WBapr22pgs_SS.qxp_Wood Bioenergy Magazine 3/11/22 7:50 AM Page 30
■ in-woods producer
Father-Son Duo
Keeps On Chippin’ By Patrick Dunning COMMERCE, Ga. ore often than not, logging is a profession passed down from one generation to the next, and usually when the next generation is still young. That only happens because men like David McClure, 83, serve as mentors to those who come after them. The veteran logger says the lifelong relationships he’s cultivated with equipment dealers and mill personnel over the decades of his career are second only to watching his adopted son, Shane Cape, 49, owner of D&S Logging, Inc. develop a love for logging at an early age and follow in his footsteps. In the early ’80s, McClure married Cape’s mother, Patricia Anne, and raised her son like his own. “When Shane was 12 years old, he went with us to the woods one Saturday,” the elder logger recalls. “I was running a chain saw and he came down to where I was and asked if he could get on the loader and move some sticks around. I said be careful. Then he asked me if he could do a couple drags on the skidder.” As Cape got older, his fascination with tractors and
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woods equipment grew and he never wanted to pursue anything else. His stepdad continued to log under the McClure Logging banner until 1991, when Shane came of age. At that point he dissolved McClure Logging and from it formed D&S Logging for David and Shane. “Shane and I knew it was always going to be me and him side by side,” McClure says. “He was crazy about the woods and if he wasn’t in school he was with me.”
Chipping Operation McClure and Cape purchased their first Bandit whole-tree chipper at the end of 2009 to diversify the company’s portfolio and take advantage of the Biomass Crop Assistance Program (BCAP). A program where the government incentive matched payments at a rate of $1 for each dry ton paid by qualified biomass conversion facilities up to $45 per dry ton to inject liquidity into U.S. biomass markets. With U.S. housing starts lacking following the ’08 Recession, D&S says its chipping business saved the company. “The main reason we decided to get a chipper was the Obama Administration,” Cape says. “There wasn’t much
D&S Logging averages 50 loads per week production of 5/8 in. dirty chips for biomass outlets.
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Wood Bioenergy / April 2022
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