Danny Graham: Our young forester on the kindling boom

I was somewhat disturbed to read in a national newspaper that, according to a recent survey, one in 10 people leaving school never intend to seek employment. For reasons I’ve explained in previous articles, coming from a farming background in Northumberland and being the third brother of three, I had few options – basically sink or swim. There would be no-one to support an indolent lifestyle of closed curtains, computer games and take-away meals. How can parents possibly allow this to happen? Why do we spend the first years of our lives in an institution that fails to provide the tools, ambition or work ethic we need to be contributing members of society? When you consider the resources we pour into this, I find it quite scary.

And so, to use an agricultural term, I was quickly weaned. I spent several years, as many young teenagers do, working here and there, until for whatever reason, at 19 years old, I found myself splitting kindling with an axe, one flick of a wrist at a time, one stick at a time. I was then working at the sawmill which, as readers understand, is a hard, physical job and each night I came home I would work until the early hours slowly filling net bags with kindling to make a little extra money.

At this point in my life I didn’t really understand the shift of the seasons. Simply put, people tend not to need kindling in the summertime and sheep don’t need shearing in the winter. Along with my peers, I was beginning to understand how rural demands ebb and flow as the year rolls on. Basically, at this time of the year, Northumberland goes into ‘limp’ mode. The geography of the south is such that you’re never really that far away from some urban environment where jobs are generally more readily available.

Newcastle for me is a hundred-mile round trip and that’s before I even mention public transport! Rural inhabitants here tend to toil on in a multitude of jobs in the darkness and the clarts, armed only with a lack of ambition, head down until spring arrives in mid June. It’s for that reason many young, unskilled rural workers really struggle to find work during the dark months. 

By producing kindling, albeit inefficiently, I was able to afford the transport to get to the sawmill where, unlike many of my friends, I had a full-time job. This was fine for a while, but it wasn’t enough to quench my thirst for work and the need to better myself. I could see others around me processing and selling firewood and I could see there was a growing demand, yet I didn’t have the facilities or the capital to get started. High-hp chainsaws were too expensive and I didn’t have an illuminated outdoor area in which to store things and work. Neither did I have the means with which to deliver anything, other than my battered old Ford Fiesta. Kindling, however, was an open door of opportunity. Biomass prices at the time only just covered the cost of haulage and I’d noticed there was an abundance of ‘off cut’ or reject boards at the mill where I worked.

Fortunately for me, the owner of the mill had no qualms about me taking whatever I could carry and so each night after work I would load the Fiesta with as many 6” boards as I could physically get in the car. Once home (a cattle shed on my dad’s farm), I would cut them down with my grandfather’s old Husqvarna 50, then kneel down with my axe and block and begin whittling away into the night – with the help of a head torch – until I’d filled a quota of net bags. It wasn’t the most profitable business at the time, but it was my business, no one could tell me what to do or how to do it, and it was up to me to develop it in any way I wished.

We are now 10 years on and I suppose some might see me as the Pablo Escobar of the kindling trade. Not that I smuggle bags of kindling into the USA or that my kindling is in any way addictive, but I have managed to dominate the trade in the area. Most of this last month has been spent producing kindling to supply to firewood dealers in the area to make sure they are well supplied in my absence. Absence? Well, I’m currently on a plane heading out to New Zealand to do a spot of shearing, happy in the knowledge that I’ve produced enough stock to keep everyone happy. My processor has been running 14-hour shifts, aiming to produce 1,000 nets (bags) every two days. Deliveries have been going out morning and night across the North East.

READ MORE: Danny Graham: Our young forester explores Canada's autumn forests

This brings me to another hot potato – cash! Most of the people I supply insist on paying in cash. If you were to believe the media, then cash is on life support, yet here in the North it seems as popular as ever. In fact, I’ve never seen so much paper money. There’s cash in my pockets, cash in the glove compartments, cash on the pickup floor, and it would be blowing out into the street if I lived on one. Being the honest taxpayer I am, I used to enjoy paying it into the village bank, but unfortunately they’ve closed it and so now I have to make regular trips to a nearby town. It’s a bit embarrassing turning up three times a week with a bag of cash and you can see everyone watching you suspiciously. It didn’t take long before I was ushered into the back room for interrogation.

“What! You mean you earned this legitimately through hard work?” I like to keep them guessing and frequently make up stories. The latest ruse is I’ve convinced some of the cashiers I run a chip shop. “The cod’s selling really well this week,” I say, standing there in full hi-viz gear with chainsaw boots, braces and sawdust in my hair. They really believe I run a chip shop!

To keep output high, I no longer deal with waste boards from the sawmill, but with the best larch sawlogs I can get. Straight, clean and no knots, as I learned from the hours and hours I spent hand-chopping. Larch splits with a lot less effort than spruce. Sitka tends to be stringy. Pine splits well, but with the slightest amount of water vapour in the air it turns black, which is unattractive to the buyer. Luckily for me there was a larch clearfell just down the road in September and although the timber was slow-grown and dense, haulage was a doddle and it flew through the processor at nearly 50 nets per hour. My all-time record with the axe was 14 nets in an hour, which also included a large chunk from my thumb.

Splitting now is fully automated and I hope to double the process next year by introducing a second machine to work alongside the existing one. I also intend to purchase a larger diesel generator. The current Wolf petrol generator has served me faithfully for six years but is now noisy and generally on its knees and has really suffered in this cold spell with oil viscosity. Running these machines on the mains is an option, but I blew the farmhouse fuses at 6 am one morning, which didn’t go down well with my brother.

Although the splitting is fully automated, the cutting is still fully manual, but I’m still happy with the output. It is labour intensive, but I’m aided in this process by a moderate slope which assists the rolling of the sawlogs, and a Stihl 500i to do the cutting. It’s not difficult to cut three trailer loads of 6” discs, which equates to roughly 800 nets per day.

A larger saw, the 661, does cut faster, but my lower back appreciates the 500i.

The other advantage of the 500i, apart from its weight and the fact that it cuts quickly, is the size of the saw from the bar to the end of the crankcase, which is exactly 6”, the optimum kindling length. This makes measuring and precision cutting a quick and pretty foolproof task.

So here I am, sitting in a plane waiting for them to defrost the wings. The saws have been locked away and my wife has very kindly packed me some shorts and flip flops.

One might even think I was heading off for a holiday, but alas, when I arrive in New Zealand, it will be in the middle of shearing season. Long before the days when my brother became agitated about fuses blowing or other brothers being in and around the farm, he was a very talented shearer and much better than me. He had a personal best of 345 sheep in a day. My current record is 323 and so one of the reasons I’m off to New Zealand is to do something about it!