A Mill-Slab Firewood Business

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DRYING

Without prompting, few fuelwood customers get interested in buying firewood before late summer or early fall. Consequently, unless you can convince your customers to let you fill their woodsheds according to your schedule, you'll need a place to dry and store your inventory. Because of their size and shape, slabs will dry sufficiently to be burnable in just a few weeks. (Two months exposed to the weather, followed by a month under cover, and you can practically light a mill slab with a match!)

With experience, you'll learn to move slabs through your storage area efficiently, thus turning over your stock (and your investment) on a monthly basis all through the selling season. At first, though, it's best to plan on stocking up enough cut and dried wood to cover orders as they come in. Requests for firewood tend to be sporadic and often frantic, so you'll want to make every effort to fill each order posthaste—before your competition beats you to it.

A-CORD-ING TO CUSTOM . . .

Fuelwood sells by the cord. As defined by law in several states, a cord is a rectangle of closely stacked firewood measuring four feet high, four feet wide, and eight feet longfilling 128 cubic feet with a blend of wood, bark, and air. That's a lot of wood, more than you can haul in a typical half-ton pickup in one load. (A cord of wet hardwood slabs can easily exceed a ton in weight.)

Because it is a fairly large amount, many customers don't like to purchase a full cord at a time, but prefer half cords (known in the business as ricks). No problem; go ahead and sell in whatever quantities your customers demand. But always talk in cords and charge by the cord or fraction thereof.

KNOW YOUR STUFF

Generally, people who burn wood for heat divide fuelwood into only three categories: long-burning deciduous hardwoods (maple, oak, beech, and such), fast-burning hardwoods (the birches, wild cherry, etc.), and the conifers, or evergreens (which, along with some deciduous species, are usually termed softwoods, though some are harder and burn longer than many nominal hardwoods).

In my part of New England, only the most knowledgeable, progressive wood users burn evergreen . . . although it is, in actuality, a fine fuel. That's because all the old-timers "know" that coniferous woods produce too much creosote. But, as with any other type of wood, conifers produce creosote primarily when burned under conditions of oxygen starvation—or when used green or wet. So even though there may be an abundance of fir or hemlock or pine slabs in your area, be prepared to start by providing new customers with what they're accustomed to burning. Once you have their business, you can launch a consumer-education campaign to ease them away from the hardwoods and toward the more abundant conifers.

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