In the searing August heat in North Carolina, big yellow logging machines pile up the harvest from 153 acres of sweet gum, red oak and maple trees.
A roaring log loader grabs the trunks to slice off 16-foot logs and stack them for one of the sawmills that provide a traditional market for Eastern North Carolina timber. These logs are worth $20 to $40 a ton and will be turned into plywood, cabinets and veneer.
In a second woodpile, there’s new money. Limbs and leafy treetops are stacked alongside trees as big as 16 inches across. They cannot be sold as saw logs because they’re forked or knotty, crooked or hollow.
This pile will be fed into a chipper and milled at an Ahoskie factory that makes 1,000 tons, every day, of a minor American fuel product suddenly in hot demand on the other side of the Atlantic: wood pellets.
Two years ago, everything in this second pile would have been left on the ground to rot, said David Jennette, a Windsor forester who is managing this timber harvest. Now it brings $2 to $8 a ton. “When you’re talking about 50 to 75 tons of chips to the acre, and maybe more, that’s a significant amount of money going back to the landowner that we weren’t able to get before,” Jennette said.
From The News & Observer: https://www.newsobserver.com/2013/08/17/3115248/european-climate-policy-drives.html