Charlie Sells noticed it, liked it, and shared it with Jerry Thompson, the Sale Preparation Forester for Region 1.

What attracted them was the technique’s efficiency. As Charlie explains, “It was a pretty negligible cost to limb an extra 15 feet of topwood, instead of cutting it and throwing it in a pile… it took just a few more seconds with a machine.” Charlie and Jerry took to calling these topwood sections “PeeWees.” The name stuck.

Removing the Small Diameter Timber results in a much smaller slash pile GROWING THE IDEA

CAPTION 3: The resulting slash pile is much smaller when the small diameter timber is removed.

Charlie Sells soon found himself asking, “Why not apply this idea to all forest biomass?” In other words, why not make PeeWees out of trees with diameters from seven to four inches (breast height), and not just treetops?

One consideration was efficiency: Small-tree PeeWees would require more steps than topwood PeeWees. “With smallwood,” Charlie points out, “We’re telling them ‘you have to clip [those trees] with a harvester, put them in a bundle, get them to the landing, clear the limbs, and set them in a PeeWee pile.’” The Forest Service would need to compensate the purchaser. But how?

Charlie and Jerry proposed waiving the traditional brush disposal deposit, which often came to between three and five hundred dollars per acre. Essentially, says Charlie, the Forest Service was telling loggers, “Instead of cutting and piling… them and paying us to clean up, we want you to cut, skid, delimb, and pile them [and qualify to skip the deposit].”

Another way to compensate purchasers was to set a bargain price for the PeeWee logs — and to discount the price of the sale logs, or “saw timber.” Jerry came up with a spreadsheet-ready formula that would produce an allowance based on various expenses and conditions, including cost of skidding, distance from the nearest mill, and price for delivered logs. The bottom line, according to Jerry, is that when saw logs are at, say, 40 dollars per ton, purchasers typically get an allowance “that could be anywhere from five to 20 dollars a ton for handling that stuff.”

WORKING THE SYSTEM
Sells and Thompson had created a workable method for getting ready-to-sell topwood and smallwood to the landing — and out of the forest. The next challenge was to get institutional buy-in for their method. Fortunately, as 35-year veterans of the Forest Service, they not only had forestry skills but also marketing smarts.

Starting in October 2006, Charlie and Jerry put together a kind of PeeWee RoadShow that made a circuit around the Region 1 forests. As Charlie recalls it, “We talked and educated and lectured and had meetings and presentations.”

At about the same time, they wrote up a detailed proposal for Gail Kimball, then the Regional Forester for Region 1. By January 2007, the PeeWee method had been incorporated into a directive to the Region’s forest supervisors.

The directive from Kimball (together with mandates from Congress) added a certain persuasive power to the PeeWee pitch. In just the first four months of 2007, Sells and Thompson were able to help eight of the twelve forests in Region 1 to modify their existing contracts.

One result: By the end of April, the region had sold 300,000 tons of slash instead of burning it, which meant keeping 980 million pounds of slash-related carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. “And that’s without cutting any more trees,” says Thompson. To which Sells adds, “And we still leave behind [the prescribed amount] of material for nutrient recycling.”

SOURCES OF SUPPORT
To be sure, the PeeWee program got a boost from advocates within the Forest Service. But Jerry Thompson is quick to point out that success required two other sources of support: purchasers and processors. When it came to purchasers, The Smurfit-Stone containerboard facility in Missoula was a major factor. As Charlie Sells remembers it, “We said, ‘If we go public, will you be able to buy this stuff if we put it on the landing? And they said yes…[and now] everywhere we go, they’ve been there first.’”

Processors played a big role, too. Charlie and Jerry met with both the Montana Logging Association and the Montana Wood Products Association. “We went over it,” says Charlie, “and they told us, they understood…that it was a policy shift, and they would do their part.”

But driving everything are market forces. Pulp prices are near an all-time high, and demand from post & pole producers is rising. Demand is also coming from emerging markets such as the Fuels for Schools program, pellet mills, and hew log sawmills. As Charlie sums it up, “More people are looking for the PeeWee log.”

FORESTRY OF THE FUTURE
As Charlie Sells gets ready to retire from the Forest Service, he’s optimistic about the prospects for his brainchild. In addition to modifying existing contracts, he’s been able to insert PeeWee provisions into contracts for new projects such as the Smoked Fish sale in northwest Montana. And just as importantly, other regions are now paying close attention to the PeeWee program.

Charlie is handing the program over to Jerry Thompson, and feels sure it’s in good hands. So what’s Jerry’s vision? “We’re trying to get ahead of the curve,” he says. After all, “sooner or later, dealing with biomass is going to become a regular way of doing business.”

And whether they’re used for pulp, poles, pellets, studs, or heating systems, those little PeeWee logs could become a very big part of biomass.