 Most of my work is done in Vermont. I'm in charge of essentially finding opportunities to harvest timber in stands of timber that are ready to be harvested, mature timber, of which there are many on these lands. And once I find those harvestable units, I write a plan to describe those units. We comply with all sorts of layers, the use value appraisal program, which is the current use program in Vermont. We have a conservation easement. And then once the plans are approved by the appropriate regulatory authorities, then I'm in charge of executing the timber sale on the ground, which is my favorite part, is hanging the flagging, marking the trees, and supervising the logging operation, which I love to do. There's great guys in these woods. Once I find the harvestable unit, I will go through some stereo photography analysis of the tract, look at the contours, determine whether or not the skid is within the skid, the timber skid is within half, three quarters of a mile. And if it's not, then we'll need road to reach it. And so I will go out, lay out the roads in the woods, try to keep the percentage of slope to a minimum amount, which is sometimes difficult in mountainous country. Once the roads are established in a tract of land, say we pick a harvest unit, we put the road in, we've got a tract of 200 acres off the roadside to our right. It's various terrain, various timber types. What you'd first do is establish where your landing was going to be for these big, heavy objects that you're going to be handling. Trees are a ton, ton and a half a piece, and they come into the yard, and they're long, and they're difficult to handle, and you need a lot of room to handle them. So you establish landings, and once you know where your landing is going to be, then you can flag that out. For cutting that out later, you flag the perimeter of that, you cut that out, and then stump it and use that ground as your center point. So once the landings are located, then you start to lay out your main skid system. And that involves running trails that can be parallel with the road or work with the contours of the land so that the slopes aren't too steep, but that the tracked vehicles, the tracked feller bunchers, can go on these areas. I mean, you can't run a tracked feller buncher on a 30% slope this way. You just doesn't go side hill that way. So you've got to be able to figure out how to get those tracked vehicles in, and you flag each skid trail with orange flagging. We have a protocol for flagging, and you flag those locations out. You flag each stream buffer. We have a policy about streams, buffers, 50-foot buffers on most perennial streams, all perennial streams, actually. And then on intermediate streams or intermittent streams, there's a little bit different policy. You still got the buffer, but you can operate in the buffer and so on and so forth. So you put in your main skid, your main skid system, and some spurs off your skid system, your buffer system, your blue line flagging, we call it, blue for water. And then you'd put in your harvest boundary in a pink. A pink is where the harvesting ends is on the pink line. So you've got your orange, your blue, your pink. And still the cultural boundaries where I determine maybe I want to thin this parcel over here, but this parcel has a lot of unacceptable growing stock, and maybe I'll put a small patch cut here where the timber growth isn't so good. It probably should be started over again. So those are the kinds of things that I do on the ground as a rule before the logging crew shows up. The relationship that we have is I will show them the map, give them a copy. Usually give them a GPS with the whole sale on it. And they know the routine. They know that orange flagging is skid trails. They know that blue paint means the tree leaves the site. We have a protocol with blue and orange paint. When you mark the trees in blue, those go. And you mark them in orange, they stay. So a lot of times we'll have a small patch cut, and we'll leave an excellent dominant tree in that somewhere, in that patch for seed source. And the relationship that I have with the loggers is basically show them what to do, and those guys execute. And we work together on many of these things. We put crossings in together. We have bridges that we cross streams with. We have other manner of crossings, pole crossings that we use occasionally on smaller streams. And we work with those guys to describe what we want for a crossing. And they'll execute that. And the relationship is really very good. We're dealing with a lot of guys who are my age now. They're older, more experienced, really, really experienced. And you've got to give these guys credit for what they know, because they're brilliant. Many of them are brilliant. They're just blue collar brilliant guys. They really are. I think there's a really promising future for young people in the business, because there are so many of us that are going to age out. Shortly, the only real downside I see for the youth is that what bank is going to hand over $10 million for equipment purchases. That's their biggest hurdle, I think. That would seem to me the biggest hurdle. Who's going to hand over that kind of money to make these equipment purchases possible? There's a lot of opportunity there. There's a lot of opportunity. Art, the contractors, the logging contractors I work with are always looking for new young talent. Like I said, most of the guys in the business are my age. And maybe somebody doesn't want to go to college right off the hop. Maybe they don't want to go to college at all. And maybe if they have an interest in heavy equipment. My god, what better place to be interested in heavy equipment than an industry that has all kinds of heavy equipment to operate? Some of these kids, there's a couple of kids on kids, 22, 23-year-olds that work on my projects. And they're absolute geniuses with this equipment. And I constantly tell them or ask them, how did you get so good with this stuff? Some of these guys can pick a dime off the ground with a grapple skitter, it's remarkable. So they just say, well, I was interested in it. My father had an excavator. He let me run it. And I got pretty good at it. And then I decided to try and run it. I answered an ad in a paper for a skitter operator. And I ended up running a skitter. And then I graduated to a delimiter and then into the harvester itself. And the harvester is really a key piece of the puzzle for us. They're the guys that we look at and say, OK, here's the plan, execute. And the grapple skitter guys, they have a critical role, too, because they've got to be able to maintain their trails. And the young kids today that are so talented with this equipment, I mean, every contractor's looking for young guys that can run equipment. Father just very little. And like I said, after he passed away, I don't know, maybe a year later, my mother sold the farm. And we moved to Orleans there. And my heart was kind of infirming. So I stayed with some friends in Brankton. I grew up there part-time with them. And then I guess when I was 18 or so, I thought I wanted to play mechanic. So I worked at a garage outside of Orleans there for I don't know, five or six years. Then we went to logging. I used to play on weekends doing firewood and stuff. And I had a little old C3 tree farmer skitter I used to play with. And I don't know. Then I got in with Wagner Woodlands. And they was going to give me a contract. So I wouldn't lease the skitter for nine months. And I never looked back. I just stepped along from there. Right now, there's just four of us. Me, my son-in-law, my future son-in-law, and my brother. I've been working for Plum Creek. I believe it's around eight years. We've done a lot of work for them. They've been awful good to us. For the last probably six years or so, I worked solely for Plum. I used to run six, seven different pieces of equipment on them. We're starting to get in our golden years, I guess you'd call it. So I'm trying to mellow out a little bit. I mean, we still try to keep everybody happy, but that's where we're headed. That's a hardwood log. And we're going to grottin' a catamount yard down there with that. And our pulp, and there's ash pulp and everything, that's going to Buffalo Mountain and Hadwick or down to the catamount yard. Our softwood is going to Hadwick. Our softwood log's going to Hadwick. And our softwood pulp and stuff goes to Jamie. Of course, you hear bits and pieces, but my opinion, I guess it's still always going to be here. We might have to log a little smarter, which I think we're trying to with our cut to length and stuff like that. It's just, you might have to diversify a little bit. Like we do firewood, and that helps us from flooding some of our pulp mills. We try to do a few hundred-quarter firewood a year. That helps us there. Finding new markets, we're always trying to find new markets. It's hard, no. I mean, if you're going to get help, you're going to have to teach them. Especially with this newer equipment we've got now. It's not like somebody with a chainsaw or a go cut a tree. Well, I don't even have a chainsaw and a job. We don't use them anymore. Very rarely we use a chainsaw. And so there's a lot of learning curves. You're into your computers and everything nowadays. But with this here, I can set it up for seven different operators. And my son-in-law with that one, it's just unreal what you've got to know to run it. You don't know how to calibrate your computers and stuff like that. This machine, my son-in-law runs in the woods. We call it the Harvester II. And he goes up to a tree. He grabs onto it, cuts it down. As it hits the ground, he's got wheels, spins it up. And he's got a computer inside. He's watching his computer for the diameter of the tree, which we don't really do much logs. If we do a power log, it's going to be 8 inch. But it's going to be a nice, smooth tree. And his machine will tell him the diameter of the tree so he knows he's 8 inch inside the back. And if it's a nice, smooth log, his other gauge there, I'm not familiar with the machine, but I know it runs. His other thing will tell him the length. He wants an 8-6. So the machine will spin it up to 8-6. He'll cut it off. That's a good tie log, or 16 foot per pulp. I mean, it's his judgment on what he wants to put that tree into. But his machine will tell him the diamers that he needs to know to make his marks. I'll take my forwarder and you'll have piles off of the woods. I go pick them up and bring them out. Then my brother here loads me and he'll sort of in the landing, which mill we want him to go to. So, and then when a truck comes in, my brother loads it. Plum Creek, they tell us where to market it. I actually get a quota every Sunday night, I believe, or email to me what markets I can use that week. You know, with them, we have a tie log market, which is in Coventry, Vermont. It's Le Branch Lumber. We go to there. They have another tie log market for a smaller tie log in Maine. It's Isakson's above J. Maine. And then we have what they call a mat log market, which is a 16 foot hardwood. It doesn't quite make a saw log. And that goes to Maine. I think it's Bethel, Maine. And they make bridge mats out of it, which a lot of log is used in the woods. And they make the bridge panels and stuff. And then we have saw logs on plum, which go to shampoo in Canada. That's your hardwood saw log. And then we have the veneer, which goes to Columbia Forest in Newport. And then if we get into the softwood logs, they all go to Milan, New Hampshire. And the pulp is been going to, the softwood pulp has been going to Sappy and Skelhegan. And the hardwood pulp either goes to Sappy and Skelhegan or Domtar in Windsor, Quebec. If we had to train somebody to run, like say my son-in-law's piece of equipment, you're gonna have at least a month, a two-month learning curve, because there's a lot of stuff that entails. And then you're really pushing it. I mean, if you get six to eight months under your belt, then you should be an operator. You should know whether you're gonna make it by then. And the forwarder, I don't know. I picked it up in probably three weeks where I could manage to make a living with it. It's not for everybody, but I managed so I guess a lot of people could. I mean, they'd be better off to try and get in with a bigger firm. And just to learn today's logging, it's so much different than it was years ago. You can't jump on a skitter and a chainsaw and go across the brook. There's just so many laws nowadays has changed. If anybody really wanted to get in and do it right, they should get it with a bigger firm and learn the right way to do it before they wanna step down on their own. I like to have all my guys at least to have a CDL license so they can drive dump trucks. And somebody that can run heavy equipment that's had some experience. And we usually have, like to have at least one labor in our crew. Pretty much everybody kind of does a little bit of everything. Nobody has just one job. In our peak season this summertime, there's about six. And next year we're hoping to add at least one more. So it'll be seven guys, employ. We usually put an ad in with an unemployment office and usually sometimes advertise a newspaper. Most time you can usually find somebody by doing that. People will come and see you. Was brought up on a very firm just down the road here. And my father always had a dozer and stuff. And in 86 we had an auction and he always did side work anyway. So he just kind of started in the excavating business. And as years went on, we got a little bit busier and he just kind of got sick of doing the paperwork and meeting with the customers. And I actually bought him out 19 years ago. And he actually worked for me up until about four years ago. Now we semi-retired. We have three excavators, a dozer, a loader, and four dump trucks. Pretty much all excavating work. We do dig foundations, put in septic systems, build driveways, and of course we build a lot of roads for Plum Creek. Graveling roads and building green roads for the, you know, so they can get logs out. Don't really have a set area. I know a lot of guys don't usually travel too far from home, but we, most everywhere we work for Plum Creek is anywhere from, you know, a 20 mile ride in the morning to a 50, 52 mile ride. We build a lot of their roads, fixing up old logging roads that were used for trucking. They haven't been used in a while. We'll go in with a brush head. On the excavator, you know, trim all the brush back and then we'll re-grabble it, change all the culverts. And we also build green roads, you know, we'll go in, log section of road out, then we'll come in and we'll stump it, put the ditches in, culverts, and then grabble it so it can be used for, you know, the lug trucks. After Hurricane Irene, we did work for the town of Ludlow for eight weeks, rebuilding all their roads down there, replacing culverts and so pretty much we'll go just about anywhere. We do quite a bit of town work for a municipal. We do a lot of state work. We do a lot of residential too, you know, like I said, digging foundations, septics, driveways, stuff like that. It's getting tougher with help is our main thing. It seems like the younger generation's really not into, you know, what we do, long hours, you know, the hard work. It's definitely finding help is a big problem. I do have a couple of guys that were trained by myself, but most of the guys came from other places. And as of right now, we've got probably the best crew I've ever had. I think it's getting harder for anybody with a small business. I would hate to think this day and age I was gonna start over like I did 19 years ago. I don't think you could do it financially. And I don't know with all the stress and everything else, I don't know if I'd want to do it. Like this, those are here, brand new is about 150,000. That machine right behind me here, that brand new was about 250. Pretty much we do most everything right through our local bank here in town, but most of the times if the equipment companies usually sometimes run a really good deal in interest, so we'll finance right through like Caterpillar or Volvo, but most everything is right through the local bank. I guess I got into the trucking business way back when I had to farm with one dump truck. I had one dump truck and that led to more. And I think I had five or six dump trucks that I worked also and it just seems to keep growing. And then as we get into the milk business, I had 28 milk tankers, so I don't remember how many trucks I had, but I had more than that. Picked up all of those, the milk from all the farms and that grew to the sawdust business, so that added more units. And then that turned to the mulch business. So one thing led to another and we just kept the different products and developing markets for it. I'm very fortunate I've got help some of you have been here almost 30 years. We're just fortunate on the good help we have is good help, but truck drivers are a different situation. If you can keep one for four or five years, you're doing pretty good. I'm Kevin Barrett, I'm Rodney Barrett's son and I'm the active manager, co-owner of Barrett Farms Incorporated. My grandparents had a farm and then my dad had a farm and I've worked basically with my dad ever since I was small. He had an international hirerster dealership for a while. I didn't have much participation in that, but when he had the farm, I did milk a few cows and I cleaned barns and fed cows and run the siloed trucks and fed calves and all that stuff. And then when he sold that business and got into the milk column business, I was kind of fascinated with the truck so I would ride with him quite often and get some learning from that. And then he let me drive a few times and then I guess I caught the bug. And I've had trucks in my system ever since then. We do quite a wide variety of trucking. We are mainly in the multi-business so we haul mulch all over the eastern coast as far down as Delaware, as far west as Ohio. We have another terminal in East Windsor, Connecticut and one in Tuaco, New Jersey that we reload out of. And we do back calls for a lot of different companies up here including the Columbia Forest Products. We do some veneer, we do some animal feed. We haul a little bit of asphalt for a pike industry, a whole castle. We kind of do a variety of a little bit of everything. Just the trucks, we've got 30 trucks so we have 30 drivers and then we have three full-time mechanics and two welders and that's just for the trucking part of it. We do have some other employees that work in the yard here in the manufacturing sector. Besides the two trucks that work for Pump Creek primarily, we have five other trucks that haul wood for private individuals. And we haul for some of the larger wood contractors, self-employed contractors in the area. Plus we have a chicken crew that goes out and chips wood for biomass also. As far as wood truck drivers, we probably get experience most of the time. We had some people that have come in here, we've trained them, we have one employee that's been here for almost 20 years. He started off and he was 15 years old here and we've trained him and he basically can run every aspect of the company. He's capable. And we've had a few others that we've brought in as green horns and trained them. But now we're kind of looking for, it takes a special kind of person to go in the woods. You just can't take any truck driver and put them in the woods. It's kind of a special breed, so to speak, which is getting very, very hard to find because these kind of drivers came off the farms and there's very few farmers left, so to speak. So it's very hard to find a good person to go in the woods. Goodridge Lumber actually began in 1974, which is many years ago, on this piece of land here in Albany. And the mill got started because we wanted to build a log home of our own. And worked with the farmer down the road that was doing harvesting up behind the mill here. And we said, well, we will help you all winter, get the logs out and instead of payment, let's save out some nine and 10 inch diameter logs for our log home. We had been living in a mobile home and thought the dream home was a log home. So when we got the logs all together and spring came, we had the pile of logs and the light bulb went off. Wouldn't it be fun to saw our own logs? So that was probably a dangerous question because after we thought about it and found a used sawmill over in Glover, not too far from here, a bell saw on a hay wagon with a tarp over it and it was a bargain for $500. So that was a big purchase. And got it home, took it to the farmer's yard down below and it needed a tractor to run the blade and hooked the tractor up, the PTO and we found out that the goodbye of $500 was maybe not quite such a goodbye as we thought because they were missing parts. And not having money at our disposal to buy these parts, we did look at that log pile and actually sold the logs that originally were going into the home for parts and had a sawmill that was workable and that was in 1974 and set up on Route 14 a little bit below where we are sitting now and used tin poles and this bell saw with a neighbor's tractor and in 1974 a lot of railroad beds were being replaced and a mill and hard whip could not saw the hardwood railroad ties fast enough. So we did some custom sawing of hardwood, the six by eights and seven by nines for him. So that actually started our sawmill career. We started out with the hardwood railroad ties operated down in the the mill yard we call it down below for a couple years and then moved up to the site where we are now and had another mill building and we switched to softwood and pine and a little bit of cedar. And what we noticed was that although the softwood and pine were readily available in log form they were more of a commodity item. The softwood logs often went up through Route 14 into Canada were processed and sent back to the US and sold for less than what we could process that same log from our hillside. So we knew that this was not a long term profitable venture. Pine was a good commodity item but the cedar was a little unique in the fact that it grew locally. And we felt that being involved in a local product a specialty product, a natural product, very decay resistant, bug resistant, very beautiful that it was a specialty area that would bode well for us. So in 1985, we switched strictly to cedar. Goodridge Lumber currently has eight full-time employees and my sister who works two days a week in the office. We have changed mills a couple different times the actual sawmill that we mill the logs on. We have a chase hydraulic carriage and an edger. A sash saw from Sweden that is thin curved blades so we're saving as much wood as possible when we're cutting. So we have our employees, we buy our raw material from over a hundred different landowners, loggers and truckers on a yearly basis. Our vendor list is 300 plus but there are usually a hundred folks that are doing harvesting. And we are unique in the sense that we get our material from a 75 mile radius, which is a very local area. And the cedar generally grows in swampy areas. So the challenge is mother nature needs to give us some good cold weather in the winter. 80% of our product that we use yearly, 80% is brought in during the winter months from December until mid-time. The owners of the Goodridge Lumber Corporation are myself and my three sons Doug Mark and Brian. They all play very important roles. We have lots of different skills that are used in our business here. Doug, my oldest son does the sawing. Mark tends to planing operations and maintenance. And Brian is responsible for the yard, unloading the truck, stacking the logs, delivering and also we're all working sales. I will say that I feel very fortunate and blessed to be working in a business using a natural resource with my sons who are also my business partners. And that's an opportunity that not everyone has. So I feel very fortunate.