Last June, my family and I moved from Colchester to Charlotte, which took us off the natural-gas pipeline and into the land of propane tanks and woodpiles. As I admired my neighbors’ impressive stockpiles of split and seasoned cordwood, all stacked with architectural precision, most told me they heat their homes with a combination of propane and wood, relying more heavily on the latter whenever propane prices soar.
Heating with wood isn’t preferable just because it’s local, renewable, eco-friendly and pleasing to the eye; it’s also cheaper. At least, normally it is, when supplies are abundant.
And it’s a popular option in these parts. With more than 80 percent of Vermont covered in trees, many of them hardwoods, the Green Mountain State is a veritable Saudi Arabia of biomass. Not surprisingly, Vermont has the highest per-capita reliance on wood as a primary heating source of any state in the country. This year, more than one in three K-12 students in Vermont began the school year in a building heated with wood.
Hence I was stunned to learn, upon purchasing a new woodstove in August, that seasoned firewood isn’t just pricier this fall than it’s been in years. It’s also harder to find. Much harder.
What happened? Has the emerald ash borer, which has killed tens of millions of ash trees from northern Québec to southern Georgia, finally gained a foothold in our verdant woods?
Nothing of the sort. By all reports, Vermont’s forests are as healthy and productive as ever. According to Paul Frederick, a wood utilization forester with the Vermont Division of Forestry, in the past five years Vermont has harvested, on average, more than 8,000 cords annually from state lands alone.
After many fruitless phone calls and emails, I learned that a confluence of other factors has left me heading into the winter without two sticks to rub together. They include last year’s longer, colder winter; higher prices being offered at regional pulp mills; the opening of new wood-pellet factories and biomass plants; and a shrinking workforce of loggers, who increasingly resemble the membership ranks of AARP.
Going DIY and burning freshly cut wood wasn’t an option. As my salesman at the Chimney Sweep Fireplace Shop in Shelburne reminded me, that’s a surefire way to choke my neighbors in an acrid cloud, set off my smoke detectors and eventually accumulate enough creosote in the chimney to burn my house to the ground.
Marshaling my investigative skills to gather firewood intel, I turned to Vermont’s hyperlocal source of neighborhood info, Front Porch Forum. I put out the e-word that I was looking to score at least a cord that had been seasoned at least one year. Instead, I got back half a dozen emails from fellow Charlotte residents who all said, in effect, “If you find some, let us know. We’re out, too!”
One neighbor suggested I contact Larry Hamilton, Charlotte’s tree warden since 1996. Hamilton spent 30 years teaching forestry at Cornell University and another 13 years at a tropical forestry institute in Hawaii. He knows the location of nearly every tree in Charlotte that’s more than 80 years old and has planted more than 400 roadside saplings over the past six years. No wonder he’s become Charlotte’s de facto adviser on all things arboreal.
I wasn’t the first person to tap him for firewood connections. A few years ago, after years of replying to individual inquiries, Hamilton finally compiled a list of local suppliers and posted it on Front Porch Forum. He promptly forwarded it to me, along with seemingly encouraging news.
“A lot of people have gotten into the firewood business in the last two years,” Hamilton reported. “Four or five years ago, there were maybe five people in Charlotte [selling it]. Now, there’s a lot of them.” He said I could expect to pay $250 to $275 for a “short cord” or “stove cord.” That’s similar to a standard cord — four feet wide, four feet tall and eight feet long — only the logs are cut shorter, to 16 inches, to fit in a typical woodstove.
But as I rapidly burned through Hamilton’s long list of dealers, coming up empty each time, it became apparent that price would be less of an obstacle than availability. Hoping to avoid my least desirable option — buying kiln-dried wood from a local lumberyard at nearly $500 a cord, including delivery — I widened my search radius to include some regional loggers. Surely, if anyone had wood, they would.
It’s time for a word about one of Vermont’s largest but arguably least-appreciated industries: forest products. Milk, cheese, maple syrup and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream may be Vermont’s iconic commodities, along with patchouli-scented Phish fans and socialist presidential wannabes. But Vermont’s timber industry contributes more to the state’s gross domestic product than even agriculture — not including the illegal marijuana trade, which, technically speaking, could be considered a forest product, too, as that’s where much of it is surreptitiously grown.
In fact, when measured collectively, Vermont’s wood-products industry is second only to electronics in total manufacturing revenues, and pays the highest manufacturing wages outside Chittenden County. Need further convincing of its importance? As the bumper stickers I often saw while living in Montana put it, “Don’t like logging? Try wiping with a pine cone.”
Yet, for all their contributions to the state’s economy, loggers don’t get their due respect, especially considering the hazards of their job. According to 2014 figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, work-related fatalities among loggers in 2013 were the highest since 2008 and the highest that year, per capita, of any industry in the country — exceeding commercial fishing, mining, construction and aviation.
What’s all this got to do with my inability to build a crackling fire? Turns out, more than half of Vermont’s timber workers are older than 45; one in four is older than 55. And as all those graying woodchucks retire, very few are being replaced by younger bucks who can drop the trees that will feed Vermont’s growing number of woodstoves.
Forester Frederick confirmed that, because fewer loggers headed into the woods this year to cut timber, supplies were smaller than they’ve been in the past. Exacerbating the problem was the long, cold 2013-14 winter, which caused suppliers to burn through their back inventories.
“Last winter, everyone burned everything they owned,” noted David Bessette, a 51-year-old Williston logger. “They were just about ready to start chopping up the back wall of the barn and throwing the furniture in there, too.”
As a result, many eager beavers snapped up extra cords this summer.
Bessette, who’s been logging for more than 25 years, has heard from frustrated customers who can’t find firewood this year. He explained that loggers are seeing increasing competition for low-grade lumber from regional pulp mills such as International Paper in Ticonderoga, N.Y. Also hungry for wood are biomass plants, including Burlington Electric Department’s Joseph C. McNeil Generating Station; a new 75-megawatt biomass energy plant in Berlin, N.H.; and a new chip-burning boiler in Fort Drum, N.Y.
“They’re chewing up wood that wasn’t being chewed up before,” Bessette added. “And they’re trying to buy the same wood you’re trying to buy.”
Adam Sherman, of the Biomass Energy Resource Center in Burlington, wasn’t convinced that new biomass plants were cutting into my potential woodpile. But he did confirm Bessette’s observation about the paper mills.
“In the last six months, we’ve seen a pretty dramatic uptick in the hardwood pulp demand,” Sherman said, “which is a competing supply to the firewood market.”
Bessette told me he’d gladly sell me a cord if he had one (he didn’t), but he admitted that he has reasons for favoring larger markets. In his business, when he’s got a truckload of low-grade timber and a paper or pellet mill willing to weigh his truck and pay him for the entire load, that’s an easy sell.
By contrast, selling firewood to a homeowner involves more sorting and segregating so Bessette can give his customer “that most picture-perfect, hand-splittable wood, with no mud or dirt on it.” Add in the time and hassle of backing a logging truck down a long, winding driveway, where he runs the risk of caving the front lawn into the septic tank, and it’s easy to understand why peddling firewood isn’t high on many loggers’ to-do lists.
Since I kept coming up empty, I finally reached out to the one fallback source everyone had recommended: A. Johnson Company lumberyard in Bristol, which sells kiln-dried firewood. Dave Johnson, a fifth-generation wood supplier, confirmed that the dwindling number of loggers in the woods has “positively” affected his inventory. While lower supplies and higher demand mean higher prices for Johnson’s products right now, he said he’s troubled by the potential consequences of the wood shortage down the road.
“We’ve got a number of customers,” Johnson said, “who have told us that if we stop [selling firewood], unless they can find a replacement supplier, they’d get rid of their stove.”
Personally, I’m not ready to go to such extremes yet — or bite the bullet and shell out $400 for a cord of kiln-dried, certified emerald ash borer-free timber. After all, the damn woodstove hasn’t even been installed yet.
But if you’ve got any, I’ll be the one standing along Route 7 with a tongue-twister sign that reads, “How much for a truck of woodchuck’s wood?”
This Stuck in Vermont video features Pat Stanley, a firewood dealer in Vermont for 24 years.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Wood If I Could”
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2014.
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Have a few of your trees cut down now so you’ll have logs to split in the spring, and seasoned wood in the fall (next year). Also, lots of woodchucks are selling green wood now at good prices that you an store ans season for next year. This year, I don’t know anyone in southern Chittenden County who’s paid less than $350 for a cord of dry wood.
Environmental Nazis make working Vermonter’s lives a living hell. Want to cut a tree to burn it? You will need several permits & an indulgence paid for in cash in just a few years.
Ken, as one who worked in the woods for a number of years cutting, splitting, and delivering 200 cord one at a time in my peak year, it is not only some of those most dangerous, b$&$-busting work there is, it is also some of the most demeaning. I miss the work, but not the Chittenden County customers, for the most part. Even at $250 a cord that barely keeps a man in good equipment and current with his workmans comp, liability, and health insurance. Frankly, every Vermonter should have to fell, skin, buck, and split at least one cord before being able to dicker about the price. Get a tandem load of log length, and I will come buck this winter for you. Pay for my fuel and a couple files and do something nice for my wife and kids, and we’ll call it a good winter weekend.
The price of a full cord of firewood in urban areas of Ontario, Canada has risen over the years. When I started burning wood in 1995, a face cord, stove cord or 1/3 of a cord was $55.00 or $165 a full cord. Last month I paid $125.00 a face cord or $375.00 a full cord. I’m in a city not much bigger than Burlington, so the price is higher, than if you live 40 miles outside the city.
I am very grateful to my supplier, for the costs he incurs such as: processing equipment, fuel, labour, trucking and sweat equity. I’m pretty sure he’s not getting rich selling firewood, which is why he processes lumber, as well as builds cedar and pine sheds to make ends meet.
My backup heat source, is a high efficiency Carrier gas furnace which I hardly use and it’s probably cheaper to burn gas, than to burn wood these days. Although, I just can’t break my habit of stacking, moving, re-stacking, splitting logs, splitting kindling, hauling from the garage to the house, then making a WARM soon to be HOT wood stove fire…It was our wood stove that got us through the ice storm of 1998, when we had no power or water for a week. Aside from the fact that my playing with wood has become kind of a hobby, it’s also the only winter exercise I get, other than shovelling snow. I sincerely hope, all of you wood-burning Vermonters can find some firewood this year, as it sounds as though the shortage is probably going to get worse, before it gets better…Just a thought. It’s time to put an overnighter-log in the stove.
One glaring omission from this article is that if farmers were allowed to grow hemp (no, not pot, hemp, two completely different things), it could easily supply the pulp market, with a higher quality and quicker growing fiber, easily freeing up a lot wood for heating fuel. It could also be used in the bigger, automated biomass boilers.
I have to wonder where the commodities speculators hands are in all of this. They’re specialists in driving up prices on struggling americans, so they can live like kings.
How does the writer conclude that wood is eco-friendly? Emissions from woodstoves are very dirty compared to other sources of heat except coal. Renewable? Yes, to a point.
Tom, I beg to differ. I’d guess you are only factoring in the amount of emissions from the actual fuel you would burn in your gas or oil furnace, but you need to factor in the amount of emissions from the process of drilling/fracking/mining and transporting that gas or oil which raises the pollution level by several orders of magnitude. Look at the amount of energy expended to get oil from the tar sands and then transport it, refine it, transport it again, and again, not to mention the runoff pollution and so on. Or the amount of energy to transport oil from the middle east. Those ocean going tankers that transport crude oil, they burn something on the order of 20 gallons of fuel to move forward just five feet. Add to that, that oil and gas are Carbon that WAS sequestered in the earth and is now being added, layer upon layer, into the atmosphere, where every tree is just releasing the Carbon it took out of the atmosphere. It’s removal making way for a new tree that will again take the Carbon back out of the atmosphere.
Also, your assumptions about emissions from wood stoves are very wrong. Modern wood stoves, properly used and properly maintained, have very low emissions. Some of the best burn so efficiently, they don’t put any more CO2 into the air than if the tree had lived it’s life, fell over and rotted on the forest floor. It was proven in Washington State several years ago.
More biomass delusion in the Greenwash Mountain State.
Burning wood, even with the best air quality control techniques is dirtier than fossil fuels for conventional pollutants, and cutting and burning green trees for energy is worse than even coal for atmospheric carbon impacts despite the persistent militant ignorance to the contrary.
I am not defending fossil fuels, just using the example to show how dirty wood burning really is.
By the way, “green” Vermont has the highest asthma rate in the country according to the CDC. No doubt, part of that is from all that wood burning.
There is a pile of recent science stating the obvious, that cutting and burning forests for energy, as McNeil does, increases atmospheric carbon levels, but don’t let the facts interrupt a trip to the land of make believe, as exemplified in Burlington’s “Climate Plan” which does not count McNeils 400,000 tons of annual CO2 emissions (according to the EPA).
Here is some inconvenient truths from Bill Keeton (at UVM) and others (by no means tree-huggers) regarding biomass energy and carbon impacts:
“The physics of the greenhouse effect is indifferent as to the origin of the pollutant. Once a molecule of CO2 is in the atmosphere its heating capacity is the same regardless of its source. It is the overall C budget and the net atmospheric concentration of greenhouses gases that are of concern. If greater use of wood energy has the unintended consequence of contributing to an increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, then decisions to switch to biogenic fuels should be guided by careful accounting to determine net carbon fluxes to and from the atmosphere.
An earlier letter to the US House of Representatives and US Senate (Schlesingeret al., 2010) from 90 American scientists stated that ‘Although fossil fuel emissions are reduced or eliminated, the combustion of biomass replaces fossil emissions with its own emissions (which may even be higher per unit of energy because of the lower energy to carbon ratio of biomass)’. More research is needed to determine which biomass energy technology scenarios and forest ecosystems are most likely to result in greater biogenic emissions than the equivalent fossil fuel energy source. Recent work in the United States and Europe supports the Schlesingeret al.(2010) statement (e.g. Walker et al., 2010; Bird et al., 2011; McKechnieet al., 2011).
In addition, if biomass harvests involve living trees that would otherwise have remained alive and growing, the short-term net impact on the atmosphere will be greater than if logging residue or waste wood were used. All wood is not equal in terms of temporal impact to atmospheric GHG levels. Therefore, the use of wood for energy needs a strong quantitative basis ensuring policy based on evidence rather than opinion.
Wood energy harvests encompass a wide range of silvicultural treatments, but have the potential to increase the overall intensity and frequency of harvesting. This can reduce the net amount of carbon stored in forest biomass at any moment in time at landscape scales, particularly in natural forest systems with low risk of catastrophic disturbances and relatively slow growth rates. If overall harvesting intensity increases to meet new demand for wood energy, carbon stocks on the landscape can be depressed to a lower equilibrium storage condition therefore increasing overall atmospheric CO2 even when considering the substitution benefits (Harmon et al., 1990; Smithwick et al., 2006; McKechnieet al., 2011).
When we also consider the amount of biogenic C remaining in the atmosphere as a result of historical global conversion of forests, prairies, peatlands and wetlands (Birdsey et al., 2006; Rhemtullaet al., 2009; van der Werf et al., 2009), it becomes clear that all sources of additional C emissions should be evaluated based upon their near term contribution to the atmosphere and their potential for re-sequestration by new biological growth. This historical debt also negates the argument that biogenic carbon can be banked in advance of consumption for energy (e.g. Sedjo, 2011). Again, what matters is the amount of CO2in the atmosphere, regardless of the source.”
John S. Gunn, David J. Ganz, and William S. Keeton 2012. Biogenic vs. geologic carbon emissions and forest biomass energy production. GCB Bioenergy (2012) 4, 239–242, doi: 10.1111/j.1757-1707.2011.01127.x
http://www.manomet.org/sites/default/files…
I like a nice warm fire as much as the next person, but it is militantly delusional to think that burning wood is “clean” and “green” in spite of all the easily obtainable facts.
I don’t use fire wood if possible, I recycle my news paper and use them as my alternative fire wood and it’s enough to keep me warm!
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