Atlantic Forestry November 2020
/
Hamming it up on the planting block – (from left) Pat Wiggin, executive director for the Federation of Nova Scotia Woodland Owners, with planters Peter Houston, Emma Budreo, Hattie Reeves, and Ash Scriven.
Youthful exuberance, anyone?
Bridging the gap in Nova Scotia’s silviculture sector
Pat Wiggin came aboard last year as executive director with the Federation of Nova Scotia Woodland Owners, bringing some youthful energy and vision that will serve the group well. Wiggin grew up in Nova Scotia, but he spent the first part of his career out west, and he says he has been able to view this province’s forest industry “from an outsider’s perspective.” What he sees tells him there are tremendous opportunities, but more needs to be done to connect the dots. He has made a start by launching a pilot project that has evolved into the Federation’s new Forest Skills and Development Program.
Wiggin got interested in natural resource management while completing a B.Sc. in environmental science at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. He funded his education by doing summer treeplanting jobs in northern British Columbia. “Obviously, the scale of treeplanting operations in B.C. is pretty significant,” he says, “and it attracts a lot of young, eager workers who are looking to do the same – pay their tuition, or pay for world travel, or whatever.”
After graduating in 2011, he continued with the same company, Vancouver-based Apex Reforestation Ltd., managing remote camps for several years. Then in 2015 he came back east to get a diploma at the Maritime College of Forest Technology in Fredericton. Among his fellow graduates, he was one of the few Nova Scotians who came home to start a career. “Everybody was just flooding out west, and it was kind of worrisome, just in terms of succession of the workforce,” he recalls, “let alone the land ownership – the kind of multi-generational dilemma we have here in the province.”
Soon after taking his new job with the Federation, he began to get a clearer picture of the shortfall in Nova Scotia’s forestry labour force. “I started crunching some numbers, and I did a survey with my membership base, because some of the directors on the board were basically saying that there’s just endless work – boots-on-the-ground work: PCT, crop-tree release, pruning, planting.”
He found out that this physically demanding work was mostly being done by people in their 50s, and there were far too few new entrants coming up behind them. “It’s kind of a wake-up call for young people to pick up the torch here, in an age of iPads and sitting in front of screens,” says Wiggin.
Many silviculture contractors reported dismal success rates with their recruitment efforts. “It was about getting a specific type of individual who really excels at self-motivating and doing piecework,” Wiggin says. “And it often leaves them a bit frustrated, to the point where they might want to give up. They might hire kids who previously worked in a grocery store or a gas station or something like that, with no real exposure or understanding of the output – like, for your effort you basically get paid more.”
The Federation decided it could play a role in helping to match suitable workers with employers. “The board and I met probably weekly for the better part of six months before I launched the first treeplanting project,” says Wiggin.
Mike Gillis, the Federation’s secretary-treasurer and director for the Eastern Region, expressed interest in participating. Gillis is the manager of Baddeck Valley Wood Producers, in Cape Breton, so he was familiar with the challenges of finding workers, and he had ground that needed to be planted.
“We targeted students in their 20s, or older teenagers,” says Wiggin. This past spring, he accepted a small group of four participants, and provided intensive training out on the block.
“We planted over half a million trees, in partnership with Baddeck Valley,” he says. “This was on private woodlots, but just to provide full seasonal employment we also did some on Crown land. It was probably 60-40. Maybe 350,000 on Crown and 220,000 on private.”
CRUSHING LAND
With the success of the planting project, Wiggin applied the same model to pre-commercial thinning (PCT). He assembled a crew, and the Federation provided assistance to get them geared up. “It’s a very daunting thing to a lot of people – that big down payment, and working off a brush saw that might cost $1,300 or whatever,” he says. “We subsidized that, and we brought in people to mentor them – people who had been doing it for 15 or 20 years. So Mike Gillis from Baddeck Valley had two of his staff help the PCT gang for maybe three or four days, and now they’re killing it. They’re just crushing land – maybe three hectares a week each, which is great.”
The crews started on Crown land in the Cape Breton Highlands, with the intention of moving to private woodlots in the lowlands as winter weather set in. Participants are charged a modest fee to cover their training. “About $25 per hectare, which is really nothing,” says Wiggin, noting that this is a small fraction of PCT rates. “That allows us to pay the mentors a fair wage, to be able to create these good teams.”
The measure of this program’s success is the young workers’ ability to achieve a level of productivity that equates to an attractive wage and a recognition that the silviculture sector offers a rewarding and respectable livelihood. “They’ll have their saws at the end of all this, and they’re loving it,” says Wiggin. “We gave it a bit more of a relaxed schedule, so it’s not so isolating. They work Monday to Thursday, and then they have three days off. They’re all making over $300 every single day.... It’s good money for them, and it’s also starting to provide a stable workforce.”
The way Wiggin sees it, this kind of job training is not merely technical. It is partly attitudinal, and it also has broader social implications. “The point of it is to get people to understand the flow of how forest management works here, and to get them exposed to hard work that pays well – and also just connecting with the generations of landowners and forest practitioners that have been in the business for so long,” he says. “Being fairly young myself – I’m only 31 – I just thought it was a good opportunity to be able to show my respect and admiration for the older generation that does have this experience, to be able to pass that on to people who are willing to learn.”
The training is also available to landowners who would be interested in doing their own silviculture if they had the skills and the confidence. “The way we’ve framed it is, anybody is welcome,” says Wiggin. “I’ve sent letters out to my member base saying that if you want to learn how to do this stuff yourself, it doesn’t matter what age you are, come out and learn with us, and we’ll have the mentors that you’ll be able to learn from, with people who are actually working contracts.”
ECOLOGICAL
With the onset of snow season, the program will shift into crop-tree release and pruning. A crew has been lined up, and there have been discussions about partnering with New Wave Forestry, George Dempsey’s company in Thorburn, N.S. “That would be in Pictou County and Musquodoboit,” says Wiggin. “We’re trying to create these opportunities in every service area.”
He points out that the rollout of this program coincides with the release of the Nova Scotia Department of Lands and Forestry’s new woodlot management home study guide (Module 18) devoted to ecological forestry, and that all these silviculture treatments will play a part in implementing the recommendations of the Lahey report. “If we really want to get on top of this, we’ve got this crazy backlog of work that needs to be done before we can really transition,” he says. “I mean, how many thousand hectares of un-PCTed land is there, on private and public forests in the province? It’s staggering, when you actually look at it.”
Although full planting, as a post-clearcut treatment, does not appear in the new study guide, the fact remains that there is plenty of ground waiting for someone to pound in trees. “It’s not really for me to comment on whether it’s ecological or whatever,” Wiggin says. “If people do want the work done, then who are we to deny them? Especially if we have the opportunity to keep the work available, in terms of being able to keep a season. I guess if we’re able to create boots-on-the-ground work for all parts of the triad approach that Lahey has put forward, we’re meeting the needs and objectives everywhere.”
Wiggin is hopeful that as the program continues, contractors will have an easier time finding workers, and young people will feel that there is a place for them in the industry. “I think we’re onto something, because it’s kind of tragic that both generations have kind of given up on one another a little bit. I think that when you’re doing fairly laborious work like this, both people are a bit vulnerable, and it’s amazing to see the patience and the cooperation. It’s been working out really well so far,” he says. “There’s a bit of a misunderstanding in this generational gap, and we wanted to bridge that.” DL