The way they do these panels you can’t farm under them. Someone told me they’re going to use an autonomous lawn mower to cut grass under them because it’s so too short for anything else.
Article I read for this thread said they are a minimum of 8' above ground and are programmed to tilt and follow the sun. The crops were row crop vegetables so no need for combine type clearance
The demographics are pretty different, and Union County population is actually growing.
The ones by us aren’t nearly that tall. It’s maybe 4 1/2 to 5 feet off the ground when tilted.
Hardwood is generally more valuable than softwood. On the stump, it's about double right now in Mississippi, but that's a loaded statement.
That's what they're asking for it. And I'm asking $1.9MM for my house....
I do a lot of woodworking as a hobby and earning a little side income. I’ve made several items out of 100% hardwood and they are pretty for sure… but it’s hard to beat the strength and stability of plywood. Some things though are better all wood.
Itta Bena is directly east of Greenville. I'm guessing about maybe an hour away down Hwy 82. Once you pass Itta Bena then you're only approx 10 minutes from Greenwood.
When I retired five years ago I didn’t care if I ever smelled sawdust or saw a piece of wood but I recently built a staircase and I really enjoyed myself. The thing with engineered panels is the consistency , it takes the human out of it. At least in a production environment. Hardwood requires a good eye and experience to discern what is good or bad. CNC machinery takes the thinking out of the equation. We would buy large production cycles from sawmills , mostly poplar and oak, an at the end of their cycle they would fill the last load with whatever was mixed in that particular tract of timber and it would always be upscale not a downgrade. We would get in one or two bundles of the prettiest black walnut or hickory lumber you’ve ever seen. It killed my soul to see that stuff hit the ripsaw because it would eat a whole bundle of lumber in about five minutes.
I've driven up to North Dakota a couple of times to visit my brother and those things are all over the midwest and big sky country. I find them mesmerizing to watch.
When I worked at a paper mill, they really didn't pay attention to any of that. They just paid by weight (and they checked the moisture content to make sure they weren't watering down the load). All the hardwood went in one line, the softwood another. I wonder if they were getting the rejects of both....
Drying gum is an absolute bítch. I worked at a furniture factory with a similar setup. We dried gum by loading concrete weights on the top bunk... By weights, it was a solid slab of concrete 6" thick. About 70% was usable after, but the other 30% had to be ripped down and edge glued. Sycamore was terrible too. And of course cottonwood... Speaking of cottonwood, there's a company in Lubbock, Texas called O'Hair Shutters that somehow uses cottonwood.. I know Batesville Casket uses it, but caskets are kind a forgiving... Shutters are extremely difficult for woods that move in the slightest because they have to be so precise since ever shutter is custom made effectively... how those fools are drying cottonwood in Lubbock and getting it to stay dimensionally stable is one of the great mysteries of the hardwood industry. They never let any sales reps in and apparently keep it ultra secret in house as well. I know they buy it green and rail it into Lubbock and try it themselves.
Plywood is great for production costs, but is not stronger or more stable than properly dried hardwoods. Give me a properly dried oak, ash, maple, hickory or a thousand other things any day. I sold 40 containers a month of hardwood plywood and 80 truckloads of hardwood lumber a month at one point in time... 90% of which was going to cabinet and furniture manufacturers the rest went to high end millwork and flooring outfits.
The furniture frame industry buys pretty low end hardwoods... As they should. That definitely makes it harder. And honestly, most plants in MS are/were building pretty low end upholstered furniture. Flipping to panels was a no brainer for promotional furniture. I even saw some using osb for frames. The coolest thing I remember seeing in furniture factory was a CNC bandsaw. You could stack like 15 sheets of 23/32" plywood and cut them all at once. The table moved around the saw. You couldn't get real intricate, but for basic rails on a sofa, it was hard to beat the production. 1 CNC bandsaw could out pace 6-8 CNC routers.
Pulpwood is kinda the trash. It's all valued as such.
Take the $75k and put it all on State over 6.5 wins***
We had a CNC bandsaw and a second one on order when I left. It would churn out some parts. We had a plywood rip saw that was made locally by a machine shop. It had a 5 foot arbor with aluminum spacers between the blades and had to be manually set up which took some time but once it was set up it would rip an entire bundle of plywood in under 4 minutes. It screamed like a banshee , you could hear it running out in the parking lot.
Interesting in buying it or listing it. He’s a realtor. IOW, he’s probably interested in flipping it if you’ll sell it for $2k/ac.
Correct which is why he'd hafta offer a sizeable chunk over what I already have on the table.
If they’re paying 300 dollar rent they aren’t making money on it or it’s at least a very tight margin. And just because someone is paying 300 dollars on that doesn’t mean he needs to charge anywhere near that for his land, all depends on how productive it is.
I would guess a lot of electricity would be created for a very short amount of time.
I saw a picture where a car parking lot had solar panels that also allowed for covered parking to exist. You would think that type of solution would be best usage of all that fixed use space that can't be used for anything else. That is what actually thinking looks like.
The problem is economies of scale. Rooftop solar makes sense from a space point of view, but it still doesn't pencil out economically without subsidies because of installation costs.
I just rode by the solar farm in Canton and thought of this tread. Those panels are about 4 feet on the ground. I doubt there'll be any type of crop under them.
I watched a video about a week ago of a guy that has a herd of goats and goes around to solar farms in the NE part of the country, puts up temporary electric fence and lets the goats clear the grass and weeds under them. There wasn't a crop under any of these either
