Lumber future vs cord wood price?

[bholler]

farmer's market, as long as you don't accept cards including food stamps there is no digital record that the government can subpoena. He could still get reported by whoever hates him, but so are firewood sales.
Total $ amount is also relevant. IRS rarely audit someone actually making $20K for reporting $10K, but if you make $200K and only report $100K, audit is very likely.

Again we are talking about people cheating the system collecting disability then working on the side.

 

[bholler]

I shovel chips into barrel stove and camp stove. Burns pretty hot.

That may work for you in TX with your primative stoves. It absolutely will not for most of us. That much surface area can lead to really bad and dangerous backpuffing in more efficient stoves.

 

[bholler]

If I want them to burn slow I leave some ash in firebox, and mix chips into the ash. The ash provides some insulation from heat and air.

Again that may work for you in TX. Not going to cut it here

 

[SpaceBus]

Yes. The harbor freight $500 for chipping yard waste of mine and neighbors. Produced enough wood chips for myself. I just lay them on backyard for sun drying before piling them under tarp. I shovel chips into barrel stove and camp stove. Burns pretty hot.

CA/OR/WA wild fire areas are not desert but grass/shrub land and forest undergrowth, these shrubs grows for a few years to mature size. We don't harvest them, and they self combust every a few years in wild fires. Google Earth is your friend!

In the time you spent using that tiny little chipper I could have bought a few trailer loads and come out ahead. My time is worth more than that. Even my Wallenstein PTO chipper/shredder is almost too small to make it worth my time to feed it. I don't burn the chips or shreds, just use them for mulch and fill material.

Google earth doesn't tell you what is or is not a high desert and what shrubs grow quickly. CA, OR, and WA are comprised mostly of high desert with a bit of boreal rainforest in places near the coast. The majority of those states are arid high desert. I think too many people picture the Egyptian sand dunes when people say "desert", but there are many different kind of desert biomes, all of them characterize by average precipitation, not temperature or soil composition. Deserts can have very arable soil, but not enough moisture to support large amounts of flora and fauna. Furthermore tundra biomes are considered deserts, and almost every inch of ground is covered by short plants during the summer seasons. Plant life does not define a desert. The high deserts in the US host primarily coniferous plants that lose very little moisture from their leaves. These "shrubs" as you call them are mostly juniper and cypress, which grow very slow in the desert.


Anyway, lets get this back to lumber and cordwood prices. Start your own thread for discussing destroying ecosystems for biomass fuel.

 

[SpaceBus]

Do you get my point -- in many of the areas, the vegetation will burn when it accumulates enough biomass that the area's limited water amount cannot support. They become dry and a fire hazard. They WILL die of fire if we don't cut them, which is what's happening now.

If we cut them (but not including the trees that would survive wild fires), we remove the combustible biomass so the wild fires can be avoided or become milder.

Have you ever considered that the fires are a part of the plants' life cycles? Again, you are advocating destroying an ecosystem for wood chip fuel. Please, start your own thread about that topic.