The Bovine Bugle

Logs become lumber right on the farm

We've been in the lumber business the last couple of days. A man who lives here in Franklin, Lloyd Richard, has a portable sawmill that he brings right to the farm to saw our logs. He has been here 5 or 6 times over the last 15 years or so, and several of the buildings here on the farm have been built with lumber he has sawn. It gives me a little more satisfaction seeing a building built from lumber that came from logs we cut and hauled from our woods.

Lloyd was sawing white pine into 3-inch wide boards to use as batten on the utility farm building we built a little over a year ago. The narrow boards will cover up the spaces between the wide pine boards we used to side the building. I could watch Lloyd mill logs all day. It's just so interesting watching the logs being milled into just the lumber you need for the project you are working on. As Lloyd sawed the logs, I "tailed the saw," pulling the fresh cut boards off the saw rig and loading them onto the wagon. We ended up sawing a little over a thousand board feet. We call the farm building the boards are meant for the "Horsebarn" because it replaces one of the original farm buildings that collapsed a few years ago due to heavy snow. We called that building the "Horsebarn" because it housed the horses when they were used to do the fieldwork here at Howmars Farm. Cowboy Noah (my son) really thinks we should get a horse so that we could keep it in the new "Horsebarn".

--Jonathan, Howmars Farm
Franklin, Vermont