But at this off-the-beaten-path industrial site, those castoffs are as good as gold.
Three retirees - a forestry professor, a rancher and a banker - are betting they can turn the wood that no one else wants into a profit while creating some jobs in a county that desperately needs some.
A column of steam marks the spot of this fledgling business two miles down a windy country road from the tiny town of Hall and just a couple hundred yards back behind Ed James' other manufacturing venture - the Sugar Loaf Wool Carding Mill.
James and his partner, Bob Lanford, are looking over the wood piled high just outside the shaving plant's metal building.
"All of this would have gone up in smoke," Lanford said in his Southern drawl. "This was pulled out of a slash pile and it would have been burned eventually."
Just a bit farther away, another pile of odd-sized logs came from a fuel reduction timber sale on national forest lands that nearby lumber mills couldn't use. Other piles were gathered from private ranchlands.
"We're using the stuff that no one else wants," Lanford said. "The bug-killed, fire-damaged and logging slash that sometimes even the pulp mill can't use. We can use anything that's big enough to make a shaving."
The shavings produced by the plant are packaged and sold all over the West to a variety of animal husbandry operations.
The idea for the plant grew from conversations Lanford, James and a third partner, Ron Paige, had after the trio met as part of a local economic development association.
Granite County isn't exactly a hub of economic activity.
The largest private employer in the county is a local lumber mill, which has been hit hard by a downturn in the market. While controversy continues to swirl around large-scale logging on national forest lands, there's been an uptick in the number of thinning projects on both public and private lands.
The small-diameter woody material produced from those thinning projects wasn't always being used. The distance to Missoula's Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. pulp mill was often simply too far to transport the odd-shaped logs there.
"We knew we had a lot of this underutilized product in the woods around here and no really good place for it to go," Lanford said.
Lanford moved to Philipsburg after retiring from his job as a forestry professor at Alabama's Auburn University. He knew the value of thinning forest lands and how private landowners could benefit if there was a way to pay for those efforts.
"Our idea was to find a way to both create some local jobs and help landowners pay for thinning their forest lands," Lanford said.
The first talks centered on putting in a wood pellet plant, but they found the costs were far too high.
"There were about a million reasons why we decided against the pellet plant," he said. "That's how much more we figured it would cost to build a pellet plant versus a shavings mill."
The more they learned about the animal bedding market, the better the idea sounded.
Much of the dried wood shavings used in animal bedding used to come as a byproduct from lumber mills. As mills closed and pulp prices soared, the shavings were harder to come by.
At the same time, the market for animal bedding was growing at somewhere between 25 percent to
30 percent a year.
"The market for bedding for horses is really growing," Lanford said. "There are many other people that use shavings for bedding. Ranchers use it during calving. Chicken and pig farmers use it, too."
The partners couldn't find a shavings mill in Montana to visit and learn from, so Lanford packed up and went back east where the operations are much more common.
"I've been in the wood-products industry for 40 years and I'd never been to a shavings mill," he said. "After visiting the first one, I realized we could probably do with even less funding that what we'd originally thought."
The men cobbled together some new and used equipment to open up their own plant. They broke ground last spring. The first product was produced in November, and they've since been working out the bugs that come with any new operation.
Craig Rawlings of the Montana Community Development Corp. provided support finding funding and marketing the venture.
"He was a lot of help," Lanford said.
Big Sky Shavings are sold at Quality Supply and direct to a number of other places around the West.
"We're still learning a lot," Lanford said. "We probably have about 10 or 12 logging contractors that are dropping off logs to us. Most of it is coming from land not very far away."
U.S. Forest Service officials are excited about the possibilities as well, he said.
"This will give them the opportunity to possibly do some more hazardous fuel sales," he said. "They sometimes have a hard time finding someone to bid on those because there's no market for the material."
When the mill is up and running two shifts, it could employ close to 15 people with a few more working in the woods.
That would make it one of the largest private employers in Granite County.
"We've advertised for a second shift and we already have enough applications to fill it," James said. "There aren't a lot of jobs available for people here in Granite County."
The mill site is on the 100 acres James retained after selling his ranch a few years back after some health problems. The retired rancher has stayed very busy between working to get the shavings plant up and running and keeping his wool carding business alive.
"I'm just a rancher trying to survive," he said. "For a retired guy, I'm pretty busy."
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at pbackus@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)