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by Dave Johnson, photos by Marcia Johnson The Northern Logger, February
2001
Reprinted with permission.
Like a lot of logging contractors, Mike Theilke’s career in the
woods started early. At 14 he was bicycling out to the woods with his
chain saw hooked over one side of his handlebars and his gas and oil
containers over the other side.
That was some time ago. Since then, Theilke has done just about everything
there is to do in the logging business. He has peeled popple, done his
share of chain saw felling, and owned and operated almost every type
of logging equipment known to man.
At one time, he owned three Makeri harvesting machines and ran a crew
of 14. These employees are gone now, as are the machines, but this doesn’t
mean Theilke has run for cover, because he hasn’t. He’s
just changed the nature of his operation.
While his former employees are gone for good, the Makeris have been
replaced with different machines. Theilke operates in Central Wisconsin,
not far enough north to be in the fabled “pinery” or far
enough south to be into prairie.
The area around his home base of Wautoma is now heavily wooded but this
wasn’t always the case. The mix of timber is made up of natural
stands of scrub black and pin oaks; some natural jack pine stands and
planted pine plantations. The oaks are all about 100 years old; having
seeded in after fires which ravaged this part of the state that long
ago.
The pines were almost all planted from the late 1940s, up to the present.
The majority of them were planted in the 1950s as the result of the
Soil Bank program that paid landowners to plant trees. These trees,
mainly red pine with about 15-20 percent white pine mixed in, are about
50 years old and yielding logs and pulpwood.
With the maturing of the plantations came a new type of owner. Many
people bought land in this area, only three hours from Chicago, for
recreation. Some built homes and cabins, some just use the land for
hunting, snowmobiling etc. Many would do no harvesting at all if they
had their choice, preferring to maintain the land in its “natural”
state. They harvest because, in order to qualify for the State’s
“Managed Forest Law,” they must or lose their tax breaks.
These owners put a high premium on appearance. They are not willing
to wait years for slash to rot down, nor are they willing to ski around
hardwood tops. Most of Theilke’s work is for this type of owner.
During the initial thinning phase, almost all the pulpwood from these
plantations was cut with chain saws and sold to paper mills which abound,
making Wisconsin the leading producer of paper in the country.
The trees are now big enough to yield cabin logs, saw logs and, some
utility poles. Sawmills, notably Biewer, to the north in Prentice, Wisconsin,
have sprung up to utilize the resource. Some of the harvesting of these
trees is still done by chain saws, but less all the time. About 15 years
ago, the Makeri harvesting machine made its debut, having been brought
up from the south by local pulp contractor Rod McIntee.
McIntee modified the machines, which were designed by the Finnish company
Rauma Repola/Lokomo, which built them to process whole trees, into cut-to-length
machines. This fit into the local, forwarder-dominated, operations.
These shearhead processors took over pulpwood harvesting in short order.
There are still a few around but they are no longer being built, and
wear and tear has eliminated most of them. Currently, most pulpwood
and logs are harvested using chain saw-processing heads. Initially many
of these were mounted on rubber-tired farm tractors – mainly Kubotas.
These are phasing out now as the heads become more complex, and the
farm tractors lack the hydraulics to operate them efficiently. Many
harvesting heads are now mounted on small excavators and other, heavier
construction-type machines.
Mike Theilke could have traded in his Makeris and followed the crowd,
but he didn’t. It isn’t that Theilke doesn’t like
to try new things – it’s not that at all. What he likes
to do is to try really new things. He presently owns three Tree Farmer
model 3000 feller bunchers, a Timberjack 560 grapple skidder, a Morbark
Chiparvestor, and a Prentice slasher, plus a fleet of chip trailers.
The Morbark 2455 is a chipper flailing unit that he bought new –
the only one of its kind operating in Wisconsin. It is powered by two
diesel engines with a combined horsepower of 1175. That’s almost
enough to power a small town. The 2455 is the heart of his operation,
producing clean pine chips for International Paper company’s Thilmany
mill at Kaukauna Wisconsin. He can and does chip almost anything, he
says, including aspen and oak and any sort of odd jobs you might have
such as box elder and black locust.
He sells hardwood chips to Packaging Corp. Aspen goes to Weyerhauser.
Even though the 2455 folds up hydraulically to allow it to be pulled
on the highway with no oversize problems, it is truly a massive piece
of equipment. It will take just about any chunk of wood you feed it
and reduce it to clean, bark free chips in seconds.
When visited by The Northern Logger, Theilke and the 2455 were processing
medium sized pine stems from a second thinning of a plantation. The
trees were about “three sticks” and limby. With this type
wood, Theilke says it takes between 400 and 600 trees to make a vanload,
and about a half-hour to process. The vans hold 20-30 tons.
The machine sat on a landing of about one-half acre. This made for easy
turnaround for the trucks and it was completely clean. No piles of logs
and no slash. The trees, which had been piled in fire lanes by the feller
buncher, were brought out, about eight or nine at a time by the skidder
and immediately consumed by the harvester.
On each trip out of the woods, the skidder picked up a grapple load
of slash and deposited it back into the plantation. The “slash”
was more like mulch, a mixture of pine needles and small pieces of branches.
Theilke says the 2455 will utilize almost 50 percent of the branches
as well as the trunk. He says he gets about a third more yield than
conventional harvesting models.
The consistency of the slash was such that the skidder could easily
pick up a full grapple and carry it away without spilling any. Once
in the woods, the skidder operator used the blade to spread the load
so as to not leave piles, or to produce a mat for the truck road to
prevent rutting.
All of this was impressive enough, but it was even more impressive when
you realize that it was all being done by just two people. Mike and
his wife, Jennepher. Mike operated the chipper and Jennepher ran the
skidder. The truck driver slept in his truck.
Jennepher got her first taste of Theilke-style logging when she signed
on for a summer job after her first year in forest at a tech. school.
She quickly realized that operating heavy equipment was what she wanted
to do and she never returned to school. They hit it off in their spare
time as well. They married and now have a 13-month old baby.
Jennepher takes Mondays off to be with the baby. Aside from that, they
both work fulltime together. Both Theilkes operate the feller bunchers,
but Mike takes advantage of Jennepher’s day off to get ahead with
the felling, which takes about the same amount of time as the chipping.
Since the feller-buncher transports the stems upright, there is no whole
tree skidding, and thus the danger of barked trees is reduced. The three-wheeled
design makes the machines maneuverable enough to squeeze through the
spaces left between trees on its way to the nearest fire lane. The Theilkes
get a lot of their work through referrals from people they have worked
for.
They both have a respect for, and knowledge of, nature in its many forms.
To walk through woods with them is to learn a lot about the total environment,
not just the timber aspect. This must be reassuring to people who are
hesitant about allowing anybody to touch their woods. The fact that
Jennepher is a young blonde wearing a “Pooh Bear” shirt
can’t hurt either.
Theilke is a pretty good-natured guy, but he hates stumps. He hates
them when he runs over them with his three wheel feller bunchers and
he hates them when landowners look over his job. He says that because
they are so light-colored, they stand out. He wants his customers to
see only trees, so he goes to great lengths to cut the stumps down.
He says he needs the shears to do the job he wants done because he actually
cuts most pine stumps below ground level. Saw heads can’t stand
up to the grit and stones they encounter in this operation. Since all
the wood is bound for the chipper, butt shatter is not a problem.
One of Theilke’s three feller bunchers is equipped with a saw
head. He uses this one on oak jobs to produce random length logs for
the grade market. He bucks the logs with apprentice slasher and runs
the tops through his Chiparvestor. He uses the loader on the Chiparvestor
to load the logs onto trucks.
Most jobs Theilke does are marked by foresters, but if they are not,
the Theilkes mark them themselves. They say that the harvesters restrict
vision too much to be able to select trees as they go. Regardless of
who marks them, they only mark at breast height, not at the base. With
the stumps so low, any mark there would disappear when the trees were
cut.
As he tours the woods with a visitor, Theilke points out a large, open-grown
white pine. The tree had sustained massive tip weevil attacks. It branched
into four large twisted stems about four feet above ground. It was what
is called a “cabbage tree” and almost worthless to loggers.
He said he could get as much value out of a tree like that as he could
out of a straight, five-stick tree. “What’s more”,
he said, wiggling his index finger, “I can do it with just this
one finger.” Some loggers and landowners may wince at the idea
of chipping a straight, five-stick tree, but money talks.
This combination of a clean job and the ability to produce money out
of junk wood accounts for Theilke’s reputation. He bids for jobs
by the ton and is able to get more work than he can handle within about
30 miles of his home. Because his machines utilize almost everything,
he gets a lot of oak clearcutting jobs. He uses everything, limbs and
all. No more “logging tops” to contend with.
These sites are so clean they can be immediately planted to pines. Because
he buys new equipment and uses it sparingly, he says his downtime comes
to less than two percent, compared to up to 30 percent for these same
machines in the South where they work them hard.
He does all his own maintenance; most of it right on the job. He doesn’t
have a shop. He says his biggest maintenance problem is with the semi
trailers.
You would think that now that he seems to have put together a perfect
pulpwood production combination, Mike Theilke would be content to reap
the benefits. But that’s obviously not the way he looks at it.
The Northern Logger visited his job on a Wednesday because he was going
to spend the rest of the week at an equipment auction in Michigan. Why
does he continue to “push the envelope”? He has a one-word
answer. “Excitement.” |
