From the Fields - Steve Kafka

By Steve Kafka, Calaveras County forester 

As we’re coming into the fall season, we’re trying to wrap up timber harvest before the rain comes. We also work on a lot of road maintenance issues before winter comes. Harvest has been going well. With the cool summer, we haven’t had a lot of shutdowns.

We’ve had a pretty good season with regard to wildfire. With the wet spring and winter, we were worried we might have problems due to a lot of grass and brush growth. But it’s been a cool summer, and we really haven’t had a lot of fire starts. We’ve had a lot of lightning and thunderstorms, which is always a fear for us in the timber industry. But so far, the few that we’ve had, we’ve been able to catch them quickly and put them out.

We were preparing for a bad fire year because we have more vegetation growth. Fires are always a problem. They’re something we’re always dealing with or trying to avoid. There’s always a danger, but I think the cooler temperatures and the sporadic thunder showers have kept things not wet but not quite as dry as we normally get in those warmer summer days.

We harvest mostly on private property. Our operators have been busy. We always go through a shortage in trucking to move the logs. We’re always trying to figure out what to do about that. There’s just not enough trucks to move the logs from the forest to the sawmill. You start to build an inventory out in the forest, and that’s sometimes not easy to work with. I think trucking has been hard through all commodities.