Green Wood is Good Business for Western New York Firewood Producer

by Eric Johnson, Editor, The Northern Logger & Timber Processor, November 1990

Rapidly escalating energy prices may be good news in the long run for the forest products industry as serious efforts to utilize alternative energy sources – such as biomass – get underway, but this most recent energy crisis stands to hurt nearly everyone in the short term. Fuel and transportation, after all, are at the heart of nearly every forest industry business from the smallest logging operation to the largest pulp and paper mill.

Everyone will feel the pinch a little differently, however, and firewood producers are among the lucky few who stand to see an immediate net gain from the high cost of fossil fuels. That’s because unlike whole tree chip producers, for example, who must wait until new customers buy and install industrial wood burning equipment, firewood producers cater to a pretty good installed base of residential wood furnaces, wood stoves and fireplace inserts.

During recent years when fuel oil prices plummeted, many of these appliances saw little or no use, as the average consumer chose to fire up the oil or gas furnace rather than fool around with wood heat. But now that the old wood furnace collecting dust in the basement or the wood stove/plant stand in the living room offers to save their owners some real money, switching back to wood heat is pretty easy. For most, it’s simply a matter of dusting off the stove or furnace, moving the plants and getting a hold of some firewood.

For firewood producers, that’s where the payoff comes.

“I don’t advertise and always deal with a group of steady customers,” says Tony Vavra, co-owner of T&T Firewood & Logging of Canadaigua, New York, “but suddenly this fall I’ve already got 2,000 face cords on order, and no end in sight.” Vavra, who produces more than 300 face cords of green processed firewood per week, says orders started pouring in by August – right after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait – and show no sign of slowing up as winter approaches and heating oil prices continue to inch upward.

“My biggest job has always been trying to get people to order their wood early – like in the spring,” Vavra explains. “That way it’s good for us because we don’t get hit with a big panic rush in the fall, and it’s good for the buyers because it gives the wood a chance to dry out before they try to burn it.” Vavra says he’s never tried to misrepresent the product to customers. “What we produce is green hardwood firewood,” he notes, “and that’s what we call it when we sell it.”

Vavra says he has considered selling dry wood, but feels the storage and handling involved – plus the loss due to shrinkage —would not be practical.
The T&T firewood processing operation centers around a Multitek 2040XP processor, which is in its third year of operation. Set up right next to a dairy operation near Shortsville, NY, the processor turns out a ten-face-cord truckload of firewood about every hour and a half, Tony Vavra says. Low-grade, long-length logs are loaded onto the live deck with an aging Allis Chalmers wheel loader, and the processor quickly reduces them to processed firewood.

The 16-inch, split wood is conveyed into dump-bed trucks and stacked by hand, and then delivered. Vavra estimates that 65-70 percent of his production goes to Rochester and its suburbs – about a half hour trip one way. The rest is sold in the Canadaigua area. Ten-cord loads are dumped in the homeowner’s yard. Some of T&T’s wood is sold to wholesalers and generally loaded directly on the wholesaler’s truck at the processor site.

T&T uses two dump trucks – a Ford 800 and an International Paystar 5000, for deliveries. Tony usually makes the deliveries, driving one truck while the other is being loaded. This way, he says, he can make four or five deliveries a day and keep up with the processor. Two other full-time people are generally required to run the operation, including one to run the processor and another to stack the wood in the truck.

In charge of supplying logs for the operation is Tim Vavra, the other “T” in the company name. The brothers have their own skidder and work in conjunction with another area logger (who does the log trucking) to get low-grade wood. The species mix consists of typical northern hardwoods, including the maples, oaks, beech, ash and some black locust. When possible, the brothers say, they like to sell the less dense species, like soft maple and ash, to people who plan to burn the wood green, so that it will have at least some chance to dry out.

Tim Vavra says that while his customers are for the most part decent people who are easy to work with, they tend to be picky about their firewood. For that reason, he notes, chunks containing excessive rot, ants or other ‘defects’ are sorted out. “I get to burn a lot of stuff myself,” he notes. The only other ‘waste’ product is sawdust from the processor’s cut-off saw, which is scooped up almost as quickly as it’s made by a skid-steer loader from the dairy farm and used for livestock bedding. “I could sell more sawdust to another farm down the road if I had it,” he says.

The Vavra brothers (whose operation includes brother Tom at the controls of the processor) say they’ve always seen a good future in the firewood business since getting started ten years ago with a pickup and a chain saw. With the recent jump in demand for their product, however, they are considering expanding their operation. Options include branching out into high-grade logging and/or adding another processor and more delivery trucks to their fleet.

“We work year-round,” Tony says, “and we enjoy this kind of work.” The future, he adds, looks promising. “I’ve been talking with stove dealers, and they’re selling stoves left and right, so I don’t see the demand for our wood letting up anytime soon.”