Forestry supplier BRANCHES OUT
Published in: The Register-Guard
Date: 3/13/2005
By: Scott Maben
CORRECTION (ran 3/15/05): A story Sunday on Page F1 about Eugene business Terra Tech incorrectly stated the company’s origins. Rudy Hedberg bought it in 1987 from Bill Bennett of Eugene; Bennett began the business as International Reforestation Suppliers in 1976.
The changes that have swept across the Northwest timber industry in the past 15 years have compelled more than just loggers and sawmills to adapt.
A host of support businesses also have had to look for ways to survive. That’s the story of Terra Tech, a Eugene firm that began life 30 years ago as a supplier of equipment to the reforestation industry.
As one of the nation’s leading suppliers of tree bags, planting hoes and seedling protection tubes, Terra Tech continues to leave its mark on public and private forests stretching from the Pacific Northwest to Dixie.
But the company has evolved into much more. It makes brightly colored safety vests worn by highway crews and surveyors. It sells erosion-control and landscape fabric, pruning tools for vineyard and orchard managers, and deer and elk repellent. It offers Christmas tree shearing knives, general forestry supplies and wildland firefighting gear.
The company assembles its own name-brand hoedads, the heavy-duty planting hoes used for planting seedlings, and has been an innovator in designing new blades for planting shovels and hoedads.
And now Terra Tech is branching out again with products to absorb spills, from a puddle of oil in a home garage to a hazardous substance running into a creek. The firm recently developed a prototype of a spill response kit that fits in the trunk of a car, and shopped it around at the Oregon Logging Conference last week in Eugene.
It’s hard to encapsulate all the company does, sales manager Todd Hedberg said. And it keeps growing, he added.
“It’s a cool time. There’s a lot of opportunities out there with the changing industry,” he said. “There’s always something new to keep it fresh.”
His father, Rudy Hedberg, started the company in the mid-’70s. It focused solely on reforestation supplies, and was sustained by abundant logging and replanting .
But the substantial decline in federal timber sales over the past 15 years, spurred in large part by the federal government’s move to protect the Northern spotted owl, forced the company to diversify.
“It was something we had to do, but it was also something that was easy to do,” ToddHedberg said.
Terra Tech already had a foot in the door in some other business areas, he said. It just needed to bring more products to more customers, building on its reforestation base.
“We just evolved and expanded,” said Hedberg, 26, who has worked in his father’s business off and on from the time he was 15, before joining full time in 2001.
Finding new products and markets, or new ways of making the same products, became a trend in the Northwest after logging on public lands became embroiled in environmental protests and lawsuits.
“A lot of people have had to do that,” said Paul Ehinger, a Eugene consultant who has tracked changes in the wood products industry for more than two decades. “Everybody is working on something they can do better.”
Heavy equipment suppliers, for example, shifted to supplying the construction and road building sectors, Ehinger said.
“Good entrepreneurs don’t quit. They try to figure out how they can survive,” he said.
Turning to private sources
For Terra Tech, this meant turning to owners of small woodlands for business when federal timber supplies were increasingly protected or tied up in litigation, leaving mills turning to private forests.
The explosion in recent years of private contract crews to fight wildfires in the West opened yet another market for Terra Tech. The company always dabbled in firefighting gear but now carries a full line of protective equipment and hand tools.
At one point, it even flirted with outdoor recreation gear but found it too difficult to compete with such companies as GI Joe’s, REI and McKenzie Outfitters.
Terra Tech also sells directly to the public from its office/warehouse/manufacturing plant at 2635 W. Seventh Place.
“It’s gotten to the point that if people don’t know where to get it, they’ll just come here,” Hedberg said. “Because we carry some obscure tools. … A lot of it is contractor grade, so they’ll last.”
Forestry is still the backbone
While the company’s aggressive move to diversify has given it financial stability and has fattened its bottom line, the bulk of its sales still relate to forestry, although often in different ways than in the past.
The needs of tree planters keep Terra Tech’s 11 employees bustling from early fall through spring, as the optimal planting time varies from region to region. It’s not unusual for Terra Tech to move several hundred thousand plastic mesh tubes, which protect seedlings from hungry deer, and bamboo stakes imported from China, in a single week.
Having a fully stocked warehouse of forestry tools in town has kept Eugene timber cruiser Jim Steele coming to Terra Tech for 25 years. Steele, owner of JLS Consulting for the past 10 years and a timber manager for JH Baxter and Co. before that, goes there to buy the flagging, compasses and pedometers he uses in determining the volume and value of timber sales.
“They do stock a lot of items, so you’re not having to wait a week to get something,” he said. “They’re very competitive.”
The company’s closest competitor is industry giant Forestry Suppliers in Jackson, Miss.
Hedberg said Terra Tech will continue to grow and diversify but also will strive for stability from season to season.
“My challenge is to level the peaks and valleys to be more consistent through the year,” he said.
The company’s sewing room is a key to that goal. From rolls of heavy vinyl and other material, up to 10 workers cut and stitch tree bags, fertilizer backpacks, firefighting packs and a line of customized safety vests.
The vests have been one of the company’s fastest-growing products. The ability to tailor pockets to specific tasks and emblazon them with logos appeals to buyers.
Aiming for the municipal market
Terra Tech makes one of the most durable vests for timber cruisers on the market, Hedberg said. “That’s one of our vanguard products.”
But the company is trying to forge deeper into the municipal market for vests. The city of Eugene’s Public Works Department buys about 125 of Terra Tech’s vests a year. They are used by employees any time they need to work in public rights of way, said Jim McLaughlin, subsurface operations section manager for public works maintenance.
The lightweight design and abundance of pockets “suited our needs very well,” McLaughlin said. “Customer satisfaction drove us to buy these.”
Terra Tech’s latest venture involves Sorbitec, a multiuse granular absorbent sold in jugs, pails and bags. The fluffy pellets can be used to soak up oil, gas, paint, ammonia and a wide range of other substances. The product makes disposal easy and is fire-resistent up to 2,300 degrees, Hedberg said.
Terra Tech is experimenting with filling small, socklike booms with Sorbitec and packaging them in a vinyl kit. Potential buyers include crews likely to respond first to a spill, construction crews and truckers, Hedberg said.
“It’s just a really cool product,” he said.
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