Fall 2023 3 Last year, despite my failure to adequately protect myself against numerous bloodthirsty ticks, I enjoyed spending a day working with VFA-member landowners Bill and Stephanie Osl. After that successful endeavor, I decided to again offer a day of work at the 2023 Forestry Summit silent auction. Clearly, my prowess with a chainsaw has become more widely known as bidding for my services was furious out of the gate. In the end, I was pleased that the winning bid not only surpassed the price of every inanimate silent auction item, but also that I would spend a day with VFA President Dan Hockenberger and his crew at Virginia Forest Resources LLC (VFR) on an active logging job. Make no mistake, loggers are the backbone of the forestry supply chain. Nothing—not forest management, not processing, not the transportation of logs or chips, not the implementation of best management practices-— happens without this critical segment. Virginia’s loggers provide both the muscle and literal movement of Virginia’s $23 billion forestry industry, supporting the livelihood of 108,500 employees throughout our community. VFA is incredibly proud to serve more than 50 companies engaged in our harvesting and transportation segment. Nevertheless, today, Virginia’s loggers are very much operating on the edge. Job-to-job, day-to-day, tree- to-tree, on the brink. We settled on an October Monday for work, with Dan noting that Mondays typically present more challenges than other days of the week. I arrived at VFR’s job in Quinton, a mixed stand clearcut on 43 acres adjacent to a residential farm property, just before 8:00 a.m. The full crew had already been hard at work for an hour or so upon my arrival. Shortly after greeting me, we spotted a gigantic 10+ point buck galloping along the edge of the soy field next to the job site. Dan looked on, helplessly, with neither bow nor arrow. After joking that he likely would not have been able to tag the buck by bow, and Dan immediately producing photographic evidence suggesting otherwise, we resolved to press onward towards the tasks at hand. We stood on a jigsaw puzzle of carefully placed logging mats protecting the dirt road as Dan explained the process by which he won the bid for this work, the objectives of the landowner as expressed through their consulting forester, and the different markets to which they would deliver that day. As he was describing this last part, he received a text notification from a procurement forester that one of VFR’s primary market outlets would not be accepting anything for the entire week. As we stood 50 yards from the chipper actively loading a trailer, the potential destination of this material had changed in an instant. It would now go to the only market within a reasonable travel radius, one that every other logging company within the same radius would also need to utilize in the coming week until it too was full. This elicited little more than a slight shrug of Dan’s shoulders and his assurance that over the last decade, this had become the industry’s standard operating procedure. Next, Dan talked through the logistics of the day with his crew foreman, Chris, a 31-year-old who had been with VFR for nine years. It was easy to see why Dan would tab Chris as a leader. Chris ran through what everyone on the property was working on and where they were located. His description seemed more symphonic than I would have imagined. Each employee and each machine were working in harmony with one another to create an efficient operation. Dan suggested we go check things out, so off we went in hard hats and highlighter-yellow shirts. Our work on this glorious October Monday would be to hand-fell some large-diameter trees that were marked for harvest and standing adjacent to a Livin’ on the Edge FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR UPDATE Corey Connors Dan Hockenberger
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