David Ward Firewood produces around 3,000 tonnes of high-quality firewood each year, delivering direct to customers’ doorsteps, heating homes within a 20-mile radius of its Shropshire base. Forestry Journal paid a visit to learn about machinery and philosophy and the heart of the business.
FIREWOOD is a demanding business. Or, at least, the customers are.
Modern end users expect uniform logs of the highest quality, neatly packed and delivered on time, without fail. Amid an onslaught of ever-stricter regulations and increasing pressure, how can independent firewood producers be expected to cope with demand?
For David Ward, of David Ward Firewood, the secret weapon keeping him ahead of the pack has been the Fuelwood Factory.
“We’ve had it for four years and it’s been a real game changer for the business,” he said. “The Fuelwood Factory allows us to produce a quality, uniform log consistently and it’s a very easy machine to use.
“It all runs off a remote-control unit, so there’s no need to physically pull levers and press buttons. You can run it remotely. Plus it’s very versatile, because you can use the splitter part to do oversize.
“It’s a very efficient, very well-built machine and the service from Fuelwood is brilliant. All in all, it’s really transformed our business.”
David’s Fuelwood Factory combines a Woodcutta 400 cross-cutting machine and Splitta 400 log-splitting machine to create a fully automated arrangement for converting timber lengths into split logs or kindling.
The Woodcutta 400 converts the timber into cut rings using a hydraulic chainsaw, then transfers them to the Splitta. The rings can be cut to any length between 15 and 33 cm to suit the length requirement of the final product. The output is then presented for bulk loading or for bagging into net bags.
The Woodcutta boasts many unique features developed by Fuelwood. The log being cut is gripped and held so it cannot twist. The cutting bar system uses .404 bar/chain which automatically regulates the cutting pressure giving optimum performance. The waste and last ‘short’ log is automatically ejected from the machine, keeping all the processed logs to exactly the same length.
Working at its peak, with timber of 40 cm diameter, the machine is capable of producing 13 m² or 22 bulk bags per hour – and David has his running almost constantly.
Based in Ludlow, Shropshire, David Ward Firewood has a prime location for supplying kiln-dried logs to South Shropshire, North Herefordshire and North Worcestershire. The site, standing in the shadow of the Woofferton transmitting station, which transmitted the Voice of America during the Cold War, was a railway siding with sawmill until 1963, so has a history of wood processing.
David bought the yard around 20 years ago, back when he was operating a timber transport company. He sold his share in that business after spotting an opportunity in biomass, but reckons now he may have made the jump too soon.
“We were too far ahead of the game, really,” he said. “The RHI hadn’t come in at that time, so we were sort of pioneering it. We were making some progress, but it was hard work and big money and it was all very new and experimental.”
Meanwhile, a nearby business selling log burners was doing a roaring trade, with vans constantly heading out to install new stoves for customers. David took the hint that perhaps firewood was the business to be in.
He bought a processor on eBay for £2,000 and began producing firewood as a sideline, filling a few orders and growing with time. What he once used to produce in a month the firm now produces in a day.
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It helps that David’s cousins run a timber-harvesting business, ensuring he has access to a steady supply of good-quality logs.
“We only source our timber within a maximum of a 20-mile radius of our yard, from the local estates and Forestry Commission,” said David. “We know two or three years ahead what jobs are going to be done on the local estates. By working closely with them and relying on the family harvesting business, we can control the goods coming in, we can control the quality and the legality and the sustainability of our source of timber so everything’s produced within the same radius it’s delivered back out into, which to me is very important.
“One year we got supply down to within a five-mile radius of the yard. We believe strongly in using local timber, not hauling it halfway across the country or even bringing it in from abroad. I don’t think that’s ethical. We’ve got more than enough timber here. We should be making a viable product from our own timber, managing our own woodlands.
“There are some incentives, but the government needs to help us to be able to produce our own timber, rather than bringing it in from the other side of the world.”
For the last 16 years, David has been focused entirely on firewood. A year or two in, he bought an AMR log splitter from Fuelwood and has been relying on the dealer for all his processing equipment ever since.
“They’re British-built machines, which is a big thing for me,” he said. “And with the company being based in the centre of the UK, if you do have any problems, they can help you straight away.
“A big factor is the reliability of the service. Do exactly what you say you’ll do and you get the business. The thing about dealing with Fuelwood is you can always get hold of them and they react very quickly to anything you need.”
As well as the Fuelwood Factory, he has a Transaw 350XLS semi-automatic processor, fitted with a circular saw with a cutting capacity of 35 cm (14 inches) and a 15-tonne semi-automatic splitting unit.
This means that with just three members of staff – one on each machine, one on the conveyer to check what’s coming out – David can run two production lines at the same time.
Timber arrives at the site by lorry and is unloaded by excavator. It’s graded and stacked to dry, usually for 12 months, while anything oversized is put to the side to be dealt with at a quieter time. Logs under 10 inches in diameter are put through the Transaw, while anything larger goes through the Fuelwood Factory.
From there they go to the kiln, which David had installed 12 years ago.
“We put that in at the beginning of the RHI, which was a big incentive to do it,” he said. “I don’t think we could have probably afforded it otherwise. And it’s worked well. We then hired a second kiln which is just up the road on a farm and we’re pretty much running two full time now.
“When I first put it in, kiln drying was around 20 per cent of the business. Now everything is kiln dried, for various reasons. People seem to have really cottoned on to the fact that kiln drying is the best. Realistically, it’s no different to something that’s been barn-dried for two years. But we can take stuff that was cut on Monday have it ready to sell by the next Monday. It really can be turned around that rapidly, if need be.
“Some things, like beech, need to dry longer. But with the marketplace now, the modern stoves, the latest regulations, Woodsure, it’s important to have complete control over your final product. If you kiln it, you know you can get the moisture down to where it needs to be. If you’ve got a beech log and you leave that outside, it’s likely to rot before it ever gets dry in the middle.
“It gets rid of a lot of hassle to do it properly and target the top end of the market and let others go for the cheap end if they want to.
“In my experience, people always want top quality. That was part of the reason for putting the Fuelwood Factory in, because it produces a uniform log all the time.”
After being kiln-dried, logs are put through a Japa cleaner to remove any scraps and bark (unsaleable wood and waste is used to fuel the kiln) and packed into 1.2 m3 bags, which are then loaded onto one of two delivery vans. Each van is fitted with a crane, so they can reach over garden fences and walls and into garages or outbuildings, dropping the wood exactly where customers want it.
David and his son William handle deliveries themselves. In the winter, one vehicle will run full-time, but in the spring or summertime, all the week’s deliveries can be achieved in two days.
“We might do 40 or 50 deliveries on a Monday and Friday and then we’ll have three days in the yard to cut,” said David, who is proud to say that, despite floods and snow, he has never missed a delivery to his customers.
“I’d been in transport and logistics most of my life. I understand all the basic principles of getting it right first time, and I’ve put that into practice with what we’re doing. We don’t sell to trade, we just deliver to the end user and they demand a certain standard.
“We’ve got new customers coming on board all the time. The industry is changing again now, with all the new regulations. There’s been a lot of people have sort of jumped into firewood, thinking it’s a bit of a get-rich-quick scheme, spent a lot of money on machines and then haven’t had the reliable supply of timber or customer base to make it work.
“It’s taken me almost 20 years to build my customer base and we rely on our reputation as much as anything else.”
David has proven himself an adaptable businessman, moving from haulage to biomass to firewood, identifying opportunities in the market. While fortunes have fluctuated for firewood producers and changes in regulations have made the outlook more challenging, he’s confident about the future.
“I often think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” he said. “If you look it up, the basic needs, above anything else, are food, water and heat.
“You can have your fancy meals out, your big flash cars, but they’re luxuries. In a crunch, they’re the first things to go. The last thing will be heat. Once you put the log on the fire, it’s gone, so you’ll always need more. And we know we can provide it.”
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