Atlantic Forestry July 2021

Three perspectives on silviculture

It’s always a pleasure to chat with people who have a deep appreciation for the woods, and for wood products – people who take pride in the industry generally, and in their own work specifically. That’s a big part of what Atlantic Forestry Review is all about; we seek out those good-news stories. 

But we also have a responsibility to listen to those who want to change things for the better, and those who have experienced frustrations or disappointments. I’m not talking about critics who are looking at forestry from the outside; I’m talking about people who work in the industry – people offering first-hand accounts of problems that should perhaps be addressed. We do not seek out these stories, but they come to our attention. Three recent conversations, with people from three different sectors, have stuck in my mind. I’m not going to name these individuals; no one likes to be seen as a complainer, especially in a small province like Nova Scotia, in a highly integrated industry. But their perspectives warrant consideration.

SMALL SAWMILL

First, the sawmiller – a guy running a small family operation. It’s one of those mills that has an old-fashioned charm, but that clearly goes hand-in-hand with labour intensity. Why has this business never scaled up, or adopted newer technology? The owner tells me it has a lot to do with Nova Scotia’s Forest Sustainability Regulations, which came into effect 20 years ago, requiring that mills purchasing more than 5,000 cubic metres of logs had to pay a silviculture levy, at the rate of $3 for every cubic metre of softwood.

“It didn’t take me long to realize that this wasn’t going to work for us,” says the sawmiller. At that time, his annual wood procurement was about 6,500 cubic metres. “With this program, you could bring in 5,000 without contributing to the fund, but once you went over, you pay into the fund from zero. If you did 5,001, the first payment was $15,000. The amount that we did over 5,000, we couldn’t justify the numbers. We were growing every year at that point, but unless we made a big leap, the numbers just didn’t work.”

So, as any accountant would advise, the owner scaled back a bit, to stay under the threshold. He has tried to do more specialty and value-added products, to generate more revenue from the same volume, but that only goes so far. “There was never any incentive to put in an extra roller or a belt or anything to speed it up. It just shortened the year for us,” he says. “So we just stagnated. And it wasn’t just me, it was a whole bunch of us little mills that were around forever, where the goal was always a million board feet a year. The 5,000 cubic translates into 885,000 board feet. So now we couldn’t do our million feet without paying. It’s the same as making a little bit more money on your paycheque, and going into a higher tax bracket and ending up with less.”

The consequences, though presumably unintended, should have been predictable. “They just wiped out the small sawmill industry in the province, and nobody seemed too concerned, because the number of employees was maybe five or 10 in each mill.”

The sawmiller tells me he’s not opposed to the levy, but payments should be based on wood procurement over and above the threshold. “They can change it with the stroke of a pen,” he says. “If they think they’re going to be losing something, they could drop the basic exemption down a little bit.”

WOODLOT OWNER

The second conversation that lingers in my mind involves a landowner who is highly dissatisfied with a harvest job on his 150-acre woodlot, which was well stocked with mature Red spruce, plus some hemlock and hardwoods. He entered into a rather loose verbal agreement with a wood broker who recommended a commercial thinning, subsidized with funding from the provincial silviculture program.

“We asked him if we should have a contract,” recalls the landowner.  “And he said, ‘Oh, I don’t think we need a contract. We can go in there and do what you need.’ You know, you’re trusting people. Here’s a guy who went to school for four years – a forestry guy. He must know what he’s doing.”

In hindsight, the woodlot owner recognizes that there were some red flags, starting with the broker’s attitude. “The brashness and the bravado, and the promises he made: ‘We’re going to clean this up.’” 

The job went ahead, and soon there was another red flag: “One of the operators asked me if I wanted the line trees cut. I said ‘No, the lines trees don’t belong to me!’ But lo and behold, before they were done they had cut several of the line trees.”

Another bad sign was when the broker cautioned the landowner not to let the truckers haul at night: “It was indicating that they were going to clean me out – like he was warning me – like he was pointing his finger at the truckers who were going to rip me off.”

And then, a couple weeks in, the broker let it be known that he was going on vacation. Because the woodlot owner was not in a position to be on site regularly, this meant there was no real oversight of the job. The cutting went on all summer, covering 40 or 50 percent of the acreage. In the end, the gross harvest was about 2,900 tonnes – comprising mostly studwood, but also 500 tonnes of pulpwood, and some prime spruce logs – “30 inches on the butt and 22 inches at 18 feet,” says the woodlot owner. “They seemed to have a vacuum cleaner, going around getting that stuff.”

Some loads went directly toward road costs, totalling about $30,000 – most of which the landowner hopes to recoup through Forest Nova Scotia’s fuel-tax funding program, over the next six or seven years. The wood cheques paid to the landowner added up to about $98,000 – more revenue than he had wanted, given the tax implications. But it was the forestry implications that troubled him, once he had a chance to walk the land last year.

“They’d taken out, in some cases, at least 50 percent,” he says. “They took too much. It looked OK when they were doing it, from the road…. It was like a facade. When they got into the back, that’s where the damage got done. It was no wonder it fell down, because they just honeycombed it out.”

The landowner was distressed by the number of retained trees that had the bark skinned off, and some that had been partly cut and then left hanging because the operator couldn’t quite reach them. Are we talking about a fussy customer – a guy who’s hard to please? That’s possible. But he’s someone who has decades of experience with tractor-and-chainsaw forestry – not a stranger to woods work. And what he recognized, eventually, was that the contractor fully anticipated the high level of blowdown. 

“I heard this several times from the guys: ‘We can get back there.’ This was only supposed to be a one-shot deal, but they sounded like they were coming back…. They cut it so we would be crying and they would come back – and we would throw in new areas that they didn’t cut, because they were not coming back just for leftovers. I think that’s the game.”

FOREST MANAGER

The third conversation I’m still mulling over involves a guy who works in private woodlot management – a tech who writes management plans, prescribes silviculture treatments, and oversees operations. “A commercial thinning, for it to quality for funding, you can take the basal area down quite low, like down to 16 square metres (per hectare), and that’s way too low,” he tells me. “If it started out at 40, or fully stocked, and you take it down to 16, that’s way too much.”

In his professional opinion, a bit of blowdown is not only inevitable, but desirable. “You don’t want to do a treatment where the whole stand blows down, but if you do a 30 or 35 percent removal, you’ll always get one to five percent blowdown, which is not worth salvaging, and it ends up being a nice natural setting – it has ecological purposes. I think the provincial average for wood that falls down or blows down every year is about seven percent, in the natural forest.”

However, he says this doesn’t excuse the practices of contractors who are deeply cynical about partial harvesting – people who deliberately set it up to fail. “It’s all a loophole. It’s actually advantageous to thin heavy so it’ll blow down,” he says. “Then you can go clean it up, and you get all the wood.”

There is greed at play here, but there is also a type of behaviour that closely resembles sabotage. For some people who are resistant to change, the petulant response is to do bad work, to undermine the system. The good-news story is that we will see much less of this after the province completes its review of the silviculture system. DL