SMALL WORLD: HOW A NON-PROFIT WENT ONLINE TO SPREAD SMALLWOOD KNOWLEDGE

Curious about ethanol made from wood? Want to get ideas for streamlining slash collection? Looking for the latest news on post-Katrina timber salvaging?

Then you might want to visit SmallwoodNews.com, the online home of the Smallwood Utilization Network, also known as SUN.

Inside the website’s forum you can search for—or create—postings on every aspect of small diameter wood, from legislation to harvesting techniques to innovative products. The site provides a direct conduit to the collective knowledge (and connections) of more than 5,000 fellow participants.

Interested in the commercial side of small wood? You might also consider checking out TimberBuySell.com, which serves as the online classifieds for North American buyers and sellers of small (and large) timber, standing wood, forest residue, and mill by-products.

Both sites are projects of the Montana Community Development Corporation (MCDC). And both are the brainchildren of Craig Rawlings, the Smallwood Utilization Manager for MCDC. “My job is essentially to nurture ideas,” says Craig. “I help people find new ways to use small-diameter wood. But a big part of that process is communication.”

In other words, Rawlings gets buyers talking to sellers, entrepreneurs talking to bankers, and researchers talking to loggers. He spends a large part of his year at conferences and other events, encouraging a dialogue. The MCDC websites allow that conversation to spread to timber buyers and sellers all over North America.

HOW SMALLWOOD BECAME A HOT TOPIC
Rawlings has been with MCDC since 2002, when his position was created. But a dialogue about smallwood utilization began 14 years earlier, with the fires of 1988.

As western forests burned that summer, some U.S. Forest Service employees began rethinking their agency’s long-held policy of total fire suppression. They saw that suppression had led to overgrowth, which in turn was fueling oversized wildfires. They started examining alternatives, one of which was to thin the overgrown stands of trees in the Wildlands Urban Interface (WUI). A leading advocate of this approach was Dean Graham, an official in the agency’s Forest Products Lab in Wisconsin.

However, budgets were shrinking in the late 1980s, so Dean and others began to seek ways of marketing small diameter logs in order to pay for the thinning projects. Before long Dean combined forces with Rosalie Cates, the Executive Director of MCDC. Together they created and organized the first Smallwood Conference, which first took place in Missoula in 1996 and has since become a bi-annual brainstorming event. In 2002, Rosalie created the position of MCDC “Smallwood Enterprise Agent” and hired Rawlings, who had already had careers in timber-processing machinery and industrial product development.

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF WEBSITES.
In his first month on the job, Rawlings took stock of the smallwood community. “I looked around and realized that there was no single means of sharing information about small trees and forest residue,” he recalls. So as one of his first projects, he started Smallwood News, an online newsletter with links to smallwood-related online articles. Within months the newsletter had hundreds of subscribers; in a few years its readership topped 5,000.

However, by early 2006, the rising number of postings had created new problems. “We had a truckload of stories,” recalls Rawlings. “But I was the only one who could get into my listserve, except for the real tech-heads.” Then MCDC hired Nora McDougall-Collins as its Internet Marketing Specialist. “When Nora came on,” Rawlings says, “She decided we needed a place to archive the newsletters.” That place became SmallwoodNews.com. There are now more than 800 articles in the site’s searchable archives, on every topic from biofuels to government grants.

Smallwood News also led directly to the founding of TimberBuySell.com. “Basically, the newsletter revealed another unmet need,” says Rawlings. He explains that as soon as he had started the online newsletter, sellers started asking him to post notices. One week he’d get a request from a mill owner looking for logs; the next week it might be a landowner with trees looking for contractors.

That response prompted Rawlings to ask himself, “Why not put these guys directly in touch with each other?” In other words, why not start a website? The first step was to recruit an all-star panel of forestry professionals as a Board of Directors. With their guidance, Rawlings assembled a development team. By the fall of 2006, TimberBuySell.com was born.

“We don’t charge a fee on sales,” says Rawlings of the not-for-profit site. “But we do charge a small fee for each ad posting.” A user can post a description of an item to be sold, or a description of a desired item; responses are sent directly to the users by email. “It’s a fairly unrestricted site,” adds Rawlings. “You can register for free, and have free access to news stories and articles, and even browse the buyers’ and sellers’ listings for free.” He points out that users only pay a fee if and when they decide to post a listing.

THE WIDE REACH OF SMALL WOOD
So who are the people who use MCDC’s online publications? “For one, landowners,” says Rawlings. “And foresters—state, federal, private and academic. And managers in government agencies, including conservation districts and RC&Ds.”

Rawlings scrolls through a few recent emails to find examples. He finds one from a rancher in Philipsburg, Montana who asks to be added to the email list, and who concludes, “…along with others, [I] am trying to figure out how to do something with small wood.”

Here’s another: Responding to a white paper on slash collection (available as a link from TimberBuySell.com), a senior manger at Weyerhaeuser writes, “This is interesting and helpful. I passed it on to some of our foresters.”

“It’s funny,” reflects Rawlings. “SUN began as a Montana thing, but now it reaches people globally” For example, he recently received an email from an official at a forest machinery company headquartered in Finland. “He attached a press release from a new distributor they had acquired in Canada,” says Rawlings, who posted the release because it focused on the equipment’s ability to harvest small wood and forest residue.

A TOOL FOR CONSERVATION DISTRICTS
Smallwood News has its share of evangelists. One is Lesa Osterholm, the Coordinator and Manager for the Bear River Watershed of the Nevada County, California Resource Conservation District. Osterholm pays special attention to postings about fuel reduction and biomass energy, and forwards each issue on to two or three of her colleagues every week. (In fact most subscribers report that they forward articles, which makes Rawlings suspect that the newsletter’s official subscriber base of 5800 understates its true effect.)

Rawlings pauses to consider the emails he’s selected. “In many ways, this is a good cross-section of our readership,” he concludes. “People who are dealing with real-life problems relating to small wood—how to track it, how to harvest it, how to make it into chips, fuel, flooring, whatever. It’s people who are sharing the solutions they’ve discovered, or who are looking for solutions.”

These aren’t Internet lurkers or chat-happy bloggers. They’re people like Lesa Osterholm and other CD and RC&D managers, in other words people who are making a difference and need practical knowledge to do it.

Increasingly, that knowledge comes from the “small”-minded people who read and contribute to Smallwood News, SmallwoodNews.com, and TimberBuySell.com.