Selling hardwood= fencing cost?

Lereg

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Hey all! My DW and I are looking for a place to start being self sufficient on, probably in either Tn or Ky. I know the prices are probably different throughout the country, but one place we may be looking at is mostly a forest. My question is has anybody sold their trees for hardwood to may a pasture, and if so, would the price for the hardwood possibly cover the expense of fencing the section off_?

Forgive me if this is in the wrong section.
 

greybeard

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Nowhere close to a full section, but I sold 64 acre's worth of oak/pine mix in '08. If it paid for even my cross fencing, it barely did.
1.Logging proceeds is Taxable income.
2.You have to either clean up the mess up the loggers leave behind yourself (limbs and tops) or pay someone else to do it. Then push out, burn, or grind the stumps so you don't tear up tractors and pasture equipment. Either way, it's not cheap.
If had it to do over again, I would have just hired a dozer the push the trees and junk down & pile it and burn it and level the ground. Would have been $$ and time ahead.
I started with a forest too. This is looking down at the tops of mature yellow pine, 50 yr old white and red oaks.
1998.JPG

When the loggers get done:

before_1.jpg

After I spent a ton of $$ getting it all piled up:
Jane fires one up.JPG
burned down.JPG



2013 googlearthsm.jpg
 

CntryBoy777

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I thought the same way....many yrs ago, in hopes of defraying the cost of land....but, just as @greybeard has stated, there are hidden expenses that eat up the proceeds from the wood really quick. We opted to pay for dozer work, and even got a pond in the process. When the last load leaves out, they pack-up and pull out leaving ruts, limbs, stumps, and tops. It would take ya quite a while of hard labor to get it ready for animals. Unless ya then paid for the dozer, but the price won't be much different in the long run. Dozer work here runs between $65-75/hr.
 

NH homesteader

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4 of the 5 acres I live on is a disaster because it was logged before I owned it. I don't have the equipment to deal with what they left behind so good thing I have goats who like to play in the trees huh?

As for the financial matter, I have no idea.
 

greybeard

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Dozer work here runs between $65-75/hr.
That's way cheaper than it is around here. That wouldn't have paid for the hourly fuel use in '08.
Below thread is 5 yrs old, and diesel has come down a lot since then, but what is being talked about in that thread is closer in line to what I see around here.

http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=350967&DisplayType=flat

I paid to have it piled, then wife and I burned the 20+ big piles and I then spread out and re-piled them with my tractor using a box blade with scarifies all the way down, an old 10' wide cultivator, and an 8' landscape rake on the back of a tractor. I had cattle on pasture by fall 2009 and good grass in 2010.
 

Lereg

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Wow!! I guess that place would be out of the question then. Maybe we can buy a mill, not!!

Thank you all for your input!! I guess it was just wishful thinking.
 

CntryBoy777

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I paid a guy in 2006 to spread 7 loads of gravel for a pad to drop trailers on and that is what he charged me then...and my neighbor had some work done last year for the same price, by a different guy. So, I haven't heard of the higher charges, but it certainly isn't surprising.
 

goatgurl

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first off welcome to BYH. i hope this new life adventure is all you want it to be. another view on the trees, years ago I worked for a forester in wv. he and his partner use to buy rural farm land in the state, log the timber and sell the farm at a profit. he made money both ways. might not hurt to check with someone about what the timber is worth before you decide.
 

greybeard

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Wow!! I guess that place would be out of the question then. Maybe we can buy a mill, not!!

Thank you all for your input!! I guess it was just wishful thinking.
IF, you have the more desirable species, black walnut for example, and you can find a nearby niche market for that specific lumber, then you can select cut just those species and not have near the mess, but it generally means you're left with all the 'junk' species still growing.

And, there were a couple of logging companies here that would have cut the timber, paid me, and piled the tops/limbs, but would not have paid me very much. There extra work would have come out of my cut.
I didn't trust them. Heard too many stories of them getting the logs, then just loading out their equipment and never coming back to clean it up.
 

NH homesteader

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Yeah it wouldn't hurt to try to find out what kind of wood is there. And it probably depends on how much land it is, whether it's manageable or not.
 

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