Small-timber arena focuses on value-added products
By GREG LEMON Staff Reporter
With a blueprint spread across a metal table in his shop at Porterbuilt Company, Ron Porter showed Bitterroot National Forest Supervisor Dave Bull the truss design for the pavilion he's building for the city park in Townsend, Mont.
It's the kind of project Porter, owner of Porterbuilt, needs for exposure - the perfect project to highlight the uses of small-diameter wood, which he specializes in.
"Getting these out where people can actually look at the construction - how it's built, how it's made ... It's a key deal for us," said Porter pointing to the blue print.
Porter has built kiosks for the Olympics in Salt Lake City, trusses and handrails for bridges at state parks in Lolo and Missoula, and trusses for the new public library in Darby. But the small-wood technology can be used any place, he said.
"The application can be anywhere," he said. "Up on the mountain or down in the town."
Porterbuilt, located between Darby and Hamilton on U.S. 93, was just one stop on the three-day event hosted by the Forest Service, Montana Community Development Corporation, the Montana Department of Commerce and the Ravalli County Economic Development Authority to highlight the benefits of small-diameter wood.
The tour looked at a variety of places in western Montana where small-diameter wood - less than six inches in diameter - is processed.
From drying and cutting larch at Tricon Timber in St. Regis, to a sorting system based on wood moisture at Pyramid Mountain Lumber in Seeley Lake, to the grand opening of the library in Darby where Porterbuilt-manufactured trusses and furniture make up much of the building, small wood is the new wave in the timber industry, said Fred Deneke of the State and Private Forestry division of the Forest Service in Washington D. C.
"I just see this as being more and more a part of how forestry is practiced," he said Thursday while in Darby on the tour.
But in the small-diameter world, a producer needs to find ways to add value to his product, said Porter. He can't just get by with selling fence posts anymore.
Currently 30 percent of Porter's business is value added material: furniture, trusses, or hand railings for log homes. But 70 percent of his profit comes from the value-added business.
"If you don't have at least that mix you're going broke," he said.
Porter uses lodgepole pine almost exclusively. He can't get it locally, so most of it is shipped from Idaho.
Much of the work done locally is in lower elevation ponderosa pine stands, overgrown after years of fire suppression. There's an emphasis in hazardous fuels reduction in these areas, Deneke said, and that is a big shift away from traditional harvesting timber. It means harvesting what is considered sub-merchantable timber, or the small-diameter material.
To afford to do all the hazardous-fuels reduction, particularly in the national forest and private land interface, there has to be some profit generated, said Craig Rawlings, an agent with MCDC and organizer of the event.
"It's a new era of forestry because typically they've always burned or left that junk wood," he said.
As the group stopped by Bud and Shirley's Restaurant in Darby for a quick lunch, the thoughts floating around the table focused on the future.
Research is being done on a one megawatt mobile generator that would run on chipped forest products called hog fuel, said Chris Risbrudt, director of the Forest Service's Forestry Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis. Other research being done at his lab would generate bio-diesel from wood chips - an innovation that could reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil, he said.
Much of the wood removed in hazardous fuels reduction projects is chipped into hog fuel. Currently the market for the material is either the pulp mill in Missoula, or the boilers at the Darby and Victor schools.
Darby's biomass boiler was the group's second stop.
Installed about a year ago, the boiler saved the school district about $30,000 in heating costs last year. This year it is expected to save even more, said Rick Scheele, maintenance director for the schools.
The old fuel oil boiler took 175 gallons of oil just to heat the hot water for the schools. Right now fuel oil is about $1.50 a gallon.
The hog fuel cost $36 a ton and without running the furnaces, the school uses about one ton a day, said Scheele.
The boiler is the best they could find, said Nan Christianson, who worked for the Bitterroot National Forest on the Fuels For Schools project, which acquired the funding for the boiler.
"Our goal with this first one was to really create a state-of-the-art system," she told the group.
The Darby system cost about $850,000 and was paid for by federal grants. Christianson is expecting costs to continue to go down as the technology gets more common and the market more competitive.
Victor's recently installedbiomass boiler cost about $680,000, according to Christianson.
"I think the next generation of projects we have will be more cost effective for the schools," she said.
But the boilers need chips and eventually this could provide the outlet needed to make money off all the hazardous fuel that still needs to come out of the National Forest and private land interface, said Bull.
"It's definitely working together with private and other government agencies for that material that the National Forest can produce in abundance," he said.
The work being demonstrated in the Bitterroot Valley is really important and the Forest Service wants to show their support, said Deneke.
"It's important, I think, to demonstrate to the community that the Forest Service cares and we want to celebrate their success," he said.
Reporter Greg Lemon can be reached at 363-3300 or at glemon@ravallirepublic.com
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