Beaty Lumber

Gabe and Tim Beaty are quickly growing their lumber company in East Tennessee and have just moved their Jamestown-based sawmill to a larger location.

GROWTH IN FORESTRY: BEATY LUMBER CONTINUES EXPANSION

In the last 15 years, Beaty Lumber in Jamestown, Tennessee, has doubled in size. It’s the middle of a hot Tennessee summer and owner Tim Beaty and his son, Gabe Beaty, are busy moving their sawmill to a larger location–a task they expect to take up to six months.

The new site has more than enough room for their current operations, which includes a debarker, a chipper, two circle mills and a band resaw. It also has plenty of room for additional mills should the Beatys decide to expand the operation. The old sawmill grounds are uneven, hard to access and not paved. The concrete grounds of the new facilities are flat and the site is closer to main roads than the old one, which will save the company money.

“We can produce more here with fewer men. This will cut costs down on getting logs here,” Tim said, and Gabe noted that it will also reduce wear and tear on their trucks.

The company hauls logs within a fair radius of its location, and delivers lumber as far as Indiana, Illinois, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and even Wisconsin and the East Coast. The trucks doing the hauling log a lot of miles, which is why Tim often gets the engines rebuilt at Stowers Truck Service in Crossville. In the past year, Stowers has rebuilt two of his truck engines.

“Our trucks come through Crossville all the time and they stop in and get fixed. Adam at Stowers is about the best truck technician you can get with a Cat® engine,” Tim said.

He’s a huge fan of the Cat C16 engines that were made for two years before being discontinued. He describes driving a truck with a C16 in it as easy as “driving a car, but it’s hauling 90,000 pounds and going uphill.”

Beaty Lumber also has a logging operation which, at its peak, can produce 30,000 feet of logs a day. They log on both their own property as well as bid on government and private jobs when the opportunity arises. They also buy land and timber when they need it. Tim said that lumber has become more plentiful in the past two or three years, and their inventory is bursting at the seams. Right now, they log about 2,500 to 3,500 acres at any given time, 1,500 acres of which they own.

The mill produces about 40,000 feet of lumber a day, which is intended for a multitude of purposes, the two men said. Some of it is turned into furniture, cabinets or hardwood flooring, while other lumber becomes pallet wood. And these days, every single bit of wood is used, including the sawdust.

“There’s wood fiber in toothpaste, in plastics, in some food that you eat!” Tim exclaimed. “There’s no waste. The sawdust is used for charcoal, for chicken houses, for making liquid smoke. You can make pressboard out of it or pellets for wood stoves and wood pellet grills.”

Demand for their timber hasn’t declined over the years, in part due to exports. China is a major consumer of their timber exports, and that saw Beaty Lumber through the recession. International and national demand fluctuates quickly, making it difficult to determine the market, Tim said. However, he’s not worried about the business ever bottoming out.
“There’s always going to be a need for Applachian hardwood. There’s stuff that grows here, east of the Mississippi River, that doesn’t grow anywhere else,” Tim said.

Much has changed in the industry over the years, and at Beaty Lumber. One of the changes at Beaty includes switching to Cat® equipment, which Tim said they did about 10 years ago. While he recalled his father having a Cat machine or two, it’s just been in the past decade that Tim and Gabe decided to make the majority of their fleet Cat equipment. Part of that is due to the quality of the machines, which the Beatys said both they and their operators have noticed as they’ve owned and operated various Cat machines, including a 248B skid steer loader, a 930G wheel loader and two 930H wheel loaders.

“The Cat wheel loader is smoother, like when you’re putting a load on a truck. It feels so much smoother than some of the other brands,” Gabe said.

The other reason the Beatys buy Cat equipment is because of the support and service they get from Stowers Machinery.

“Stowers has been better at helping us with problems than anybody else we’ve worked with,” Tim said, and Gabe added on, “When Stowers does the work, it’ll be done right, and if it’s not, they’ll stand by it and make it right. They’ve helped us out with some stuff that they didn’t have to.”

Logging and milling runs in the Beatys’ blood–Tim’s great-grandfather started in the forestry industry with a handset mill, and his father used mules to load logs by hand. Now, Gabe is the fifth generation in the business, and Gabe’s 4-year-old son already likes to “help out” at the sawmill whenever he can.

Tim and Gabe often finish each other’s thoughts in a conversation, and it’s obvious they love the business and their families. Their eyes light up when they talk about Gabe’s little boy playing with his toys as if he’s a logger, and it’s their hope that one day, he’ll be the sixth generation of Beatys to carry on the family’s legacy