By JAMES RONALD SKAINS
Journal Correspondent

"I've done a lot of things different in the logging business, but this is the most different of all," Travis Taylor told the Piney Woods Journal, while standing next to his chipper set up on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River only feet from the water's edge.

"The other amazing thing about this project is that the logs are willow trees that were cut on an island in the Mississippi in Missouri and brought by barge down the river."

Taylor, who is also President of the Louisiana Loggers Council, pointed out some of the intricacies of this chipping operation set up on a Mississippi River batture below the levee on the east side of the river less than ten miles from downtown Baton Rouge. "This is my first experience in chipping willow, which has turned out to be a real experience. It's classified as a hardwood but sometimes it acts like a softwood and breaks, splits open, or breaks off into short pieces, all of which gives the chipper fits."

"Also, some of the logs are too big for the chipper while others are too crooked," Taylor explained. "So, I've had to learn how to handle willow. We've about got the problems worked out and I hope to go to chipping around the clock."

Dean Tyler, longtime fixture in the logging and forestry industry in Central Louisiana, has the contract to off-load the barges from Missouri, placing the logs in reach of Taylor's Morbark 620 chipper "This operation has been a challenge," Tyler admitted. "Each barge has about 1,500 tons of logs. It takes us about a day and a half to unload a barge if we don't have any problems."

Tyler has two work barges which he bought from IP last year docked at the Mississippi River site. One barge has had problems with a leak and water has to be pumped out daily to level the barge for unloading the logs coming downriver from Missouri. "To correct the problem, we have to pump air down into the barge as we pump the water out each day," Tyler explained. "I'm doing some repair work, which should stop the leaking. Repairing barges is not something that I normally have to do in a logging operation."

This is Tyler's second year to work on the River. Last year, he set up at the same 10-acre riverbank location that he has leased since last year to bring logs from an island across the river.

"We logged on the island last year and brought the logs by barge over to this location and then trucked them to the GP paper mill," Tyler pointed out. The logging operation is separate from unloading the Missouri willow logs, although both are underway side by side.

"Last year when we were logging the island, one of the big problems was to get tugboats when you wanted them to bring your barge around to the unloading area on this side of the river," Tyler pointed out. "So, I decided to add a tugboat to my logging equipment. The only problem with buying a tugboat was that I had to learn to run it, which hasn't been exactly easy."

Tyler was able to buy a new tugboat with twin Diesel engines for about half of the cost of a new skidder.

"I could have bought a used tugboat for around sixty thousand and a new one for $85,000 so I decided on the new boat," Tyler noted. "It was a good deal in my opinion since my tugboat can haul a lot more than a skidder."

Mark Harris, the former guitar playing rodeo cowboy turned trucking company executive has the contract to haul the Missouri willow chips from the river bank location of Taylor's chipper to Timbec Paper Mill in St. Francisville.

"Its not a long haul from here to the Tembec mill in St. Francisville," Harris pointed out, "so we can keep trucks rolling as fast as we have chips. Also, the operation is producing a certain amount of fuel wood from the bark and slash."

"That is my primary business, fuel wood for the paper mills," said Harris, who now operates out of St. Francisville. "On a usual work day, I have upwards of fifty lease trucks hauling chips and fuel for me all over Louisiana and part of Mississippi."

Eugene Moss, the Florida University forestry graduate now based in Anniston, Alabama is the man who brought all the players together, including the loggers who are harvesting the willow timber on the Mississippi river island on the Missouri side of the river, "It was a good opportunity for us," Moss explained. "It took a lot of coordination to get all the players in place for this operation after we bought the timber on the island in Missouri. Then the logistics became the prime factor."

"We not only had to coordinate the actual harvesting operation but we had to arrange for barges to bring the logs down the river to this location," Moss pointed out. "Once we got Travis and his chipper in place and Dean set up to unload the logs, the last thing that we wanted to happen was to run out of logs. It takes about a week to get a barge of logs down from Missouri."

One visiting forester remarked to the Journal after watching the unloading, chipping, and trucking operation for about an hour, "I know that everyone knows what they are doing in this operation but there is so much action that it sure reminds me of a Chinese fire\- drill."

Travis Taylor in noting the unique aspects of this logging and chipping venture had this to say, "To my knowledge this is the first of its kind on the scale we are operating on. On a good day, just running one shift, we are managing to chip about fourteen loads of chips."

Taylor added, "I think this type of operation using the lower cost of transporting logs by water is going to increase dramatically in the near future. Both the logging industry and the overall forest industry are facing such a financial crisis, that every dollar-saving angle will be explored."

"I really think that we will see a lot of logs come into Louisiana from South America both for lumber and pulp," Taylor explained. "With timber being so cheap on the stump in South America and the shipping cost by boat not being astronomical, I sincerely believe that Gulf Coast states are going to be flooded in the very near future with logs from down south."

"Actually, this may be the only way the U.S. sawmills and papermills can compete with all the foreign imported lumber," Taylor, a 1967 Louisiana Tech Forestry graduate who has been logging and chipping for over thirty years stated. "Imported lumber now accounts for over 55% of all the lumber used in the U.S. Right now, you can buy lumber in central Louisiana that was grown and manufactured in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Finland."

"These countries are exporting lumber to the U.S. cheaper than we can grow it and process it," Taylor pointed out. "Everyone is familiar with the Canadian lumber coming into the U.S. but not so much the with lumber coming in from Europe and South America." The NAFTA and GATT trade agreements are killing the forest industry and putting loggers out of business, Taylor said. "For every percentage increase in imported lumber coming into the States, you are talking about sawmills shutting down and loggers going bankrupt. My estimate is that imported lumber will account for over sixty percent of the lumber used in America by the end of 2003," Taylor said emphatically. "This means that more loggers and sawmills will go out of business and timberland investments will be worse than the stock market."

"Unless changes are made in our trade agreements that slow down the imported lumber, the Louisiana logger is going to qualify for the endangered species list real soon," Taylor concluded.

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