With the emerald ash borer expected to make its presence known in more state communities this year, Wisconsin is set to have an unexpected bumper crop of wood.

“Ash is a beautiful wood,” says Terry Mace, a forest products specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry. “It’s used to make furniture.”

“It’s also the wood used to make baseball bats and shovel handles,” adds Bob Wesp, co-owner of Hartford-based Kettle Moraine Hardwoods. “There’s always been a market for ash — I think it is a beautiful wood, too — and it is used for cabinets, flooring and paneling, though it has never been quite as popular as some of the other hardwoods.”

The problem is that this particular wood, from EAB infected ash trees, has some limitations to it. A current quarantine is in place for Crawford, Fond du Lac, Sheboygan, Ozaukee, Vernon and Washington counties, all counties where or near an EAB infestation has been discovered.

But some businesses are located right in the quarantine areas, such as Kettle Moraine Hardwoods, providing them with an opportunity to capitalize on the quarantined wood.

“We do have an advantage in being in the quarantine area, because the logs can be brought to us at any time,” notes Wesp. “We do have to process the infected logs differently, but once they have been kiln dried, the restrictions lift significantly.”

The current problem for those who are seeking to capitalize on the infected, urban ash wood is not whether it can be used but rather an economy of scale issue.

“That’s the chicken-and-egg question,” says Mace. “You need to move a lot of wood to make it a profitable venture.”

According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Wisconsin has about 770 million ash trees with approximately 5.2 million existing on public and private property within cities and villages. Though ash makes up about 7 percent of trees in the state's rural forests, it makes up about 20 percent of the trees in our urban forests. It’s not a question of if these trees will come down, but when.

Currently Kettle Moraine Hardwoods is working with a few municipalities in the area in accepting urban wood.

“It just makes a lot more sense than grinding it up,” he notes. “But we’re also not paying for the wood, either. They’re just giving it to us.”

Some municipalities have shown interest in having the logs processed at mills, but are unwilling to do so without some compensation for the provided wood. That’s not unexpected, considering that the EAB infestation has caught Wisconsin municipalities off guard. It’s rare to find a municipality that has a significant budget for treatment, removal and storage of its inventory of infected ash trees. Couple that with the fact that there is no government funding source currently available for local management costs, and it’s easier to understand why municipalities are trying to tap any source of revenue they can. Yet, free-drop off might just be the most economical option.

Municipalities do have the option of storing trees for a specific time period in a marshalling yard, but there are related issues of labor, space allocation and security.

“It costs a couple of hundred dollars to have someone come in, take a tree down and chip it up,” adds Wesp.

In contrast, transportation is the main cost in taking the infected wood to a sawmill. Kettle Moraine Hardwoods does offer a program where municipalities can fill a 30-yard container for transport to the yard, rather than on a log-by-log basis.

“Hopefully, with more wood coming in, we will be at a point where we can invest in more equipment,” says Wesp. “But I think that’s something that everyone is still trying to figure out.”

With the emerald ash borer an inevitability for Wisconsin municipalities, it’s companies like Kettle Moraine Hardwoods that will be ahead of the curve and able to find opportunity in an unfortunate reality for Wisconsin’s forests.

Photos courtesty of Dave Cappaert, Michigan State University (above) and Marianne Prue, Ohio DNR (below).