Hello my Steemit friends. It's Friday once again. It's one of the most awaited day of the Week! It's time for the popular #MarketFriday tag hosted by @dswigle. This is an initiative I highly recommend you join or at least know more about. Just click on the link here and have a real cool Steemit experience you'll always look forward to.
For this edition of Market Friday I wanted to feature a trip we did to a certain farm a couple of years ago which had mahogany trees for sale. Mahogany lumber is quite popular and expensive here in our country and is the choice of wood for furnitures and stairway steps. There were about 120 trees of varying sizes in height and diameters for sale. It so happened that I was friends to both the interested buyer and the seller, so I was acting as a broker of sorts in this ocular inspection. Photo below is part of the trees which were for sale.
This is my friend, the interested buyer. He owns a lumber and furniture shop and has connections in the wood business, from loggers to wood processors. He is inspecting the trees to determine the possible recovery from tree to finished lumber. This is important to be able to establish a price to offer for them.
The dilema that the buyer is facing here is the seller wants to sell everything, from the small trees to the big ones. This arrangement is called "pakyaw" or "corridas" in our vernacular. The problem with this arrangement is it cuts the overall recovery rate from trees to saleable lumber. There should be no problem with the bigger diameter trees because after debarking and squaring the logs (that means taking out the round edges) there would be a lot left to make boards of different thicknesses and widths. But not so with the smaller trees. After squaring them, there would hardly be enough to make a 1" x 2" boards. To illustrate this point I am showing a picture of log squaring courtesy of Google. As you can see, the bigger and longer the tree, the more lumber can be sliced off it.
Photo below shows what the buyer preferred. This size of trees is optimum for high recovery and therefore higher profits. (Remember: The thicker and wider a board is, the more expensive it is). Note the tree beside the one the buyer is hugging. It's just about 1/5 of the size! After taking off the bark and round edges, he can just recover sticks from it.
There were 124 trees all in all and the seller wanted Philippine Pesos 7,000 per tree or about US$140. The total amount involved here was a cool Philippine Pesos 868K or US$17,360.
Here are some more pictures of the trees for sale.
Finally, after a lot of deliberating and computing, the buyer gives a counter offer of Philippine Pesos 264,000 for the lot (US$5,280). Seller did not accept and so we just left, had a few beers on the way back and chalk it all up to experience.
Just so you would all have an idea of how the wood processing starts and end, I am showing a simple diagram which illustrates this process. At least you all would have an idea how that piece of wood you are either sitting on or writing on came to be.
And that's about it for this edition of Market Friday. Hope you enjoyed your visit and learned a bit too from this post. Hope to see you again. Meanwhile, our quarantine rules are slowly being relaxed and people can now move about and do things they could not for the last 2 months. Please stay safe friends and may you all have blessed weekend.
(All photos except for those with sources affixed are mine.)