BUILDING ON AN OLD SAW Corinna mill profits by offering a personal, hands-on service

In a former Corinna chicken barn the length of a football field the sounds of saws have replaced clucks. Stacks of wood have replaced stacks of cages. And the smell of fresh oak, maple and bass wood have replaced the sour smell of egg-laying chickens.

Where Lloyd Bolstridge once raised 27,000 chickens for central Maine’s now nearly defunct egg industry, Melvin Yoder has taken his knowledge of logs and wood and created a custom sawmill.

Whether it’s hundreds of board feet required to make a new deck or the custom cutting of a beloved backyard tree for a special piece of furniture, Yoder provides a personal, hands-on service. “There are a few portable sawmills left around,” he said recently, standing in the barn-turned-mill as sawdust swirled slowly in the air around him, “but nothing like what we do.”

“Right now, I can’t keep up with the demand,” he said. “It’s a good problem to have.”

Yoder is a Mennonite, raised in Pennsylvania and trained in the cooperative sawmills there, rising to foreman. It was there he met his wife, Rhonda, a Newport native, and then moved to Maine in 1999. “I was looking for an opportunity to go out on my own,” he said.

The couple purchased the former chicken barn and family homestead in Corinna where they now raise and home-school their four children.

For the first few years in Maine, Yoder said he operated a portable sawmill and drifted from farm to farm. “But there is no work in the winter,” he said. “It drops right off in November.”

So he opened Yoder’s Custom Sawing in the fall of 2002 and has been building a strong reputation for quality work.

“We mostly deal directly with the customer, face-to-face,” said Yoder. And he means on both ends of the operation. His log suppliers are often farmers who show up with three or four logs in the back of their pickup, deliveries the large lumber mills will not accept. “We also buy a lot of cedar from local guys who have small woodlots,” he said.

Yoder, 31, employs two full-time workers and hires two or three part-time workers when the demand is heavy. Often his workers are fellow Mennonites who operate nearby dairy farms and can use part-time work after the fall harvest.

The barn has been adapted to allow full-size logs to be rolled mechanically in one end and up to the band saw, where two workers turn them into lumber. The wood then moves on to the edger, which removes the bark and refines the shape. It is then stacked and air-dried before heading to the kiln. Eventually, the planer-router will shape it into floor boards, decking, pickets or railings.

But specialty orders are what really builds Yoder’s business. “Someone might have a tree in their yard that has memories and they want to turn it into a piece of furniture, or several trees into flooring,” said Yoder. “Those special orders now account for more than 25 percent of my business. That’s the great part of a small operation – the flexibility. I am able to accommodate those ideas.”

Yoder can turn out 4,000 board feet of hemlock a day, or 2,000 board feet of cedar, and not a scrap goes to waste.

Local farmers purchase the sawdust for animal bedding. The slab wood gets chipped and sold as a biomass fuel. “Some of the slab wood goes to local guys who boil [maple syrup] sap,” Yoder added.

Yoder said he used to give the slab wood away. Then he discovered that he can get $2 a ton from bio-mass processors. “That doesn’t sound like a lot of money at first, but we produce 500 tons a year,” he said. “When you are a small operation, you need to squeeze every little bit out of your log that you can.”

But it was adding new equipment last year that really made the difference to Yoder’s business and allowed him to turn a financial corner. “If you have a sawmill, you saw logs. If you have a kiln, you add tremendous value. And with a planer-molder, you can take that to the next level.”

Yoder’s kiln can remove 50 gallons of water a day from a load of wood and takes four weeks to cure green hardwood. “The kiln has been very good for us. We can do a lot more work now in the winter and it nearly doubles the value of the wood if it’s dried.” Yoder is making plans to add a second kiln this winter.

The planer-molder he bought last year is also boosting his sales, adding value to a raw board with fine-cut tongue-and-groove sides for flooring or wall coverings, or softly rounded edges on decking.

And although he has found quite a niche market, Yoder admits: “The big guys are not worried about me.”

“There are advantages and disadvantages to staying small,” he said. “First, the cost to produce each board is higher, and a small sawmill is more affected by the seasons. If I was larger, I could get deals on insurance, workers’ compensation and electricity costs,” he continued.

But it is the personal, one-on-one contact that Yoder admitted he likes. “I have to admit, I like it this way,” he said.