Newbie Questions

[the westspartan]

So I have been cutting for a while now. I have been felling decent timber (east coast) semi-regularly for about 6 years, mostly for my own milling and building projects, so I know my way around the woods pretty well for a guy that has never cut professionally. Anyway, I am in a situation where I am looking for work because the school where I teach is closing my department and getting rid of all of the faculty in it. So the other day a friend of mine called me a made me an interesting offer. He asked me if I would be interested in logging his woods. It is a small tract of land, but he has some nice trees on it. I cruised it yesterday and figured, conservatively to have about 6000 board feet of nice straight red oak in the 20" DBH range and another 1200 or so bf of black walnut (none of them are "highly valuable black walnut trees" ). The ground is fairly flat with a few exceptions. I have gotten price lists from the mills in the area and plan to talk to a forester this week to make sure I am not missing anything. I have no heavy equipment, but plan to do the skidding with a friend of mine who has a team of Halflingers. I have worked with her and them before and they seem up to it. If nothing else this will be a learning experience. I will be selling the logs to the mill and splitting the profits with the landowner and the horse owner/operator.

My question is, how would you split up the profits? What percentage do we give to the landowner? He is leaving it largely up to me, but I want to be more than fair, as he is giving me this opportunity to go through this at my pace, and is willing to deal with my lack of experience with the business side of this whole thing. Thanks for any input or opinions you can offer.

 

[northmanlogging]

Well... this is by no means a set in stone rule, but start at 50-50 and figure out the difficulties from there, if its flat firm ground stay at 50-50, if its soft steep wet whatever start moving the percentage more your way. Don't forget to account for permitting and roads.

As far as the business end of things, the equipment always gets half of whatever you make, so the horsies would get 50% and then split the rest from there... Although with horses its a little different than with iron, iron needs oil fuel grease and maintenance, sometimes parts. Horses need food shelter, water, grooming, and an ass load of tack. Not to mention being trucked in everyday.

So now that I've thought while I typed again, 50% to the horsies sounds about right. Or you could go thirds with one third going to the horses. I would talk with the drover/teamster/horse lady and see what she wants out of it.

 

[treeslayer2003]

yep, 50% seems to be about standard on both coasts for the land owner. I figure if y'all split the rest after loading n trucking, that's prolly fair. don't expect to get rich, that ain't a lot of timber yer talking about.

 

[the westspartan]

Thanks guys. That's about what I thought. I ain't worried about getting rich, I just want to get my feet wet and understand what people get paid to do this.

 

[zogger]

Post some pics when you get to felling and hoss skidding!

 

[the westspartan]

I dropped and bucked a few after work on Thursday. My friend with the horses lives less than a quarter mile from where we are working. We decided that before I went all out, she should make sure the boys are gonna be up to the task. She is going to walk the team down early this week to skid them out. If all goes well, I will go in and drop the rest later in the week. I think it is going to be fine.

The biggest pain is the fact that some of the trees are in pretty tight spots, and this is a selective harvest. I can hit my spots with consistency, but even with that you wind up making a mess of the surroundings sometimes. I have been spoiled working with white pine recently, this red oak is pretty hard stuff comparatively. I cut locust regularly, too but it is a good bit smaller. The combination of hardness and size of this oak is interesting. The biggest thing is, I am used to flying right through that pine. You have to be much more careful with this stuff, especially if it is leaning, as it is on the stump a lot longer through the cut.

I will post pics when we get in the swing of things.