The dairy cows, mounds of hay and their accompanying smells are long gone.
The ability to make a living off the rolling landscape above the Wisconsin River has remained.
With a massive power saw, a $10,000 Swedish milling machine and three simple solar kilns, Jim Birkemeier is turning firewood into hardwood flooring and a sustainable income.
Instead of $80 for a face cord destined for a fireplace, Birkemeier can get at least 100 times that for the cherry, walnut and white and red oak he harvests from the 200-acre farm his parents bought in 1973 in southern Sauk County.
Some of the wood is from fallen or dead trees. Other pieces are curved and would appear unusable for a straight piece of flooring before Birkemeier begins. He cuts the wood into planks on the sawmill, dries it in the kilns and then mills it into flooring in the lower level of the farm's 100-year-old dairy barn, which hasn't hosted a milking since 1968.
"They're worthless logs and we get top dollar for them," Birkemeier said. "It's fun to make something out of nothing."
Birkemeier, 54, who is now teaching his alternative forestry methods to others, dreams of similar operations throughout the wooded countryside that could provide opportunities for other landowners while maintaining the health of their woods.
"Buying local doesn't stop with food," said Alex Greene, who owns Red Beard Lumber just a few miles southwest of Spring Green. He has been making hardwood flooring under Birkemeier's guidance for nearly two years.
Selling retail
Birkemeier and his partner, Shawn Olmstead, are working with about a dozen area landowners to turn their trees into a variety of products such as flooring, countertops, cabinets and even toilet seats that are sold at the Spring Green Timber Growers store. The shop, in a former bank building constructed in 1900, opened in December in downtown Spring Green.
Birkemeier helps the landowners, who are scattered throughout southern Sauk, northern Iowa and western Dane counties, to better manage their forests with what he calls "full-vigor forestry." He pays them twice the market value for their wood.
His goal is to someday pay four times the market value and to get some of those landowners to begin making, selling and installing hardwood flooring, which would bring them the maximum return for their wood.
"It's the ideal situation. You know where your wood is coming from, and it's improving the land. It's a win-win situation," said Greene, who moved to the area in 2006 from Hawaii with his father, Gordon Greene, a Zen Buddhist priest.
They bought the 109-acre piece of land on Sneed Creek Road in 2005 to build a temple. When it's built, much of the structure will come from their own forest, milled with their own sawmill, instead of using wood that may have traveled thousands of miles before it was sold at the retail level.
"A third of the cost is just moving the wood around," Greene said of wood that may be harvested in the United States, Canada or Russia, shipped to China for processing and then to stores here. "We saw an opportunity."
Selective harvesting
Birkemeier is succeeding by thinking differently from the way he was taught about forestry in the early 1970s at UW-Madison.
Eight- to 15-inch-diameter healthy trees are left to grow bigger. Dead trees are not overlooked. One tree per acre is harvested per year instead of scores of trees harvested per acre once every 15 to 20 years. Of the 200 acres of woodlands on his parents' farm, Birkemeier needs just 50 acres a year on which to harvest.
"These are the trees that die in my woods," Birkemeier said, while showing off a sample of mixed hardwood flooring at the store. "We harvest every year, and we produce an annual income. That way, you can be in business."
Birkemeier estimated that about 470,000 acres of forest in Sauk, Iowa and western Dane counties are being underused and said scores of landowners could benefit from his methods.
A Madison native who grew up in the Crestwood neighborhood on Madison's Far West Side, Birkemeier worked as a traditional forester from 1976 to 1982 before taking an administrative position with the Boy Scouts.
In 1985, he left Scouting to "re-learn forestry" and to farm. He bought his first sawmill in 1988 and that same year built a solar-powered kiln to dry the wood. He made his first flooring product in 1997 but realized that it was too expensive to have someone else add the tongue and groove, which allows the flooring to fit together.
In 2003, he bought a milling machine that is about the size of a basement table saw. It shaves the top and bottom of the board and adds the tongue and groove all in one pass.
"A lot of the time, a landowner doesn't know his options," said Elmo Drilling, an agri-forester from Buffalo, N.Y., who is learning how to make flooring with Birkemeier's machine. "You can see that selling this in a 30-mile radius is really green in terms of a carbon footprint."Wisconsin State Journal
