6 thoughts on “Rural Oregon juniper mill operates on hopes and dreams”

  1. Rural Oregon could be full of small mills like this if we were allowed to salvage log just a small percentage of our public lands.

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    • Not only is salvage logging ecologically harmful, but it makes no sense to build a business model around an unpredictable episodic log supply.

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      • “Not only is salvage logging ecologically harmful…”

        That statement is not true for every acre, and in many areas, the fuels reductions help speed lands back into forests, instead of perpetual brushfields, as we have seen, here in the Sierra Nevada. “Whatever Happens” is also “ecologically harmful”, too. Remember, both the Rim and King Fires were arson, a very large component of “Whatever Happens”.

        We can plan for drought, bark beetles, arson and lightning fires….. or not.

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      • Salvage logging is not ecologically harmful. I can prove it, I’ve seen it, followed it for years, and ask anyone to show me differently.
        Log supplies are always unpredictable and a challenge. What is predictable it that millions of tree die every year in our public forests.

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  2. In my former life as a sheep rancher, I built a couple miles of New Zealand-style fence using juniper posts sourced from central Oregon. I also had a pick-up load of the juniper logs milled for lumber used in my former custom home. Long story made short . . . the fence posts were a pain in the butt to pound (I used a tractor-mounted, hydraulic post pounder); much more difficult than treated Douglas-fir posts. The juniper was so twisted and gnarly that the posts would wander around as I pounded them. As for the lumber, the recovery was so low (about 5%) from warping in the kiln that we had only enough useable wood to make a linen chest.

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  3. Some of the native juniper trees that have grown because of grazing, fire suppression, and CO2 enrichment, may need to be killed but they do not need to be removed. These juniper trees contain a large fraction of the nutrients on these sites and those nutrients should be retained. Also, it would be good to avoid the adverse effects on soil, water, and weeds from roads, skid trails, heavy equipment, etc. These effects can be avoided by simply killing many of the young junipers and leaving them in place.

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