Georgia’s Hill Logging has a succession strategy in place.
By David Abbott
JEFFERSONVILLE, GA.
Given the advancing age of the logging force nationwide, many wonder what that means for the future of the industry. Charles Hill, 63, and his brother, Larry, 59, owners of central Georgia’s Hill Logging, Inc., would be lying if they said the thought never crossed their minds. “I wonder who’s gonna be me,” Charles says. But the truth is, they know the company they inherited from their father will be in good hands after they are gone. The next generation is already in place, even if it’s not quite time for them to take the reins. It includes Larry’s son, Ken, 32; Charles’ son Jeremy, 30; and their nephew, James Faulk, Jr., 31.
A succession or transition plan is an important component for any family-owned entity, and the Hills have theirs in place. The brothers are gradually allowing their successors to acquire ownership, and more responsibility. “At my age, I’m tired of being the guarantor of the guarantee,” Charles laughs.
All the younger men have been working on the crew since they were old enough, and as Charles points out, they have plenty of energy. “What I have here that makes me feel better is that Jeremy, James and Ken work well together,” Charles says. He also points to their combination of hands-on experience and fluency with modern technology. “They can work on machines and they can answer e-mails; they all have Blackberries.”
Youthful Influence
It was that youthful spark that led the Hills to add processors to their mix nine years ago. Before that they used a CTR 314 pull-through delimber and saw hand. Charles recalls that one day Jeremy suggested they consider processors. He was 20 at the time. “I said, son we can’t afford that stuff.” Jeremy, who was confident that processors were the way to go, replied that they couldn’t afford not to, with the size of the wood and speed of the processor. They studied the idea for two years before taking the plunge. “I was skeptical,” Charles admits. He remembers speaking with Waratah’s Doug Landers in 2002. “He said, ‘All I can tell you is, if you buy it, I will be here anytime you need anything.’ And for nine years he has been, along with Mike Gillis.”
Hill Logging’s first processor was a new Waratah 620 mounted on a used John Deere 200 excavator. The machine had 2,500 hours on it when acquired and they used it for another 7,500 hours. They bought another in 2004, when they expanded from one to two crews. Both crews now use the same model processor. The machine now on the Plum Creek crew is a 2005 model bought in 2006 to replace the one bought in 2002, and one bought in 2010 replaced the one bought in 2004. It had 2,000 hours on it. Jeremy Hill rebuilt the head with help from Waratah field maintenance rep Mike Gillis and David Warnocks of Warnocks Equipment Repair.
Charles acknowledges that Jeremy was right 11 years ago. The processor increases efficiency and upgrades product. “The University of Georgia did a study for Plum Creek on that, showing anywhere from 20-40% upgrade on product separation,” he says. “But let me make one point, to brag on Jeremy and James: the machine won’t do anything that the man in the seat doesn’t tell it. You have to have excellent hand-eye coordination, you have to be able to think on the move, and I think we have two of the best.” Along with years of experience—Jeremy has probably 16,000 hours in one, he says—he partially credits their skill to their age group (growing up with computers and video games.) That’s the next generation of loggers.
Crews
Most of the operation is made up of men who have worked with Larry and Charles since they were all young, including their brother-in-law, James Faulk, Sr.—men, like the Hills, who are now mostly in their 50s and 60s. But as yet they lack the experience to do what their fathers do, and they have their hands full working every day.
“We are one crew working in two places,” Charles explains. “We had them both on the same job, but we had private wood to cut, so we split off, and also as the family’s gotten bigger and bigger, if you don’t haul more then before long you’ll be working for minimum wage or just for the fun of it. So you have to do more in order to service everybody’s needs.”
Equipment on Larry’s crew includes a John Deere 848H skidder, two Tigercat loaders—a 1999 230 and 2000 230B—a 2008 Tigercat 724E cutter, a Cat D6 dozer and a John Deere 2054 carrier with Waratah 622B processor. Larry operates the loader and Ken mans the skidder. James Faulk, Sr., who is married to Charles and Larry’s sister, is a truck driver. James Faulk, Jr., runs the processor. William Perry drives the feller-buncher. Stanley Davis is also a truck driver on Larry’s crew and Mitchell Williams is in training.
Charles’ crew has a similar setup, except for the loader. Charles operates a 2005 Tigercat 240B track loader, while Jeremy runs a 622B Waratah processor on a 2054 John Deere carrier. Charles also runs a 2005 Tigercat 724D cutter with 5500 head as needed. Lee Perry is behind the wheel of a Tigercat 620D skidder, which replaced an aging John Deere 648 in June 2010. Chilor Walters, Jerry Miller and Greg Floyd are the truck drivers. Floyd’s brother, Herman, also helps with dozer work and pulls utility duty.
Charles says that each crew has three and a half men—William Perry swinging from crew to crew as needed. Normally, the Hills use only the newer feller-buncher, moving it from job-to-job as needed, with Perry working both jobs. “As long as we are on a clear-cut, we are all right,” Charles says. “He can keep up with it on clear-cuts.” The older cutter is a backup. On thinning jobs, Charles will operate it to help keep up if Perry gets behind. Perry has been with the Hills since 1976. “He told me one day, ‘I believe I could cut down,’” Charles relates. “And I told him ‘Well, just don’t turn over.’ That was his formal training. And he’s been cutting ever since. He’s only turned over one time that I know of. And he was completely over that time, upside down, and it was a brand new machine,” Charles laughs.
Perry is going on 36 years with the Hills, and his cousin, Lee Perry, is in his 26th year. Obviously, people stay with the Hills a long time. “We say most of them just die. We had one man who worked with us 36 years; he died with cancer. He was good. He only had one eye but, buddy, he could pull wood.”
The Hills own six trucks: a 2000 CH Mack and five Peterbilts, models 2005, 2006, 2007, and two 2008s. All the Peterbilts have a C13 Cat engine and 10 speed transmissions. The reason they have switched in recent years from Mack to Peterbilt, Charles says, is because they are lighter.” In Georgia we can legally haul just a little over 28 tons, depending on how much fuel you have. That’s why we use Precision Loads onboard scales.” The Hills have used onboard scales since 1981, and have dealt with Tom Kendall of Precision all that time. The Hills also use Pitts lightweight series trailers. Charles says the only problems he has had with the lightweight trailer bolsters is when mills unload with forklifts instead of a crane or knuckleboom loader. In addition to the Hill trucks, Larry’s crew uses one contract trucker, J Lynn Trucking. All company trucks are painted in the same blue color—their father’s favorite color—except for the one Mack, which is white, but Charles says he intends to paint the fenders blue. Each truck has the driver’s name painted on the door above the company logo.
Each crew is set up according to what seems to work best. Larry’s crew uses two loaders, two older models each with 20,000 hours, in conjunction, set up alongside the processor, which is on tracks but remains stationary on the loading deck. Charles uses a newer track loader on his crew, moving it to log piles made by the processor, which moves around the tract along with the skidders and cutter. The loader was bought used with 1,900 hours on it four years ago. “We do it this way because this works faster for us, and that works faster for them. At any time if something changes you might see us all together.”
Typically, Charles runs the track loader on his crew, but when necessary he gets help from one of the truck drivers, Jerry Miller, who has been working with the Hills for about 20 years. Charles loads six setout trailers and moves them to a pickup area with an old Mack that is no longer roadworthy. Highway trucks retrieve loaded trailers staged in a clearing closer to the highway, and drop off unloaded trailers. By contrast, Larry’s crew loads directly at the ramp, though it has four extra setout trailers and one setout truck. The two Mack setout trucks have been in use since the mid 1980s. “They just don’t wear out,” Charles says.
“We probably don’t keep up with it as exactly as we did at one time,” Charles says, but the Hills seem to know in amazing detail every penny of operational cost per ton and every hour of use on each machine. They know how much money they are actually making, how much fiber each gallon of fuel puts on a trailer, how long each tire lasts on each truck, and so on. This is because they have long kept meticulous records. Their office has a room of filing cabinets labeled with each year going back to 1990, with detailed files on each and every job worked in each year. They know that the 648 burns about 5.5 gallons an hour, and that the 848 burns about a gallon an hour more but that it pulls almost twice as much wood per drag. “We’ll run tests every once in a while just to check. We still keep up with it, but we don’t keep up with it as close.” The reason is that the company’s long-time secretary retired two years ago and today most end-of-the day record keeping falls to Jeremy and James.
The Hills don’t have a shop to speak of. They do have a shelter across the road from their office and a field to park lowboys and spare trucks. Charles elaborates: “We employ various mechanic shops we know that we count on: Warnocks Equipment Repair, Bennet Forestry Service, Haskin Diesel, Rory Payne Inc, Ricky Hasty and Jordan’s Welding Service. We just call these folks to come in so we don’t have much overhead on a shop and parts. They all have a shop and mobile service truck with everything on it.”
Market
Larry’s crew works on Plum Creek holdings while Charles’ is found on private stumpage that he buys. Treelength and precut pine logs go to Tolleson Lumber Co. in Perry; poles to Langdale in Chauncey; hardwood pulpwood to International Paper in Gordon or Rayonier in Eastman; chip-n-saw to Gilman at Dudley and pine pulpwood to Graphic Packaging in Macon. Combined production amounts to about 90-100 loads a week, with the Plum Creek crew usually slightly outdoing the private land crew.
Another operation, run by Steve Millwood, comes behind the Hills to grind tops and limbs for fuelwood. Hill doesn’t make any money off the arrangement. Charles has considered handling fuelwood himself but says he hasn’t been able to figure out a way to make it pay, given the expense of the equipment, without a reliable market. “I don’t see how the people who are doing it now are doing it.” In an effort to create such a market, Hill says that he and his brother and several others tried to get a wood-burning 20MW electric generating plant built locally but were unable to find any company interested in buying the electricity.
Hill says he has a simple rule of thumb for determining if a job is worth taking. He counts out on one hand 20-20-20-20-28. “You take 20 minutes to load it, 20 miles to haul it, 20 minutes to unload it, a minimum of $20 per ton to put it on the trailer, and get 28 tons to the load,” he explains. “Dale Greene at the University of Georgia laughed at me when I told him that. Later, we went on a Plum Creek tract where UGA did a sample. When they finished the study, Dale came back and said ‘Charles, you got it pretty close.’ You can’t do it for less than that.” This rule is why he says he won’t invest in a chipper or grinder for now. The numbers aren’t all in place. “That feller-buncher is $200,000. The skidder is $200,000. And the chipper is $400,000. And you’re going to haul it for $16-17 a ton? And they take it one week and don’t the next. Do the math. Get a stick; you can figure that one in the sand. It won’t work, and if it won’t work on paper, it won’t work.” Still, he wishes he could find a way to make it work. “We’re going to have cut 28,000 tons on this tract, and there were 28,000 tons of fuelwood on it, I bet you, if not more. I would love to haul it. But it won’t work, so I let someone else do it.”
Despite the economy in recent years, the Hills say they haven’t seen a lot of downtime. Some mills have had to cut back or have brief shutdowns, but overall they have continued to buy wood. Prices aren’t that good, though, Charles points out. “I think we have been working for about the same rate for the last five years, and you know what all has happened in that time. There has to be a reckoning day sometime.” And he adds, as time goes on, more keeps going out, but less comes in. “Fuel is about to kill us, and we get no adjustment whatsoever,” he says. “We all just keep fighting a war as best as we can, and maybe one day we’ll win a battle.”
To counteract the situation, Charles says they keep their eyes open for any opportunity to maximize productivity and cut costs. “I read every article I can and try to figure out any other way I can to be more efficient. I think we are about as efficient as we can get.”
