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J.H. Hart Urban Forestry Switches to Tub Grinder, Sees Rise in Mulching Operations Efficiency
Judd Hart has been business savvy since before high school when he took down a neighbors
tree and discovered it paid more than mowing lawns. So Hart ditched his lawn maintenance
services and focused on providing tree care, which led to the birth of J.H. Hart Urban Forestry,
one of the largest full-service urban forestry companies in Michigan.
Nearly 30 years later, Hart was faced with another not-too-difficult decision that just made plain
business sense. After demonstrating a tub grinder to help with the companys mulching operation,
he realized that in one pass it could produce a product that would take his horizontal grinders
three passes. So Hart traded in his two horizontal grinders for one tub grinder.
An Entrepreneur in the Making
J.H. Hart Urban Forestry, based in Sterling Heights, Mich., got its start in the mid-1970s when
Hart was in seventh grade.
I was the kid who worked on the block, Hart says. I made maybe $300 to $400 per week cutting
grass with my little John Deere tractor and my little lawn mower.
Then one day, a neighbor asked if Hart could cut down a dead elm tree in her yard. She asked
Hart how much he would charge to do the job and, after quickly contemplating whether he had
the equipment to take on the task, he blurted out a number $150. The neighbor didnt flinch at
his asking price and without hesitation she said, Do it.
So Im filling out bills at the end of the month ! for lawn service I think I cut her lawn four times
that month, so the bill was $40. It took me an hour to cut the lawn for $10, and I worked four
hours to take down the tree and made $150. Thats when a light turned on, Hart says.
In the coming years, Hart gradually did less lawn maintenance and more tree service. Shortly
after graduating from high school, he completely transitioned into a tree care service provider,
taking on line-clearing contracts with Michigan Bell (now AT&T) and several municipalities in
addition to offering residential tree service.
Today, J.H. Hart Urban Forestry employs 40 people and offers a multitude of services and
products, including line clearance, residential tree care, custom-blend mulch products, wood
disposal and recycling yard, stump grinding, plant healthcare, corrective pruning, tree trimming
and removals, and aerial manlifts. Hart says his company began its mulching operation when it
was asked by a city to help with its Dutch elm disease epidemic.
The city crews were very challenged in keeping up with the overwhelming number of trees that
were dying, he says. So the city hired us to assist, and we had a staging yard where we tipped
all of the wood. For years, I tried to take as much of the saw-grade timber as I could to the local
saw mill, but inevitably we ended up with this huge stockpile of wood that was clearly not saw-mill
capable.
To solve the problem, Hart asked his local chipper salesman if he could demonstrate a horizontal
grinder. The horizontal grinder worked so well that he bought it after only one day of use. He
would later come to own two.
In addition to serving as a practical way for Hart to dispose wood waste, the grinders also helped
him expand his company by offering off-site grinding services. In the beginning, Hart would grind
the wood material through a larger-sized screen and then sell it to the Genesee Power Station in
Flint, Mich. But he soon found that transportation, labor and other costs didnt make it a profitable
venture. Thats when his salesman asked if hed ever considered running the wood material
through a smaller-sized screen to make mulch.
He ended up bringing us down a screen and we changed it. I went ahead and reground some of
the material that we had initially ground through a 6-inch screen, and we went down to a 3-inch
screen. The resulting product was some pretty stuff, Hart says.
So Hart let the pile sit throughout the fall and winter, and the next spring, he and his crews went
back and dug into it. Thats when he found that the mulch had aged and turned the rich, dark
brown color he knew customers would love. Its like a fine wine; it needs to age, he says. Soon
after, in 2000, he bought a 60-cubic-yard delivery truck and it was the start of J.H. Hart Forest
products.
Realizing the Benefits of a Tub Grinder
However, one of the struggles Hart found with his horizontal grinders was that they tended to be
too focused on cutting the wood, meaning the resulting product was more chippie than he
desired. He also wanted to capture the wood chip material generated from tree service
applications so it could be turned into mulch rather than sold to the power plant. We just needed
to take that chip material and kind of beat it up so that it looked very fractured or fibrous. And by
investigating a better way to recover more wood material out of our operation, we learned that the
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