YOUR LOCAL SAEMILL:Rural sawmills encourage the management of local woodland... but in their operation and equipment they differ from larger mills

摘要

The main purpose of this article is not to criticise the forestry industry but to highlight an area which I feel the main machine manufacturers appear to have overlooked. There can be no doubting that over the last several years the general evolutionin sawmilling has been one of scale. Mills, generally, have become larger and larger with many of the smaller mills either stagnating or closing altogether. The driver for this trend, of course, is economics. But maybe the time has arrived for a rethink.Pockets of timber are now located in such places that the costs of extraction, transport, milling and relocation are making the whole process uneconomic. Maybe it's time for a more local solution; a return to the village mentality. Where I live, for instance, the village shop has reopened after years of closure and many more local entrepreneurial providers are emerging.