No wood wasted at Rosko Forestry: year-old facility due for more equipment, staff.

• Author: Stewart, Nick

More than a year after the completion of a nearly decade-long plan to establish a new forestry mill in Kirk-land Lake, Rosko Forestry is seeing success amidst challenging times.

In February 2009, milling began at its sprawling site on the outskirts of town, and the company now features 25 staff, cutting rough green lumber to custom sizes up to 32 feet in length.

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From one-inch-by-one-inch to ten-by-ten and anything in between, the two-line mill prepares specific requests for things such as fence boards, track ties, and barn timbers. These are sold into domestic markets, primarily Ontario and Quebec.

"It's going well," says Russ Williams, general manager of Rosko Forestry.

"Prices could be better, for sure, but that's a sign of the times."

Owned by Joe and Terry Rosko, the company is just one of many in the Rosko Group, which also includes a long-time logging operation employing up to 50 in the Temiskaming Forest, as well as Team Rosko, a retailer of snowmobiles, ATVs and boats.

Joe's dream of operating a sawmill first came to pass in 2004 when Rosko Forestry was asked to manage Tembec's Kenogami mill, which the industry giant closed just one year later.

As a self-proclaimed "stump-to-dump" forest operations company, offering anything from forest management planning to operations and harvesting, "it only made sense" to take the next step and become a "stump-to-market" firm, says Williams.

Undeterred and determined to diversify, Rosko developed the land on which the mill currently sits, servicing it with water, sewer, gas before purchasing an entire sawmill from Gerardville, Que.

Staff dismantled it, transported it to Kirkland Lake, and re-assembled it on its current location in 2008, which now has roughly 24,000 square feet spread across three buildings. The first lumber was cut in early 2009, while equipment upgrades continue to be implemented through the site.

With no official wood allotment, Rosko Forestry buys its wood on the open market and from private lands, and its flexibility in the range of products it can make is key to its viability, says Williams.

This has led the bulk of its customer base to be made up of wholesalers and secondary manufacturers looking to fulfill specific contracts with specialty cut wood.

No part of the wood is wasted, as the chips are sold to Abitibi for hogfuel, while the sawdust goes down the road to Northland Power for its co-generation plant.

This kind of outside interest continues...