The authors designed and tested two low-investment fully mechanized operations for producing chips or traditional firewood from the thinning of walnut plantations.
About 83% of the NIPFs reported to have used wood for heating their households and business premises, whereas only 29% of the NIPFs sold energy wood from their forest estates in the form of firewood, round wood, and wood chips.
Most of the remaining trees were chipped for mulch or donated for firewood.
Full tree extraction methodology is quite effective in the case of chip production in landing instead of firewood production.
For the price levels assumed in this study, small-scale mechanized chipping offered higher profits than motor-manual firewood production all along the tree size range.
Furthermore, chipping achieved a break even with smaller trees than firewood production, allowing for financially viable early thinning, timely performed before the nurse trees overtop the crop trees.
These fuels are normally used in various forms, viz.; solid wood, wood chips, wood pellets, charcoal, crop residue, sawdust, briquette, etc. Charcoal and firewood are the principal fuels used in Kenya [2, 3].
Three systems were employed for harvesting: a mechanised whole tree harvesting (WTH) system, which included chipping at landing; a fully mechanised cut-to-length (CTL) harvesting system for firewood; and a semi-mechanised CTL system with manual felling and bunching.
The use of firewood and dunk cakes/chips has increased from 75% in 2004-05 to approximately 78% in 2007-08, even in the presence of kerosene and LPG.
