Leading Mulch Manufacturer from Kansas works with Woodcracker® forestry machines

KANSAS CITY, Kansas — Drew Meylan wanted to improve efficiency in his company’s land clearing operations, and he turned to an Austrian company — Westtech — to supply a couple of tools for an excavator that have done just the trick.

Original Text from TimberLine Magazine published by Tim Cox on 9/1/2017

Mulch Manufacturing in Kansas

Meylan, 39, is operations manager for C.S. Carey Inc., a contracting business based in Kansas City, Kansas, that manufactures mulch for customers in the metropolitan region. In fact, the company’s primary business, which it has developed since 2001, is manufacturing mulch that is sold mainly bulk wholesale. It produces about 300,000 cubic yards of mulch annually and has positioned itself as perhaps the leading producer in the region. About 50 percent of the company’s revenues are derived from mulch sales, and another 20 percent is from land clearing. Another 20 percent is from trucking, and asphalt shingle recycling adds the remainder. The company has an impressive inventory of grinders, mulchers and a screen plant, aswell as an assortment of excavators. They are used for removing trees and stumps, handling wood debris and other material, feeding material to grinders and loading trucks.

Special application areas require suitable equipment

In the past the company removed trees on land clearing jobs by using an excavator to dig a trench around it, then pushing down the tree with the bucket and mechanical thumb. But the method requires numerous additional steps. A worker with a chainsaw has to cut off the stump, and the stump has to be handled to remove as much dirt and debris as possible, then loaded onto trucks and hauled to the company’s wood yard for grinding into mulch. At the wood yard, large stumps have to be split or broken apart in order to produce a size that can be fed into the grinder.

Two new Woodcracker tools the company purchased this year are streamlining the tasks and providing additional benefits. C.S. Carey bought a Woodcracker C550 tree shear in March and added a Woodcracker R1300 stump shear in June. The tree shear is used for felling, and the stump shear performs dual tasks, splitting a stump still in the ground and removing it a half at a time.

Drew initially talked to equipment dealers that sold logging attachments, but he had difficulty finding a suitable attachment to fit and match his excavators, and he wasn’t interested in buying a purpose-built forestry carrier and paying that additional cost. “I already had a carrier,” he noted. When he talked to equipment dealers that sold logging machines and explained the kind of work his company did and what he wanted to do, their response was usually something like, ‘You want to do what?’ recalled Drew.

Woodcracker fits it all

“Finding one that rotated 360 degrees, could mount on an excavator — I couldn’t find something comparable to the Woodcracker”, said Drew. Logging equipment is not suitable for the kind of projects that C.S. Carey takes on, observed Drew. Mechanical tree harvesting equipment is designed for felling standing timber, trees that grow relatively straight. C.S. Carey frequently encounters trees that have been planted to grow as fences along property lines. They have lot of branches and may even grow horizontally. “They’re hard to attack with a logging attachment that’s designed for straight, vertical logs,” said Drew.

Drew considered other companies that make tree shears and stump shears. In fact, C.S. Carey has a stump shear that it keeps deployed in the wood yard to break large stumps into smaller pieces. “It works well,” he said, “but it doesn’t split the stump in the ground.” He looked on the Internet and watched videos of Woodcracker tools on YouTube. He contacted Westtech after watching a few videos. “It was really built for my application,” said Drew. Another factor in favor of the Woodcracker tools was that they can be uncoupled quickly and replaced with another attachment, so one excavator can be used to perform two different types of work. “Being able to quick-couple one attachment to another and doing multiple things was what I was after,” said Drew.

Controlled felling in urban areas

The Woodcracker tree shear helps prepare trees for the grinder because the stump already has been removed in the process of shearing and felling the tree. “However, it’s been beneficial for other reasons, too. “One of the reasons for buying the Woodcracker is that we do a lot of technical clearing,” explained Drew. The company may have to remove trees at a property boundary or trees with nearby obstacles below them. “We used to do a lot of bucket truck work,” added Drew, but the Woodcracker shear has eliminated the need for that. “It allows us to do more controlled felling.”

“Sometimes we’re working right next to the road,” said Drew. “The Woodcracker is good for that. It grabs the tree, and you know you’ve got it.” The Woodcracker tree shear has helped the company overcome another challenge that some customers have encountered related to environmental issues on projects. Projects that have federal funding in many cases do not allow land clearing activity from April-November; trees can be felled, but removing a stump requires an additional permit. “Every March we run into all these developers scrambling to get land cleared,” said Drew. “They don’t have all their permits, but they have to get the trees down.” The developer can skirt the land disturbance regulations by having C.S. Cary remove the trees but leave the stumps in the ground — and the ground undisturbed. “It seems like it happens more and more,” said Drew. “They need to get the tree down without getting the stump out.”

Woodcacker boosts work efficiency

C.S. Carey, which has 15 full-time employees, tackles jobs that range from a handful of trees to 50 acres. The average job is clearing 2-3 acres for a building site, infrastructure improvement, or some other project. The company clears land for water lines, sewer lines, utility right-of-way, and widening roads. Mulch sales have been a source of steady revenue and have been trending upward. Customers are large landscape contractors and garden centers.

The Woodcracker tools make the company’s operations more efficient. “You speed up and grind more efficiently,” said Drew. “The grinder is the most expensive machine…If you make it more efficient, it’s a win…We don’t have to go back and pick up stuff and take it to the yard.” With the Woodcracker attachments, the tree shear can fell trees up to 24 inches in diameter and stack them. Then the stump shear is put on the excavator, and it goes back and splits the stumps in the ground and pulls them out. “The stump is processed while pulling it out,” said Drew. The two attachments prep the tree for grinding and take care of processing the stump on site. “All the stumps have been quartered or split so they go through the horizontal grinder okay. We don’t have to haul them back to the yard…It streamlines the operation.”