A Mill-Slab Firewood Business

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If you live anywhere with access to both rural and urban areas (and that means almost anywhere), a little hard work and ingenuity can set you up in your own $10-an-hour enterprise.

Wood's wood, no matter how you slice it.
— John Vivian

Anyone whose residence is within an easy commute of an area where the growl of chain saws is more common than the rumble of traffic, and near a medium to large city, likely can develop a profitable little fuelwood sales business . . . without owning a private woodlot, a large truck with a log boom, tree skidders, several chain saws, a log splitter, or most any of the other expensive tools normally associated with firewood harvesting and selling.

How? By purchasing large quantities of slabs from sawmills, then cutting them into stove-sized lengths and selling them to urbanand suburbanites for less than they'd have to pay for standard cordwood (and for a whole lot less than the costly "atmosphere fire" bundles sold in most large cities).

Mill slabs (also called mill ends or mill-end slabs, depending on where you live) are the one- to six-inch-thick slices of outer wood and bark that are sawn off in order to square a log before it can be sliced into boards. Since slabs accumulate quickly but have no real commercial value, most mills are happy to sell them on the cheap. Some sawyers even give slabs away when the scraps begin to clutter the mill yard.

Near my home in the Massachusetts Berkshires, a strapped bundle containing from half to three-quarters of a cord of slabs goes for $10. A logging-truck load that cuts up into about eight cords sells (delivered and stacked in your yard) for $110. And with cut, split, and aged log-style cordwood selling in nearby cities and towns for up to $100 per cord, there's a lot of income potential in each cord of those budget-priced slabs.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since a lot of MOM's readers don't live in the Berkshires, or even in the East, we asked our editorial man-about-the-West to check on slab prices in his part of the country. He reports that one sawmill located just outside his small southwestern Colorado town gets $25 a pickup-truck load for conifer slabs—primarily spruce—while a second mill 12 miles down the road asks $5 less for the same quantity. In both cases, buyers are allowed to drive off with as much as they can load onto a pickup truck—half-ton or three-quarter—even if the truck is equipped with sideboards to increase its load capacity.]

What's more, all the hard and dangerous work of felling, bucking, and skidding has already been done. Consequently, with just a standard pickup truck—or even a large car dragging a utility trailer—plus the willingness to do a lot of lifting and saw work, you can pick up, age, custom-cut, deliver, and stack slabs . . . sell them for less than conventional cordwood dealers get for four-foot lengths of green logs just dumped in the buyer's yard . . . and earn more money per hour while doing it!

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