May 2023
LIVINGSTON, Texas – Steven Coatney didn’t grow up with a family background in forestry. He attended Blinn College before transferring to Sam Houston State University to study agriculture business. While he was a student, Coatney worked part-time in the woods for his future father-in-law Roland Hickman.
Inside This Issue
COVER: Steven Coatney Goes Big In Texas
LIVINGSTON, Texas – Steven Coatney didn’t grow up with a family background in forestry. He attended Blinn College before transferring to Sam Houston State University to study agriculture business. While he was a student, Coatney worked part-time in the woods for his future father-in-law Roland Hickman.
Article by David Abbott, Managing Editor, Southern Loggin’ Times
SOUTHERN STUMPIN': ‘Let The Sawdust Fly’
One of the things I like about getting together in person for industry meetings and trade shows is that it gives us a chance to meet and make connections with people we never would have some across, otherwise. For instance, at last fall’s American Loggers Council annual meeting in Missouri, I met Minnesota logger Peter Wood, who hosts a monthly logging-focused radio show (and now podcast) called “Let The Sawdust Fly.” It airs live as a one-hour segment on the last Wednesday of each month on a local talk radio station in Duluth.
Article by David Abbott, Managing Editor, Southern Loggin’ Times
TAR-nished Industry: The History Of Turpentine Part Three
Third Of Three Parts
At its very best, logging work was tough, exhausting and dangerous in early America and through the first half of the 20th century, but by most historical accounts, conditions were tougher, in some instances downright cruel, for those who toiled in the gum turpentine woods.
Article by DK Knight, Publisher/Editor Emeritus, Southern Loggin’ Times
‘Swamp’ Loggers
In late March, the American Loggers Council hosted its first DC Congressional Fly-In in four years. Normally an annual occurrence, the Fly-In was cancelled in 2021-2022 due to the pandemic and the ALC’s change in leadership with the retirement of former director Danny Dructor in 2021. This year’s Fly-In was the first since 2019 and the first under Executive Director Scott Dane. ALC brought together 75 timber industry representatives from 21 states to conduct nearly 100 meetings with members of the U.S. Congress.
BULLETIN BOARD
Our Best Leisure Selections From Our Not-So-Sharp Minds
FROM THE BACKWOODS PEW: Snowy Egrets
Throughout Scripture, the contrast is given between light and darkness. In the darkness, sin rules and man seeks his own way. God’s way is not in the darkness. When man was kicked out of the Garden of Eden, driven from God’s presence and fellowship, he was driven into the darkness: into the wasteland, where the trials and adverse conditions of life conspire against him, to the point that life seems to have no value.
Bradley Antill is a forester and an author. Excerpted from Woods, Worship, and Wasteland.
INDUSTRY NEWS ROUNDUP
- Bandit Industries Continues Growth Pattern
- Forest Pro Adds DEVELON Lineup
- Interstate Hauling In Arkansas Moves Forward
- Enviva On Fast Track With Epes Pellet Mill
- Binderholz Celebrates Enfield Sawmill Opening
SAFETY FOCUS
Steven Coatney Goes Big In Texas
Article by David Abbott, Managing Editor, Southern Loggin’ Times
LIVINGSTON, Texas – Steven Coatney didn’t grow up with a family background in forestry. He attended Blinn College before transferring to Sam Houston State University to study agriculture business. While he was a student, Coatney worked part-time in the woods for his future father-in-law Roland Hickman (Coatney married Hickman’s daughter in 2007). “I fell in love with the woods during college,” Coatney says. He didn’t finish the degree, leaving after his junior year to start his own logging business when he was 21, in 2004. “Not that I don’t regret not finishing, but I think it worked out. I was ready and it was a good time to get into the logging woods.”
The fledgling logger started small, with a skidder and loader, still felling with chain saws back then, but the young man kept growing his company till he could buy new equipment, including a feller-buncher. He eventually expanded into three crews. Since then, Steven Coatney Logging, LLC has flourished.
More recently Coatney has become involved in land development. He and his good friend, James Edward Harrison the Third (known as “Tres”), partnered to form Oso Pardo Investments. As with Harrison’s nickname, the company derives from their local cultural heritage; it’s Spanish for “Grizzly Bear.” The partners chose it as a reference to an expression Harrison has been fond of: “If you’re gonna be a bear, be a grizzly.” It’s his way of saying, “Go big or go home,” essentially. “When we did anything, he’d say that to mean we gotta do it big or not do it at all,” Coatney explains. It certainly seems like an appropriate attitude in the Lone Star State, where everything is, of course, bigger.
Crew, left to right: Ignacio Gonzalez, Francisco Cortez, Marcelino Gonzalez, Omar Rojas, Jimmy Birdsong, Steven Coatney, Hamilton Quijano
Coatney prefers a setup with a single feller-buncher cutting for two skidders; he uses Deere and Tigercat cutters on different crews.
When Southern Loggin’ Times visited in early March, one of Coatney’s crews was working on a 170-acre tract in development by Oso Pardo. They were doing a real estate cut, leaving trees spaced every 50 feet or so, trees people want in their yard once people move in. Logging the land would take about four weeks, with subsequent clean-up lasting at least two months.
“Once we get it logged, we have our dozers and excavators grubbing, raking and burning and mulchers going behind them,” Coatney says. That process had already begun, in fact, on cleared sections while logging was still in progress on the rest of the property. “When we get done it will be ready to build on. We will put in the road infrastructures, the drainage systems, the power, water, Wi-Fi; we do everything from start to finish short of building the houses.”
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