From a hillside near his barn, Jim Birkemeier looks down at a freshly sawn tree trunk that has just arrived by trailer to the valley of his farm.
"Norway maple," he calls out, identifying the tree that until recently had shaded my home from the morning sun.
Like a lot of trees in Madison lately, our maple had reached its end. Unlike those lost in recent storms, the cause was not violent. Maybe it was drought, too much road salt, problems with the roots or all of those.
The day the city came to cut it down, the sawing crew agreed to leave behind the trunk and some of the larger limbs.
It is bad enough to lose a tree, and worse to think of all its stateliness disappearing into a chipper.
That is how and why my maple log and I wound up with Birkemeier, some 40 miles west of Madison at his farm, Timbergreen.
I was trying to save the wood of a tree; Birkemeier has been advancing a method for saving forests.
A former forestry consultant for clients such as Marshall Erdman & Associates, Birkemeier, who grew up on Madison's west side, has since become a pioneer, specializing in sustainable wood floors and solar-powered wood-drying kilns. His cutting practices are more aptly called lifting practices, as more often than not, his timber is found lying on the forest floor.
This fall, he will speak about his forestry methods in Scotland, Indonesia and Vietnam, where he has been invited to take part in a conference put on by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Amid those engagements, he is also scheduled in September to begin installing at Oakwood Village West a 900-square-foot hardwood floor that is made from the oak, hickory and cherry trees cleared to make room for the retirement center's expansion. The extra lumber from those trees has already gone to the residents' communal woodworking shop.
"They'll have wood from their own forest to work with," Birkemeier says as he stands before the stack of boards. "That's the coolest thing ever, to use your own wood in your own house."
Building his own house with wood from the farm is how he honed his model of forestry. He planked his floors with a mix and pattern of woods not found commercially, and in doing so, he said, he developed a plan for profitable and sustainable forestry.
By selling the finished final product, wood floors, Birkemeier says he can allow his forest to mature and deepen while making more money on the land than from any other use.
"I don't know what else is so plentiful that can be made into something so valuable with just simple machines," Birkemeier says of the trees surrounding him.
The first step, and one of necessity for the forest on his land, he notes, is to use smaller or more crooked trees than usual.
"We really had to learn to make money on worthless wood," he says, demonstrating by rolling a small log onto his sawmill. "We've never cut a good tree."
Found on the forest floor, this black cherry tree measured maybe a foot in diameter and took a bend about 2 feet up its trunk.
As the saw made passes, its thin band of blade sliced away boards with just a thin layer of pale sapwood under the bark; the rest was heartwood the color of brandy.
"That will look beautiful in a floor," he said.
In addition to sawing oddly shaped logs of sought-after species such as cherry, Birkemeier also uses trees that traditionally don't have a commercial market, such as elm and aspen.
All of these trees get cut and dried in do-it-yourself solar kilns, which are like a cross between greenhouses and sheds. Their southern-facing panels collect heat from the sun and provide the warm air needed to dry the wood. At night, the air cools and the water inside the wood balances by being drawn to the surface.
Commercial lumber kilns, Birkemeier noted, quickly dry wood with air that's super-heated by electricity. They are so powerful that after the drying is done, the lumber is lightly steamed so that the surface of the wood has some moisture.
In contrast, Birkemeier says the gentler, cyclic drying of a solar kiln makes the lumber better and easier to work with, and the energy costs are minimal. Drying a board that is 1 foot wide and 10 feet long costs about a penny this way, he says.
"You could build a solar kiln out of almost anything," he points out as he walks away from the simple wood and sheet metal structures, "straw bales, concrete blocks, whatever's on hand."
Rather than sticking to a single type of wood for a floor, Birkemeier usually creates a custom blend of several species, even varying the widths of the planks to make the most of the lumber.
By doing so, the value of a forest is increased enormously, Birkemeier says. And at the same time, his system prevents having to cut trees faster than they can naturally replace themselves.
"Elm right now is basically worthless commercially, but it's one of the favorites" among his customers for flooring, Birkemeier says as he runs a board of red elm through a machine that cut the tongue and groove into richly textured plank. "If you tried to sell it commercially, it's nothing. It's pallet lumber."
For the last few years, Birkemeier has been trying to convince farmers and other forest managers to adopt his model, which he lays out on his Web site, www.timbergreenforestry.com.
This summer, at least two other nearby landowners are working with him to develop a similar operation. And he's pitching the practice all over the world as a means of poverty relief and forest preservation.
Other ideas, he says, are rustling through those leaves. Like what to do with the pieces of wood that are too small for oddly shaped flooring planks, too small even for pens or other trinkets.
Birkemeier wonders: How about making ethanol?
"The intelligent way to make ethanol is not with good grain like corn, but with waste," he emphasizes, gesturing to sawdust and wood chips. "We're not quite there yet."The Capital Times
