ronnie vinikoff

Wood Purveyor
Forestry Management Service
Rockdale, TX
(512) 388-3525

“We usually try to keep anywhere from sixty to eighty restaurants all the time, and as far as consumption, we probably go we probably deliver at ten tons [of wood] a day, every day, seven days a week, to that many restaurants.” – Ronnie Vinikoff

Ronnie Vinikoff was born in San Gabriel, California, in 1964. He grew up in east Texas, and originally came to the Austin area as an ironworker. He started his forestry management and woodcutting business when he was fifteen years old, and he now works primarily on land outside of Rockdale, Texas. Ronnie and his crew supply post oak and other types of wood to numerous restaurants in and around Austin, many of them barbecue restaurants. Ronnie has been a pioneer in managing forests in Central Texas for sustainability and tree health, developing innovative practices and technologies, as well as providing advice and assistance to others. When you eat barbecue at a restaurant fueled by Ronnie Vinikoff’s wood, you’re not only tasting flavors from a Texas forest, you’re also helping to sustain it.

Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Ronnie Vinikoff talking about the kinds of wood he supplies and what different restaurants like to use. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Ronnie Vinikoff – Forestry Management Service/Wood Purveyor – Rockdale, TX
Date: March 10, 2007
Location: Ronnie Vinikoff’s property near Rockdale, TX
Fieldwork Director: Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
Fieldwork Team: Rebecca Onion and Lisa Powell – graduate students at The University of Texas at Austin
Interviewers: Lisa Powell, with assistance from Rebecca Onion
Photographer: Lisa Powell

Produced in association with the American Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin and the Central Texas Barbecue Association.

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Lisa Powell: This is Lisa Powell, and we are outside of Rockdale, Texas, on tenth of March 2007. Rebecca Onion is checking sound, and we’re here today to interview Ronnie Vinikoff. So, would you go ahead and restate your name for the tape, and, if you don’t mind, state your age as well.

Ronnie Vinikoff: My name is Ronnie Vinikoff, and I am forty-two years old.

Great, thank you. And where were you born?

San Gabriel, California.

Thanks. So, do you want to just tell us a little bit about what you do, what your occupation is?

Yeah, I do forestry management, in the Milam, Burleson, and Lee County area, and as a by-product of what we do, we make various forestry products out of the things that we take off the land under the forestry management, and the things that we make are railroad cross ties, pallet material for pallets, barbecue wood for restaurants. We do a lot of mulch, stuff like that; there’s nothing goes to waste. We use a lot of our own compost, just in the managing of the forest. What we don’t use or can’t make forestry products is composted, and put back into the woods for future generations of trees.

And how long have you been doing what you do?

I’ve been, probably, for twenty-seven years, actually. I started this business when I was fifteen years old.

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Could you tell us a little bit, both about the land that you’re working on, and about how you started working on this particular section of land, or in this particular area?

Well, like I say, it was mainly as a source of supplemental income when I was working construction. Construction is a little slow in the wintertime because the weather is bad, and I used to live in east Texas and had a background in logging and stuff like that, and so I knew how to run a chain saw and started cutting firewood as supplemental income, and got to noticing in the area, the amount of waste that was going on, trees just dying out here just because of the mismanagement of them. Nobody around here manages their trees. They either just let them grow to be totally thicket, or, until somebody, a rancher or somebody decides he wants that piece of land for pasture, then they bring a bulldozer in and just doze it down and burn it. I just didn’t like the waste, so I thought that there would be an opportunity there for somebody who was willing to come in and manage, and do it right. So that’s how I got in this area. They do that in other areas [forestry management], just not in this particular area. And a lot of it is because of the value of the timber. A lot of it’s real low-grade hardwood, it’s not really good for a whole lot of things, but it is some of the best barbecue wood there is around, I found out.

So, what kind of wood in particular are the barbecue restaurants that you sell to looking for? What attracts them to your product?

Probably 90 percent use post oak, that’s the particular species of oak. But everybody’s got their own secret recipe, and they use a combination of different things. I mean we also have hickory that grows out here, we have pecan that grows close to the rivers, there’s several rivers around here that have native pecans that grows along the banks and the river bottoms. There’s a little bit of mesquite, but probably 90 percent of what we sell is oak, is the post oak variety. There is also some red oak. The red oak burns a little hotter. We sell mostly red oak to people who grill with it, not necessarily barbe—, not necessarily smoke, there’s different types of barbecue, there’s you known smoked barbecue, then there’s grilled. And then there’s another thing going on, there’s a lot of Italian restaurants in the area that have these big wood-fired brick ovens that they bake their pizzas and lasagnas and stuff like that in, and we cut wood, they like the hotter burning wood with those things too. And it’s getting to be as the price of energy goes up, gas, electricity have gotten so high, that there’s a lot of restaurants that used to just have gas grills are putting wood-fired grills in just because of the economics. It’s cheaper, cheaper than the gas and electricity. And it gives the food a better flavor, grilling over the smoke, it gives a little of the smoky flavor to their food. Normally, it used to just be regular electric grills or gas grills. So it’s also a form of energy that we’re selling [laughs] to some restaurants, yeah.

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And so, once you’ve selected the trees, and gone through the process of harvesting them, then what’s the next step in getting the wood to the restaurant?

Then it is taken, we have a portable firewood mill, which there’s very few of them even in existence. I was, helped some engineers actually design this mill. It was actually built over in North Carolina. Me and some people that were interested in automating the firewood, because of the labor situation, it’s just very labor intensive work, and we’re trying to take it and automate it anyway we can. And so we designed and built a few of these firewood mills, that are portable, and we can take them out there in the woods, and we can probably set them in the middle of a forty acre area and bring all of the wood out of the woods to this firewood mill and then it processes whole trees into firewood. It measures, cuts, and splits them, and as it comes out of this mill, it goes into some crates that we also designed. They look kind of like portable woodsheds. We have different sizes—they hold anywhere from three to four tons of wood apiece. And then the wood, after it’s been processed, and cut and split, it’s stacked into these containers, and that’s the first and only time that the wood is ever touched by human hands. And then we have a special truck that will pick that container up. We can put up to seven or eight of them on a eighteen-wheeler and haul them to town. And then that same truck that can pick them up and put them on the trailer can also take them off the trailer and deliver them one at a time. We’ll just take the trailer to a central area in town. We have a wood yard north of Austin in Round Rock, and we’ll take the truck there and we’ll distribute them from there. We have one for every restaurant, plus we have about thirty extra ones that we keep loaded all the time for them. And we just take them a full one and pick up their empty one. The driver never has to touch the wood, never has to get out of the truck to make a wood delivery.

And about both how many restaurant customers do you have, and about how many deliveries do you make, each night or each time you go into town?

It varies, it fluctuates up and down. We lose a few, some of them go out of business, through no fault of their own, it’s just the economy, they come and go, and then there’s new ones that start up. We usually try to keep anywhere from sixty to eighty restaurants all the time, and as far as consumption, we probably go we probably deliver at ten tons a day, every day, seven days a week, to that many restaurants.

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Here’s just kind a fun question, and you don’t have to answer it [laughs], but what kind of wood do you particularly like the taste of the barbecue that comes from that wood? Do you have a particular favorite yourself, or do you like lots of different kinds?

It’s according to what I’m cooking. Actually, like pork, I like the taste of hickory, pork cooked on hickory wood the best. On beef, I like the taste of oak. And, it’s just, like anything else, I like to play around a little bit with it. Mesquite is a tough wood to cook with. It’s very, has a very, very strong flavor, but every now and then I like a little mesquite. It’s good with seafood or chicken, stuff like that. But there’s not a whole lot of mesquite out here, and it’s getting harder and harder to find, because there’s other things that they’re making out of mesquite now that are more valuable than firewood and so we have to compete against that. There’s a lot of furniture being made out of mesquite, this rustic furniture. And hardwood flooring, which, they get quite a bit of money for that, and it’s hard to pay what these other guys are willing to pay that are making those products from it, from the mesquite, so we’re kind of getting away from that.

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Could you verbally walk us through some of the different parts of the landscape around here?

Right. I just use my experience of working the land over the years to try to prescribe the best application to do with each part of the land. Just according to how eroded the land is, that we’ll go in there, and we try to stabilize the land as much as possible to keep it from erosion. We’ll build dams, and we’ll terrace the land in places that need to be, to hold water back from rushing away, and we’ll put what they call rip rap in places, in gullies and stuff, which slows the water down and holds soil back. I try to be a good steward of the land, is the main thing. There’s really no set way of doing it, you just have to do it through my experience of working the land, prescribe what would be best for each area. We also do a lot of soil sampling, you know we’ll take samples of soil, we’ll try to figure out why the trees are not doing good in certain areas. There’s some areas, where there’s trees, that we’ll cut down that won’t be as big around as my arm, four or five inches around, and that tree is a hundred years old, and it’s because the soil is just, there’s nothing there. And then there’s trees that are two-foot diameter that are only thirty, forty years old. They’re getting lots of water, lots of nutrients. And the land around here, it’s mostly rolling hills. There is a lot of springs, a lot of natural artesian wells, the water just bubbles up out of the ground, it’s real good for growing timber. It’s mainly sandy soil, sandy loam type soil. There is clay down underneath the sand that holds water, but the, the summers out here are pretty brutal. We get quite a few days, excess over a hundred degree days, and it just wicks the moisture out of the ground. We’ll go through there, and where we thin the trees out, you can see, these trees that we’re sitting under right now, see how the limbs go all the way down to the ground. It makes the trees bushier, that’s the trees way of shading its roots, to keep the water in the soil. And also, when you have more limbs all the way down like that, it will produce more leaves, and in the fall, the leaves fall off, and that also helps build up the soil, it turns to compost. And trees that are out, if you see up in them woods up there, there’s hardly any tree limbs, except for at the very top, because it takes sunlight to get limbs, they won’t grow, and they don’t have very many leaves except for at the very tops of the trees…There’s a science to it all, it’s more than just coming out here and chopping down wood [laughs]. Like I say, if you manage it right, there will always be trees here for future generations, and that’s the main thing that I’m, I guess what I’m trying to say is that. In my lifetime, if I just clear cut all the land, there would probably be twenty, thirty, forty thousand acres that I would probably clear in my lifetime, and I can try to take ten or fifteen thousand, and manage it right, and it will be better trees when I’m dead than when I was here. If everybody will take that approach to the environment, I don’t think we’ll have a problem, keeping the environment healthy.

It’s not just a business, I’m not motivated by money. That is a nice part of it though, you know, that part kind of takes care of itself. Like I say, if you treat the land with respect, and everything else in a conscious, environmentally conscious way. A lot of people ask me, “What about these environmentalists?” I am an environmentalist, about the land. I am not a preservationist. There is a difference. Most of the people who claim to be environmentalists are actually preservationists. They try to preserve something, and that’s good if something can be preserved. The woods is something that is ever changing on its own. You can’t preserve something that is ever-changing on its own. So you just have to manage it in a good way.

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And so I think I remember when I was talking to you on the phone, that you said you usually get up pretty early in the morning. So, I’m sure no day is typical in your work, but could you just tell us a little bit about when you start your day, and to the extent that there’s some sort of typical day, what your workday might be like?

Typically, it varies on the time of year, but typically it’s ninety degrees year round here [laughs], at least nine months out of the year here, and so I’m usually up by about two o’clock in the morning. And not all that necessarily has to do with the weather; we have a pretty bad traffic situation in Austin, and that’s our major market, where we do our deliveries at, and so I try to get my deliveries done, I start doing deliveries at two o’clock in the morning, and try to be out of town, or have them done, and finished before rush hour in the morning, which is about six o’clock in the morning, and I’m on my way out here, to work…And I don’t necessarily go into Austin every day. We take a big eighteen-wheeler load in and we can haul seven or eight of these containers at a time. And, but I’ll go probably two, three times a week, in there, and get them all done. At least every other day I’m going there…I’ll leave here sometimes at ten o’clock at night, and have time to get to Austin by two or so, and get the deliveries done, and get back here. And then if I’m tired, I’ll lay down. A lot of times I’ll work until it starts getting warm, until probably ten in the morning, twelve, and then I’ll go to bed. I’ll sleep, sleep when it’s hot, and then maybe get, a lot of times, what. Also, working at night helps if something happens, and we break down, and need parts. We’re not working until five o’clock and then figuring out we’re broke down and then have to wait until the next day. If I’m broke down during the middle of the night, and I’m done by ten in the morning, I got from ten until five to go get parts and get things repaired and going for the next night. So it works for us pretty good.

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And so, on that note, what do you think is the sort of future of your operation and the future of your business?

I think that it’s, as time goes on it’s just going to get better, actually, because people are more environmentally conscious, they’re going to want to know where their materials are coming from, that they use in their business. If they’re conscious about the environment they, or at least I would if I was a barbecue restaurant I would want to know the wood that I use is not just being clear-cut land that will never be in trees, that it’s being managed, and it will always be. I’m not in this business to cut all the trees down because then I’d be out of business if there’s no trees.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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