Our young forester finds himself managing staff amid the firewood boom - Danny, Champion of the Woods (October 2022)

I’VE crossed the Rubicon! For the first time in my adult career, I’ve started to employ people. A close friend of mine runs a nearby sawmill and of the frequent discussions I have with him, roughly 90 per cent revolve around the reliability or otherwise of staff.

It’s a tricky one. As those who know me know, my work ethic is second to none, but how do you transfer that ethic to others? The pharaohs managed it by force, as did the Romans, but this is 2022 and with the possible exception of Mr Putin we all must take a different approach. Virtually everything I do is hard, physical work, and it’s increasingly difficult to find young people today who are willing to share that experience. Trees are very stubborn and rarely behave the way you want them to. They’re awkward and rough and heavy, and dealing with them isn’t really something you can do from a keyboard.

With this current situation regarding the cost of energy, the demand for firewood has rocketed and with that comes the demand for my firewood processing services.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to convince a few locals to work alongside me. The concept is really very simple and that is to make large pieces of wood a lot smaller. This should enable anyone joining the team to get to grips with what we’re trying to do fairly quickly and avoid any philosophical angst. I’ve long argued that anyone with even a basic work ethic can make a decent wage if they apply themselves. This does of course mean getting out of bed at a certain time, reading a clock (digital or traditional), getting dressed in the appropriate attire and transporting oneself to the said venue of employment, then physically working for about eight hours; all apparently tricky challenges to the current generation. Of course, trees tend to grow in awkward places, usually well away from bus routes or metro lines and so individual transport is also a useful thing. Here we face another obstacle as so many young people today don’t have a driving licence.

At this point I must digress slightly. I was having a conversation with a friend recently and he was telling me about his niece and her boyfriend. They had both graduated from some university two years ago with degrees in social history and politics. In the two years since they graduated, neither had worked. Both lived on benefits at their respective homes, supplemented by the bank of mum and dad. Over the summer, someone at the Job Centre must have suggested they get a job and so together they applied to a hotel in the Lake District. The job provided accommodation and food but in return required a certain amount of flexibility in the hours of work. On day one they were requested to do a 12-hour shift to facilitate a wedding. They did one day and resigned on the grounds that they were being ‘exploited’. They have been unemployed since, but intend to go travelling. The whole thing beggars belief and one is left wondering how any system can allow it. 

With shearing now over and the harvests in, the agricultural calendar is beginning to slow down and so I’ve been able to acquire the services of some individuals with a farming background. My squad consists of some ex-army, some farm labourers, a mechanic, an engineer, a retired forester, a barman and even a chef, and all are employed on a part-time basis. The chef has done a few weeks on the splitter and while he’s producing a good volume of timber I’m much more dubious of his culinary skills.

READ MORE: 'Who says the life of a wood processor is boring?': Our young forester on the firewood boom - Danny, Champion of the Woods (August 2022)

Being a traditional meat-and-two-veg man myself, watching someone eat fish chowder in the middle of the woods is definitely a first. I’m not even sure what he had the other day, but it resembled dog sick. I kept firmly focused on the warm Scotch egg I’d bought earlier that day at the butcher.

I’m currently juggling about a dozen people so that each day I have a compliment or core of three or four individuals. This is working well for both parties as I think if I employed anyone full-time I’d probably break them. The relentless daily grind and physicality of the job and the monotony of splitting would slowly kill them inside. It’s heavy, back-breaking work, but being able to share the workload around on high-volume jobs makes the whole process beneficial to all. Payment is production based and so operating as an effective team is essential, which involves using the resources at your disposal in the best way possible.

Assuming the average actual work day is seven hours, you would be expected to split a minimum of 10 m3 of 8” firewood. Experienced operators are producing 15 m3. In doing these volumes each day you’re moving roughly five tonnes of timber. Once cut, the discs are lifted up onto the waist-high splitters, rotated and then thrown into bags. It’s a lot of weight to handle each day, but I was confident from the start that it was possible and quite within the capabilities of most healthy individuals.

A decade ago, as a spindly teenager, when I was working at the sawmill I would regularly handle 10 to 20 tonnes a day. It was hard work but doable, and I still had the energy to play cricket in the evening. Shearing 250 sheep every day at 70 kg each, equalling 17.5 tonnes of mutton in total, is hard work but doable. So, my logic tells me (even allowing a bit of leeway) 5 to 10 tonnes on a log splitter per day is doable.

What makes the whole process possible is a little-and-often approach. Our rule of thumb is that the heaviest item lifted all day is the saw (the saw being a 15 kg 120 cc 881).The saws do all the hard yards, with big ripping cuts reducing the large oversized trees to 10 kg blocks rather than 100 kg discs. It’s a hard shift for the saws, day in, day out, but I give them every chance for survival. I run them all on a full skip to keep the rpm higher and air cooled and a thick, smoky 30-to-1 mix. On a still day, this stings the eyes and burns the nostrils, but the pistons and cylinders appreciate it.

However, I feel my approach is beginning to show reward. This week I had a team member do five days in a row on the splitter without injury. She is one of the smallest members of the squad, with a military background and now a painter and decorator, but clearly one of the toughest. Even better, she is going for her cross-cutting and chainsaw maintenance tickets next week. I know with a little guidance she will quickly come up to speed on the cutting side and she assures me that working with equipment with high levels of vibration doesn’t bother her.

The only other member to complete a full week alongside me is a tough, retired war veteran called Nigel. He says the drone of the Honda engine reminds him of his tank!

With both of these individuals having had military experience it leads me to conclude that maybe a return to national service might be a better precursor to the world of work than a degree in social history.

We’re certainly doing our bit for King and country as our heating costs rise. The vast majority of timber we are processing is arb waste or big, oversized logs which over the last few years would have been chipped for biomass. Rather than people using electric radiators, this timber is now finding its way onto people’s fires to heat their homes as ‘green energy’. Over the last month we have processed roughly 500 m3 of timber and the next two to three months don’t look much different, provided I can continue to keep the team motivated. We’re not going to become millionaires, but in working hard and demonstrating that work ethic we are getting a steady stream of contracts and are continually getting asked back.

We’re all wearing the correct PPE, all cutters have chainsaw tickets, my employee liability is up to date and we apply common sense wherever we can. We don’t appear to be doing anything wrong, but I’m forever cautious as experience tells me sooner or later someone or some authority will try to stop us or tax us. What’s happened that people who want to work and are prepared to are almost regulated into oblivion? I imagine that on reading this the City and Guilds organisation will immediately issue a plethora of qualifications on log splitting at £600 per course – all of which have to be renewed annually!