USA - The Wood-Mizer Way 99 Spring/Summer 2017 | Page 9

“
As a young man, it’s a great idea to spend your days farming, running around on
quadbikes, tractors, and it all seems great fun, The next minute, you have a wife and children...
­
”
—HENRY BROWN
H
enry Brown has worked
the Grange Farm with
his father and now as
sole proprietor in the
village
of
Rosedale
Abbey in England for
more than 20 years. On the 300-acre
farm located in the heart of the North
Yorkshire Moors National Park, Henry
and his wife manage 400 mule breeding
sheep, 1,200 pigs, horses, two
bed & breakfast cottages, and a
timber business. “I have such a
varied job description,” Henry
laughs. “Whether it is managing
the cottages, the farming side,
the timber side, every day is
different.” However, diversity
to keep the farm consistently
profitable was not always the
case. “As a young man, it’s a great
idea to spend your days farming,
running around on quadbikes,
tractors, and it all seems great
fun,” recalls Henry. “The next
minute, you have a wife and
children. And suddenly, it was
appearing [to us] that a hill farm
was not going to generate the
income that our family required.”
In the early 2000s, Henry and his
wife began looking into ways they
could supplement farming to raise
their profits. “[Profitability] while
farming is a common problem,
certainly up in these areas,” Henry
shares. “I have two or three friends
that have also diversified – one
into steel fabricating and another
into stone.
charming B&B, which they now rent out
to people looking to get away from the
bustle of city life.
Henry had gone through a forestry
apprenticeship at nearby Castle Howard
and decided that he could make a go
of producing timber after working with
a Wood-Mizer portable sawmill for a
year. He went on to purchase a basic but
competent Wood-Mizer LT15 sawmill
because of his low budget. “People are
shocked when they see what [the sawmill]
turns out, what it can produce,” Henry
shares. “It was good to start with a mill
like the LT15 to open up the marketplace,
without having to spend vast amounts
of money not knowing what the return
would be. We started up slowly, just
processing some oak locally for people.
And it’s grown ever since.”
Timber can be a difficult market
to get into, as established sawmill
companies often have very loyal
customers. Henry differentiated
his services by being available
for consultations and to make
deliveries on weekends and being
open to try anything to satisfy the
client’s needs. “We get a lot of
different projects put in front of
us,” shares Henry. “And we never
have the attitude of, oh, that can’t
be done. I like a challenge!”
“We have a varied client
base, which I love – everyone
from
builders,
landscape
architects,
gardeners,
all
the way to your weekend
woodworking enthusiast.”
just because I had to do it.” Clients visit, inspect the logs
that Henry keeps in stock, and
can browse already dried timber
to find the perfect piece they are
looking for to complete a project.
“There was one gentleman who
came and ordered a large load of
ash – nothing unusual about that,”
Henry relates. “But it was for 10mm
(2/5") by 75mm (3") strips… he was
building coracle (small, rounded)
boats! He folds and intertwines the
ash around.”
His wife Jane had always wanted
to run a bed & breakfast and
holiday cottage. Together, they
remodeled an old barn into a Approximately 75% of the
timber Henry processes is oak,
in addition to larch and silver
birch. “Most customers like to
I wanted to make sure
that when I diversified into
something else, that it was
actually a love, and not
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