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Tub Grinder: Just Plain Business Sense

J.H. Hart Urban Forestry Switches to Tub Grinder, Sees Rise in Mulching Operations Efficiency

Judd Hart has been business savvy since before high school when he took down a neighbors

tree and discovered it paid more than mowing lawns. So Hart ditched his lawn maintenance

services and focused on providing tree care, which led to the birth of J.H. Hart Urban Forestry,

one of the largest full-service urban forestry companies in Michigan.

Nearly 30 years later, Hart was faced with another not-too-difficult decision that just made plain

business sense. After demonstrating a tub grinder to help with the companys mulching operation,

he realized that in one pass it could produce a product that would take his horizontal grinders

three passes. So Hart traded in his two horizontal grinders for one tub grinder.

An Entrepreneur in the Making

J.H. Hart Urban Forestry, based in Sterling Heights, Mich., got its start in the mid-1970s when

Hart was in seventh grade.

I was the kid who worked on the block, Hart says. I made maybe $300 to $400 per week cutting

grass with my little John Deere tractor and my little lawn mower.

Then one day, a neighbor asked if Hart could cut down a dead elm tree in her yard. She asked

Hart how much he would charge to do the job and, after quickly contemplating whether he had

the equipment to take on the task, he blurted out a number $150. The neighbor didnt flinch at

his asking price and without hesitation she said, Do it.

So Im filling out bills at the end of the month!for lawn service I think I cut her lawn four times

that month, so the bill was $40. It took me an hour to cut the lawn for $10, and I worked four

hours to take down the tree and made $150. Thats when a light turned on, Hart says.

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In the coming years, Hart gradually did less lawn maintenance and more tree service. Shortly

after graduating from high school, he completely transitioned into a tree care service provider,

taking on line-clearing contracts with Michigan Bell (now AT&T) and several municipalities in

addition to offering residential tree service.

Today, J.H. Hart Urban Forestry employs 40 people and offers a multitude of services and

products, including line clearance, residential tree care, custom-blend mulch products, wood

disposal and recycling yard, stump grinding, plant healthcare, corrective pruning, tree trimming

and removals, and aerial manlifts. Hart says his company began its mulching operation when it

was asked by a city to help with its Dutch elm disease epidemic.

The city crews were very challenged in keeping up with the overwhelming number of trees that

were dying, he says. So the city hired us to assist, and we had a staging yard where we tipped

all of the wood. For years, I tried to take as much of the saw-grade timber as I could to the localsaw mill, but inevitably we ended up with this huge stockpile of wood that was clearly not saw-mill

capable.

To solve the problem, Hart asked his local chipper salesman if he could demonstrate a horizontal

grinder. The horizontal grinder worked so well that he bought it after only one day of use. He

would later come to own two.

In addition to serving as a practical way for Hart to dispose wood waste, the grinders also helped

him expand his company by offering off-site grinding services. In the beginning, Hart would grindthe wood material through a larger-sized screen and then sell it to the Genesee Power Station in

Flint, Mich. But he soon found that transportation, labor and other costs didnt make it a profitable

venture. Thats when his salesman asked if hed ever considered running the wood material

through a smaller-sized screen to make mulch.

He ended up bringing us down a screen and we changed it. I went ahead and reground some of

the material that we had initially ground through a 6-inch screen, and we went down to a 3-inch

screen. The resulting product was some pretty stuff, Hart says.

So Hart let the pile sit throughout the fall and winter, and the next spring, he and his crews went

back and dug into it. Thats when he found that the mulch had aged and turned the rich, dark

brown color he knew customers would love. Its like a fine wine; it needs to age, he says. Soon

after, in 2000, he bought a 60-cubic-yard delivery truck and it was the start of J.H. Hart Forest

products.

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Realizing the Benefits of a Tub Grinder

However, one of the struggles Hart found with his horizontal grinders was that they tended to be

too focused on cutting the wood, meaning the resulting product was more chippie than he

desired. He also wanted to capture the wood chip material generatedfromtree service

applications so it could be turned into mulch rather than sold to the power plant. We just needed

to take that chip material and kind of beat it up so that it looked very fractured or fibrous. And by

investigating a better way to recover more wood material out of our operation, we learned that the

VermeerTG7000 did that for us, Hart says.

So, for the first time since starting his grinding operation, Hart added a tub grinder to his

equipment fleet. He says choosing the Vermeer TG7000 tub grinder was an easy decision

because of its Duplex Drum Rotor System, which features 11, double-life reversible duplex

hammers that cuts 22 radial paths for higher production. With this patented rotor system, Hart

says wood material is forced through the screen on the TG7000 and, instead of just cutting thewood, the resulting product looks more fibrous. Plus, the tub grinder saves time because the

wood material can be processed in just one pass rather than the three passes it took his

horizontal grinders.

The machine allowed us to recover hundreds of thousands of yards of material that just went to

the power plant, where we got paid boiler fuel prices, he says. Theres a time and a place for

horizontal grinders, but my needs changed in a way that I wanted to reduce my expenses and

capture another facet of my business.

Hart says the horizontal grinders required about 30 gallons of fuel per hour to operate, while the

tub grinder goes though 57 gallons of fuel per hour. At first glance, it might seem that the tub

grinder operation would be more expensive. But when considering Hart had to run the horizontal

grinders three times longer in order to produce the mulch product he desired, its easy to see how

the savings stack up.

Every time we touched the mulch, itd cost us money. Just think about how many times we had

to load the same wood material into the horizontal grinder and the man-hours and time it took to

change the screens, he says. With the TG7000, were running the material through the tub

both chips and wood with one pass and its over.

To obtain the desired mulch product, Hart uses a 2-inch circle screen on his one-year-old

TG7000 tub grinder.

Hart says their process works like this:

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After tree service companies, landscapers and others drop off their wood material, it is loaded

into the tub grinder where moisture is immediately introduced. He says wetting the wood serves

two purposes: 1) it helps break down wood fiber, making the material easier to grind, and 2) it

minimizes dust during the grinding process, which helps his company stay neighbor-friendly.

While one crew member uses a rubber tire loader with an 11-cubic-yard bucket to fill the grinder,

another crew member uses a loader with a 7-cubic-yard bucket to help stack the processed wood

product into 25- to 35-foot-high windrows. The windrows run lengthwise from north to south on

the companys 11-acre property so that they receive maximum sun coverage, Hart says. As soon

as the windrows are formed, a sprinkler system begins the watering process and their internal

temperature is monitored.

Water creates heat; heat creates decomposition; and decomposition creates color, he says.

We have to let the mulch sit and cook for about six or nine months before it is ready for sale.

As a wholesale mulch supplier, J.H. Hart Urban Forestry provides their product to dealers,

nurseries, landscape contractors, golf courses and other customers. In all, Hart says his company

has about 25 regular mulch customers, and two dealers who provide mulch to an additional 50 to

60 customers. So far, business has been good for Hart because each year he sells out of the

nearly 70,000 cubic yards of mulch he produces. Theres a barrage of smaller tree companies,

cities and individuals who pay a minimal tipping fee to dump their wood waste here because our

tree service operation doesnt provide enough wood to satisfy our mulch demand, he says.

And Hart doesnt see the demand slowing down anytime soon. Currently, the mulching operation

makes up about 15 percent of J.H. Hart Urban Forestrys total business.

Were at capacity now, if not beyond capacity. In the summer, that Vermeer tub grinder runs 10

hours a day, six days a week and five days a week in the winter, he says. Im sure well have to

look at purchasing another in the near future.

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