Kind cuts may buoy tree farms

With its giant bite, a Waratah processor takes care of another log. A Battle Ground consultant predicts new software will boost the value of a typical Northwest tree farm up to 20 percent in the next three years. (Photos by VIVIAN JOHNSON/for The Columbian)

Scott Levanen works his Waratah log processor near Battle Ground. In the future, he expects to buy new software for the machine that will track worldwide log price data and tell him exactly where to cut each log.

Sitting inside his armored cockpit, a 7,500-pound steel box dangling from the crane in front of him, Scott Levanen’s thumb touches a button. Two hooks emerge from the box and clamp around a 40-foot log. He pulls a lever and the box lifts: a two-ton trunk of Douglas fir soars into the air. Another button: gears whir and the log shoots exactly 20 feet to the left, still grasped in Levanen’s claw.

A final button: the chainsaw. A jet of sawdust shoots from the box and Levanen’s newest 20-foot log falls onto its pile with a clomp. And now the log is ready for processing.

It’s a good 10 seconds’ work for Levanen, a Battle Ground logging contractor, and for the $185,000 multitool at the end of his crane.

In the last decade, more and more Northwest loggers have been buying these contraptions, which hire out for about $145 an hour and do the work of eight skilled loggers. But until now, the “heads,” as they’re called, have been nothing but empty skulls — unable to replace a skilled logger’s brain.

That’s about to change.

Within three years, a local forestry consultant predicts, a new generation of European computer software will give each of these dumb gadgets a Ph.D. in economics. From then on, they’ll never make a chop without first calculating the optimum length and diameter for the tree in question, based on its species and the latest lumber prices from around the world.

It’s more than any but the best human loggers could offer.

“It’s kind of an art to determine how best to cut the tree up,” said David Halme, vice president of HFI Consultants of Battle Ground.

Today, the best human loggers are aging fast. But once their art has been locked into computers, the value of a typical timber harvest in Clark County could leap by 20 percent, according to Halme’s brother, Tim.

“Every log has to be assessed based on what species it is … based on what the markets are that day,” said Tim Halme, HFI’s president. “It’s very difficult for an operator to make these decisions 600 times a day.”

Cut a log too short, and it might be useless to a crucial buyer. Cut it too long, and it’ll never fit in the containers that bear logs to lucrative Asian markets.

The Halmes, who from their downtown Battle Ground office advise landowners on how to maintain and harvest woodlots, hope the new technology will power a renaissance in small-scale tree farming.

“The more efficiently we can harvest logs, the greater return to the landowner,” David Halme said.

And the more profitable timber becomes, they say, the more Northwesterners will devote their land to growing trees.

“It’s good for the economy; it’s good for the environment,” David Halme said.

If new privately funded forests spring up across Cascadia, Clark County will have a special niche in the new ecosystem.

Unlike the less populated counties to its north and east, where timber giants like Weyerhaeuser keep vast private forests, Clark County is rich in small parcels whose owners haven’t been able to invest much in tree management.

Also unlike its neighbors, the county is relatively flat. This makes it easier for big, fancy rigs to roll right up to high-value trees.

The upshot: local tree farmers will have a lot to gain from the new technology, if only they can afford it.

“There’s a real opportunity in Clark County,” David Halme said.

For small local players, tapping that opportunity will take a little time.

Soon, industry watchers say, big landowners will start demanding that all their loggers install the new software, which now goes for about $45,000 per rig.

Up the road in Kelso, Frank Chandler, Jr. is one of those loggers. His family’s company, C&C Logging, works mostly for large landowners like Weyerhaeuser and Sierra Pacific.

In the lower 48 states, 15 or so Waratah-brand harvesters have already been equipped with the new software brains. Chandler’s firm owns two.

“I know it’s the future, so I want to be ready when it does happen,” Chandler said last week.

Eventually, he said, all his competitors will have similar software. And once they have it, they’ll be looking for any chance to use it.

At that point, he said, the equipment’s prices will fall within grasp of the several thousand Clark County landowners who have five to 500 acres of timber.

That’s the day the payoff will come for small woodlots, the Halmes say.

And that might just be the day local property owners start to wish they’d planted trees.

“Most of Clark County is just better suited for forest than farmland,” Tim Halme said. “The forests were here first.”

Michael Andersen: 360-735-4508 or michael.andersen@columbian.com.