Job's Journal October/November | Page 9

To give a little more background into where some of our products come from and the kind of sawmills those suppliers operate, we thought it would be good to have a bit of focus in the newsletter. Our largest supplier is Windymains, part of the Glennon group, who supply us with a wide range of our sawn products. The Glennon group have been operating since 1913 and now operate a number of different sawmill and processing sites, following rapid expansion over the last century. These mills operate on a completely different scale to us and some of the figures are mind-boggling. Across the group they have a total sawn capacity of 500,000m3 per year and a kiln drying capacity of 220,000m3 per year! The Windymains site is responsible for just over 100,000m3 of that annual figure, of which we purchased over 2600m3 just through the last year…By comparison, our sawmill can produce approximately 4000m3 of sawn timber per year. It’s easy to look at those figures and wonder why we bother to do what we do, but there are many benefits to running our own mill and many more ways we can further improve on our current production capabilities. We might not be competing with the ‘big boys’, but we can still hold our own and run alongside them. P.8 job’s journal