Wowsers! Fast harvesting head

It is fascinating, but I wonder, why would they need to cut trees that are so young.

Notice that they're thinning that stand, cutting the pulpwood (6" - 9" diam eter) and leaving some larger pieces for timber (or "chip-n-saw"). That rig is for high-efficiency cutting of pulpwood, which is a low-margin product and has to be harvested efficiently to make a buck.

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Watched only first minute or so(*), but that surely appears to be that to me, too...

(*) skipped over to middle and end-ish segments; more of the same just different machine model(s) it seemed.

Thanks, I did not know, makes sense

How low of a margin? I know that there are places where they're growing trees specifically for pulp -- they let the stand get up to about 6" diameter, mow it down, then repeat.

I know it's done in Oregon, and IIRC in places in the Southeast.

There are pulpwood "farms" in the Southeast and in New England, where they clear-cut pulpwood. And then there are a lot of conventional logging operat ions, where they keep thinning out the pulpwood and let the lumber trees gr ow.

I don't know enough about the business in general to tell you where, or jus t how much they can make from pulpwood. My exposure to it was from a couple of companies who make the machinery. I had to do some background research and that's all I learned about it.

They make bigger ones for harvesting lumber logs, but when the trees get really big, the cutting is done by hand and they skid the logs out of the timber stand.

I do know that the pulpwood patches I've seen were on dead-flat patches amidst hay fields -- so, presumably, it's land that can't be more profitably put to raising lettuce or radishes or onions or whatever makes more $$ than hay.

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The clearcut areas I saw when living in northern MN 30 years ago weren't flat; mostly there were lots of small hills or mounds, a consequence of glaciation in several ice ages. Some of that land was farmed by early-1900's Swedish and Norwegian immigrants. But with topsoil only a foot thick (it comes back about an inch per millennium after the glaciers scrape it off) the farms couldn't last, and went back to forest - birch, balsam, aspen, jackpine.

I was thinking this is a real fancy machine for making fence posts.