Wood chipper business finding new opportunities

COOPERSTOWN, N.D. — You’d be amazed at how quickly Rod Zorn and his 435-horsepower wood chipper can turn an obsolete tree belt into a pile of gold, red or walnut-colored mulch.

And — following with two stump grinders — Zorn’s crew can turn that belt bed into a seedbed.

“Oh, I suppose if you were to look around in North Dakota, the average chipper is going to be about 80 to 100 horsepower — a big one would be 120 horse,” Zorn says while working on a farmstead belt north of Cooperstown, N.D. “This one here is 435 horsepower.”

Twice as big and twice as fast.

It’s hard to generalize, Zorn says, but he usually can do a half a mile, start up, cleaned and gone in four to five days.

TRIAL BY WIND

Zorn, 37, is one of those scrappy, young entrepreneurs on North Dakota’s landscape, with strong ties to the agricultural market.

His parents were in the retail business in Cooperstown. His father works for Otter Tail Power Co. Rod graduated high school in 1991 and went to school for welding in Bismarck. Instead of welding, he started a custom harvesting business.

“I’d done some combining when I was in high school, and so I ended up buying a combine and started custom-combining,” Zorn says. “I did that for five years, just in North Dakota — from around Wahpeton, up to Cooperstown and then up to Bottineau.”

After a marriage ended in 1997, Zorn went into over-the-road flatbed trucking for Star Transportation Co. of Bottineau. In 2001, he went with a trucking company in Brandon, Minn. By 2004, he was looking for something that would keep him home.

Rod’s older brother, David, a lineman for Dakota Valley Power Co., in Gackle, N.D., owned a small, part-time residential tree business and offered to sell it. Rod bought the business and immediately thought about how he could make it bigger.

In September 2004, Zorn traveled to Atmore, Ala., northeast of Mobile, to help clean up tree damage from “Ivan the Terrible” — the Category 5 hurricane off the Atlantic coast.

The storm spawned some 117 tornadoes and caused some $13 billion in damage in the eastern United States.

In Alabama, the storm carried winds at 120 mph and tree damage to match. Contractors came from around the nation.

“It was a culture shock — a learning experience,” Zorn recalls. “I could see how the tree business was done on a larger scale, and it gave me ideas on how I could expand my business.”

Initially, Zorn was hired on with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Homeowners would bring debris to the street sides and contractors like Zorn’s would haul it off to a landfill. He hired freelance truckers and loggers to complete the work.

“Logging is a major industry down there. They have good loggers, equipment, knuckle-boom loaders,” he says. “It’s like finding someone around here to run a combine.”

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit. He and his parents and fiancee, Sarah Dahl, went to Hattiesburg, Miss., a city of about 44,000, north of Biloxi, Miss. This time, Zorn chose not to work for FEMA and instead worked directly for homeowners, bringing the debris to the road.

“The best advertising was the sound of a chain saw,” Zorn says.

Zorn turned his sights on state park work. He bought two stump grinders and worked in the Gulfport and Biloxi areas for parks, where tidal surges of 51 feet had devastated tree stands. Saltwater had killed thousands of trees had to be removed.

“That was the first time I’d seen big chippers working,” he says.

REALLY BIG CHIPPERS

Zorn returned to North Dakota in June 2006, and by July 1, he’d paid $153,000 for a 265-horsepower chipper from Dynamic Manufacturing Corp. of Weidman, Mich.

In spring 2009, he bought a mulching machine for about $70,000. A conveyor takes the product through the machine and uses a set of screens to make different mulch products — from 1 to 3 inches in diameter and mulch 2 to 2.25 inches for landscaping. To market the product, he created a separate business he calls Dakota Mulch.

Owning a high-capacity chipper has transformed Zorn’s business.

Last August, he traded his first chipper in and bought a 435-horsepower model that listed at $300,000.

“At first, I told people what I could do, and it was hard for them to swallow,” he says of the speed of the machine.

The process starts with a set of Bobcats, equipped with shears or chain saws.

The Bobcats carry each tree to a 12-foot bed on the chipper that can handle up to a 30-inch diameter tree trunk — oak, ash or pine — like a hot knife going through butter. Larger trees are ripped and chipped. There are very few trees in any tree row that can’t get through the machine.

When everything’s working right, he can fill a semi-trailer in 45 minutes with the machine.

“We run semis with walking floor trailers,” he says. “It’s different than hauling wheat. We’re hauling cubic yards — 80 to 100 cubic yards in a semi.”

All of this is followed with two stump grinders.

WASTE TO ASSET

Initially, Zorn’s chip product was a waste.

He started hauling it to landfills or putting it into alkali spots — worked into the ground for humus.

Zorn looked for places that might burn it as a biofuel. There was one place in Minnesota, but the price would only cover the trucking, and it didn’t add to his bottom line.

He traveled to upstate New York to look at burning systems, but came back realizing he needed another market.

“I was looking to be as competitive with an excavator or dozer,” he says. “I decided that if I could sell my material, that could complete the circle.”

Last spring, he bought a mulch machine, used to make products for playgrounds. The machine allows him to dye the product red, brown or yellow — “whatever they want” — to be used landscaping. He’s making the stuff for horse arenas, fairs, livestock bedding. The product works especially well for horses because it isn’t dusty and absorbs liquid waste.

He’s selling loads to Viking Pork of Esmond, N.D., and to other farms near Langdon and Bottineau, he says.

In some cases, the wood chips are used as compost mulch when a pig dies. The carcasses are buried in a woodchip pit, and the heating in the piles removes all but the skeleton, and the fully decomposed remains can be spread onto a farm field.

The company takes the wood chips to a stockpiling center, just outside of Cooperstown, where 40 or 50 semi-loads are in a pile he likens to a silage pile. When it rains, the piles form a 1- to 2-inch crust, a half-inch black layer and then, farther down, it looks “like the day you put it there.”

Zorn has priced the mulch product at generally $20 per cubic yard in its natural color and another $5 for colored product.

“We still do residential, but we started looking for bigger jobs — road right-of-ways, shelterbelts, tornado and wind storm damage,” he says.

Initially, some of the first woodchips went into landfills.

Chipping work can go into the wintertime, but cutting the trees can be stopped if — like last winter — snow is too deep. Frozen wood is “just awesome,” if he can get at it.

FARM-RANCH POTENTIAL

In early October, Zorn’s crew went to the North Dakota’s Stump Lake area, where Nelson County was building 30 new campsites.

Zorn says one of his big opportunities is for farmstead tree belt removal, and he’ll travel the state for that.

“We’re finding that a lot of shelterbelts have pretty much reached maturity,” Zorn says. “A lot of them have the Chinese elm, which was a fast-growing tree. Many of those trees are 12 to 18 inches around.

“We’re finding that so many shelterbelts are just old, or have some damage from years of abuse — chemical spray.”

Sometimes, Zorn says, the farmers simply have outgrown them with equipment size. With minimum- and no-till planting systems, farmers don’t need as many trees to stop erosion.

Zorn says he’ll take out trees that are alive or dead, but says when they’re “stone dead,” they’re harder to handle.

“I’d much rather work with a shelterbelt that has some life in it,” he says.

He recently worked a shelterbelt of ash where the tree bases nearly touched and the tops were entangled. He would prefer trees that have at least 2 feet between them. A one-mile stretch often is doable in the $7,000 range. Zorn acknowledges that’s more than an excavator usually charges, but there’s no pile of trees to farm around, and it’s all done — no return trips for burying trees.

As for future plans for his company, Zorn hopes to go from his one-crew program to two crews. Trees would be brought to the Cooperstown area, where a third crew would make mulch and alternate with residential jobs.

“We get a lot of controversy per se, with some of the older farmers who remember what it was like when they needed trees to stop the blowing” soil, Zorn says. “A lot of them put the trees back in the days when they worked the farmland two or three times before they seeded it.”

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