There’s been some talk of a layoff at the correctional facility in Monteith, Ont., and Ken Richardson’s none too happy about it. He doesn’t work there, but he’s overheard some of the guards saying that if they can’t stay on at the jail, they’ll just go out and drive a truck.

“That really burns me up,” he says. “What do they think this is, the last stop on the employment line?”

Richardson’s indignation is well founded. He brings a skill, dedication, and enthusiasm to a business that’s unyielding in its challenges. It’s tough enough being an owner-operator these days, tougher still to be hauling logs in Northern Ontario. “If anybody thinks he can just walk in here and make money,” Richardson says, “he’s got another thing coming.”

The way things are going, it’s surprising more truck-loggers haven’t dug up their roots and headed elsewhere. Ken and his wife Cindy run their business out of Matheson, Ont., near Timmins. Shorter winters have compressed the cutting season, and in a community as small as Matheson, where many of the people are employed in the forestry industry, the effects are felt quickly.

“I can’t really earn any more revenue from the truck,” he says. “In fact, the earning potential is dropping and the costs are going up at the same time.” A five-axle logging trailer is worth close to $65,000, while the heavy-spec tractors needed for the bush come in at around $130,000. At those prices, it’s not a business for the financially faint of heart.

But the Richardsons are resourceful folks. They’ve tried to do what savvy business people do when economic times get chilly: they insulate themselves.

They’re certainly not about to leave. He grew up on a farm in the Timmins-Cochrane area and cut his trucking teeth hauling his family’s cattle to market. In his heyday, Richardson could earn as much as $3200 hauling cattle from Matheson to Toronto, provided he grabbed a load of feed for the trip home.

It was at the stockyards in Toronto where he first began to grasp one of the biggest problems facing the small business operator: having to deal with the non-entrepreneurial apparatchiks who work for his customers.

“I’d stay and watch the auctions,” he says. “And all the while the bidding was going on, the auctioneer kept banging his cane on the desk trying to keep the buyers awake during the bidding.

“It was obvious that these guys didn’t have any interest in driving the price up too high. They’d participate in a half-assed kind of way, just to make it look like they were in the game. But what struck me was that the farmer, the guy who had invested two years in raising the cow, had absolutely no way to influence the price. The best the auctioneer could do was all the farmer got.”

Today, in his own logging business, Richardson sees much of the same. “We’re taking some big chances going into this business, but the guys at the mill or the MTO (Ontario Ministry of Transportation) are all just collecting a paycheque. They’ve got nothing invested, no interest in the efficient and profitable operation of the whole system,” he says. “Yet, in many ways, they’re the ones who determine whether or not I’m going to make a descent living.”

Another determining factor: the weather. Truck-loggers in the region can only haul out of the bush during the winter months when the ground is frozen. During that time, the mills really push hard to get as much fiber out of there as possible, then stockpile it for use during the summer. For truck operators, clearing the stockpiles doesn’t pay as well as drawing out of the bush, but there’s just enough money involved to hold some of those guys over until winter.

But even in Northern Ontario the winters are getting shorter and milder, and that means loggers must wait until later in the fall for the ground to freeze. And come spring, they’ve got to wind down the off-road operations earlier as the ground begins to thaw. This past season, Richardson’s prime earning season was shortened from 12 weeks to only eight. To put the issue into perspective, Richardson says he had to earn an entire winter’s worth of revenue in only 56 days. But he lost a few days due to repairs and the off-duty time required by hours-of-service regulations. That 56-day earning period resulted in only 48 working days.

The pay structure is fairly simple: so much per ton of wood, scaled at the mill. The rate depends on the distance traveled, and Richardson works it all out to an hourly rate for comparison purposes. Hauling from the Matheson area to the mill in Englehart, about an hour away, pays him $7 per ton. A 40-ton load pays $280, and with a round trip time of about four hours under near-perfect conditions, he’s earning about $70 per hour. The longer trips pay more, but there are higher costs involved, too.

A combination of the milder winters and aggressive harvesting in theTimmins-Cochrane-Englehart area in previous years are forcing the mills to go farther afield for their supply of wood fiber. So truckers now have to run greater distances on the unpaved logging roads, which means more wear and tear on the trucks-tires in particular. The longer trips also mean more exposure to enforcement at a time when the police and MTO are keeping a closer watch on the logbooks, weights, and the mechanical condition of the vehicles.

With that in mind, and the diminishing earning potential of the shorter winters, Richardson figures it’ll be easier for him to change the way he does business than to change the way the MTO and the mills do business. His biggest challenge now is to find ways of branching out in order to lessen his dependence on his traditional livelihood.

The short-haul summer work may be easier on the equipment, but it doesn’t pay. “When the mills are clearing the stockpiles, the rate drops way below $70,” he says. “That’s when I park the trailer, put my dump box on the tractor and go work construction.”

Richardson figures he’s better off with the dump box at $60 per hour than with his log trailer at the same rate because he’s running on dry road, with less weight and no tire-killing tree stumps to worry about. “More guys used to do this years ago, but there hasn’t been a lot of road construction or pipeline work in the area lately,” he says. “Most of them sold their dump boxes to keep their loggers running.”

He’s now running three tractors, two loggers, the dump box, and a float trailer. The cutters, construction crews, and road builders often require the services of a float trailer to move equipment, and Richardson is one of only a few guys in the area who own one, and the word is already out that he’s looking for work.

Northern Ontario loggers have seen more prosperous times, but Ken and Cindy will likely do well. He understands his costs, and he’s always looking for more ways to cut even further into the budget. “We can’t just sit around complaining any more. We need to become a lot more innovative just to maintain our ground, so I’m diversifying a little,” he says with a smile. “That’s how I plan to survive.”