Green Horizons

Using a mule team to skid out logs can be advantageous for small tree farms.

In developing my management plan, I established maintaining the aesthetic appeal of the property as being of greater importance than revenue, so I wanted to try doing a limited timber stand improvement (TSI) cut using a mule team instead of a mechanical skidder.

I contacted a consulting forester and discussed this with him before we walked the property to identify 40 trees whose removal would have maximum benefit on the remaining trees. We chose this number based on what we expected a mule team could haul out given the locations and distances involved, but we also had an additional 20 trees selected in case the mule team finished the first trees faster than anticipated.

The trees identified for removal had poor shape due to lack of timely pruning, were crowding better trees, had scarring due to equipment hits or damage from frost cracking. Two large natural-woods trees were badly undercut by an adjacent wet weather creek, and one older tree was over-mature and likely to fall on younger, better trees.

The targeted trees were often very near higher quality trees in the planted areas, and were scattered through the natural woods in other areas. Most of them involved relatively long hauls to the log landing since I did not want to cut shorter access trails.

For those reasons and because I was removing such a small number of trees and selecting those trees for TSI reasons rather than sawmill value, I felt I would not be able to attract bids from loggers.

I decided to contract just for cutting, bucking and hauling. I would then market the logs myself.

I had met Tom McConnell in November 2007 at a Missouri Walnut Council field day and had seen photos of his mule team operation, so I gave him a call and scheduled a day of logging on my black walnut tree farm near Columbia, Mo.

Tom arrived with his loggers and mule team at 8 o’clock in the morning and we worked until 4:30 in the afternoon. Everything went very smoothly, and I was impressed by the way the team, Sam and Sadie, were able to weave their way into and out of the natural woods and how they could back up to a cut log. There was no damage to standing trees. The arch on the rig the team used to haul timbers allowed the front of the log to be lifted slightly off the ground, so skid damage to both the log and the ground was minimized.

At the end of the day, I was very pleased with the results. We had accomplished our TSI objective with no negative impact on the woodlot, and I had 30 merchantable logs for sale. For this one-day operation, the cost exceeded the possible revenue from the handful of saleable logs, but we accomplished our goal in an environmentally and aesthetically pleasing way.

Plus, it was a fun day watching the mule team work.

See a video of the team at work online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_j1eljngsc