Life on the Live Edge

​​Today we begin with a poem:

    There once was a sawmill from the north,
    A tide of joyful lumber it brought forth,
    It sawed with a study blade,
    A feat of board feet it made,
    And now we sell lumber of course !

This concludes the poem.  Now we will move on to a hypothetical scenario.  Imagine you were a young farmer with stars in your eyes, a dream in your heart, and two mortgage payments.  What would you do?  That’s right, you would watch the sun rise each morning, watch it set each evening, and try to monetize everything around you.

And so it was that we wondered if we could sell trees.  Building 4400 linear feet of perimeter fence and clearing two potential barn sites had left us with piles and piles of logs:

A dog is a device for meeting infinite friends, and a sawmill is a device for turning tree trunks into dimensional lumber.  To lumberify all of those logs, what we needed was a sawmill.

BOTL Farm maintains a full time staff of professionals in a variety of occupations that provide services, consultation, and manual labor.  Usually we pay them in beer.  One member of our staff is a full-time wood worker who part time works with wood and occasionally does it for us.  His previous exploits include building 16 bee boxes and a farm sign/stand.  Once he also made a set of gears out of plywood.

If you’ve ever gotten bored with your reality, had a mid life crisis, and taken up wood working to try and fill that gaping void in your soul that your day job leaves, you might know how much hardwood costs at the homeless despot.  Then you might go to a farm and stare longingly at all the trees just sitting on the farm… growing.  Why not put them where they belong, on a table saw?

So it became that BOTL Farm’s contract wood worker decided the farm needed a sawmill, and through sheer force of manifest destiny and the four basic forces of nature as identified by gravity, a sawmill was selected and ordered and came to be installed upon that which is the farm.

Meet the Woodland Mills HM126.  A pinnacle of powder-coated box tubing and the infernal combustion engine.  Our lumber mill was ushered into existence and began with a steady input of logs, gasoline and human labor has begun to produce an infinite pile of sawdust, firewood, and sale-able lumber.

If you too are an aspiring wood worker, or somebody who watched one too many Youtube videos and now wants to build something with a live edge, stop by BOTL Farm today to purchase lumber for your next great project !