Strength In Numbers

Article by David Abbott, Senior Associate Editor, Timber Processing September 2017

Although published from North America, Timber Processing is actually an international magazine. Since late 2009, a portion of our readership has been in European countries. As such, we make an effort to cover international aspects of the industry as much as possible. Unfortunately, frequent international travel, such as the editors undertake domestically to prepare the articles that appear each issue, can be costly, but we do what we can.

As for me personally, in 2010 I went to Germany and Austria and brought back several articles on companies there with sawmill supplier Springer and its affiliate Microtec. Those articles appeared in this magazine and others from Hatton-Brown Publishers. In 2013 I even brought back a story on a remote mill in Romania. Now that was an experience—dark brown tap water from the hotel sink, an irate taxi cab driver I thought might murder me. Fun times.

This summer I had the opportunity to do some more international travel. For the second time, I attended the massive Elmia Wood show, held in Sweden in June (I had also been to the last Elmia, in 2013, just before my adventure in Romania). Elmia is advertised as the world’s largest forestry fair, and with a reported attendance of some 40,000, I believe it. The four-mile walking trail of live equipment demonstrations was PACKED. In fact it was so crowded that at one point, my colleague and I lost site of each other for just a second while I took a picture, and it took us more than an hour to find each other again.

I skipped the second day of the four-day show to make a visit to the Södra Skogsägarna sawmill in Unnefors, about a 25-mile drive from Jönköping, the town where we stay during the Elmia show. Anders Frykman, a rep from Söderhamn Eriksson, a USNR subsidiary that supplied most of the mill’s machinery, picked me up at my hotel that morning. Anders had helped set up the meeting before I left for Sweden.

Now, I haven’t mentioned yet that this summer was very much the opposite of my two previous June trips to Sweden, both of which offered very warm, dry weather. This time it was rainy and cold. On top of that, for much of the two weeks before I left, every single person in my immediate family had been very ill with a stomach virus; my older son caught it twice. I took care of and cleaned up after all of them, and somehow never caught it. I just knew I was going to come down with it the morning of my flight to Sweden, but as it happened, fortune smiled and I escaped the virus unscathed.

Until the morning of my meeting with Södra, that is. Thank God I never actually got sick but I sure felt like I was going to at any minute. Even so I managed to do the interview and tour the mill. The article that resulted from that visit begins on page 14 of this issue, and by now I’ve sure you’ve seen this issue’s cover photo from the Södra Unnefors sawmill.

Interestingly, Södra is actually a kind of a cooperative of many different private timberland owners who collectively own the means of production as a way of getting better prices for all of them. It’s not quite like anything we have in the U.S., to my knowledge anyway. It might, however, be something that some might want to consider, especially as many find their timberland holdings shrinking and as the pattern of forest ownership has been changing in the last several years. After all, there’s strength in numbers.