Atlantic Forestry January 2022

Four-foot wood and the Quebec experience

by David Palmer

When Vincent Miville, president of the Fédération des producteurs forestiers du Québec (FPFQ), spoke to delegates who had gathered online for the New Brunswick Federation of Woodlot Owners AGM back in October, I was reminded of a marketing trip that two YSC directors and I made to the Beauce region of Quebec in the mid-1990s. 

Rumours had reached our shores of big prices being paid for studwood by the necklace of mills strung out along the Maine border, in exotic-sounding places like Saint-Zacharie and Saint-Pamphile. Sure enough, when we pulled into one mill and made an inquiry, the buyer quoted a price that was more than double the price back home. We thought we had hit pay dirt – but I kept thinking of the old adage, “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.” 

So we hung around and waited for a truck to cross the scales, to confirm the payload. When a tractor-trailer arrived, loaded with what we judged was about 14 cords, the scaler measured one side of the truck and declared the load to be seven cords. “Yes,” we thought to ourselves, “seven on this side, but there is another seven on the other side.” It turned out that the price we had been quoted was based on a manner of measuring and pricing wood that we were totally unfamiliar with.  

The buyer told us that 90 percent of their wood came from Maine, and very little from local woodlot owners, despite good prices and demand. Yet, we had driven past endless piles of well-aged four-foot pulp sitting in people’s dooryards waiting to go to market. Clearly there was a disconnect between what woodlot owners were cutting and what the mills wanted – but why? It was probably a combination of two factors. Firstly, every woodlot owner had an ATV with a trailer and a loader, and a beautiful network of trails that provided excellent access. Four-foot wood is what farmers had been geared up to cut for decades, and for decades it had worked out well. They harvested their wood, sold it in due course, and were paid a decent price. Secondly, marketing boards in Quebec had exclusive authority to market private wood to pulp mills, but not to all sawmills, so perhaps naturally wood got steered towards the pulp mill.  

A huge glut of pulpwood developed as sawmills increased production and chips became more abundant, leaving the four-foot roundwood sitting in dooryards. It was a time of transition for the industry and adjustment for the woodlot owners. Indeed, one of Miville’s slides was a chart showing private wood sales from 1965 to 2020. In 1995, around the time we were there, roughly 500,000 cubic metres, or less than 20 percent of wood sales, went to sawmills – but by 2000, sawmill sales jumped to four million cubic metres, approximately 75 percent of total private wood production. It was a huge upheaval for the 20,000 Quebec wood producers who harvest wood every year, and for the 13 organizations that represent them, since they had to communicate and manage the change.

WELL PILED

No doubt, some still miss the days of four-foot wood. No question, there is something very satisfying about cutting and piling it. A skilled woodsman took great pride in ensuring that each piece was cut to precisely four feet, and that the pile was a consistent height, with all the ends even. The test for well-piled wood was whether you could shingle the pile. It was said that you could tell everything you needed to know about a man from his wood pile.

It could be fun building the pile too. Four-foot wood was picked up with a pulp hook, and with the proper flick of the wrist, could be sent sailing end over end several yards to the pulp pile. Once, when I was cutting firewood with some friends, during lunch break we made a crude game of “pick-up sticks” out of four-foot hardwood, which we were cutting to about a two-inch top. Throwing 20 or 30 pieces higgledy-piggledy into a pile resulted in a mishmash of pieces, from which we would flick the top ones out with a light pole, trying not to move any below. 

It was easy to keep track of your daily production, especially if the whole tree was going into pulpwood. In the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, when pulp mills were king, it was not unusual to see 100 percent of a spruce or fir tree cut up into four-foot lengths. Since a cord of wood was (and still is) a pile four feet high by four feet wide by eight feet long, you could keep track simply by measuring the length of the pile and dividing by eight. Woodcutting was sometimes competitive. We had one director on the YSC board who was a legend; he never bragged, but it was told that one day he single-handedly cut and piled 21 cords!

Since the top size for pulpwood was usually three inches, cutting four-foot wood meant there was very little waste. If there was a good studwood or sawlog market to complement the pulpwood market, a producer could achieve excellent utilization, leaving very little behind in the woods. This resulted in a clean harvest site, and a good return for the landowner. During my brief stint in the harvest business in the late ’70s, I experienced this first-hand.  

Around 1980, my logging partner and I worked on a woodlot just outside of St. Andrews, N.B., with a horse named Tim to pull the logs out, a three-ton truck to haul the four-foot pulp and six-foot cedar to local markets, and a deal with Dead River Lumber to buy the studwood and logs. Every other day we loaded three cords of good green pulp onto the truck by hand, and hauled it to the Port of Bayside, where an enterprising stevedoring company had a contract to sell it overseas. We received a fair scale and $48/cord, and unloaded it by hand onto a conveyor that fed a small PTO-driven debarker. We were paid $62/cord for the studwood, which was picked up by a local trucker who also hauled the logs to a JDI sawmill in Pennfield (long since closed). And we used our truck to haul six-foot cedar to Goldsmith Lumber at Waweig, where we were paid $35/cord. Not great money, but if all went well and we didn’t suffer any serious breakdowns, one could keep the wolves from howling around the door. 

Most four-foot pulp that went to a groundwood mill had to be top quality – cut from nothing but live, sound trees – which was not always easy to find in the post-budworm days. There were oceans and oceans of standing dead fir, with the bark almost falling off and a half inch of rot in the sapwood. Normally, we bypassed the unmerchantable dead wood, but one day a call came that Irving needed pulp at their Reversing Falls kraft mill, no matter what condition it was in – so we swung into a budworm-killed stand and made hay until the need was satisfied. 

Groundwood mills are huge consumers of electricity, as the logs are mechanically pressed between gigantic intermeshing grinding stones, to be mashed into fibre. The quality requirements and length specifications were exacting; the pieces had to be cut between 47 and 49 inches, or they would jam in the entry throat as they tumbled into the grinders. When that happened, the machine had to be stopped and the piece physically extracted with a pike pole, like a bad molar. Later the company added a slasher deck where over-length pieces were detected and cut to proper length.

ALMOST EXTINCT 

In those days, it was common to see piles of four-foot wood all over New Brunswick, especially just before Christmas. We almost always exceeded our December delivery quotas, trying to make sure everybody got their Christmas cheque. By 1990, demand for saw material started to increase, but the pulpwood price was still higher than the studwood price. When I came on board with YSC in the fall of 1988, we had a contract with JDI for 15,000 cords of studwood and 65,000 cords of pulpwood, with a stipulation that there would be no pulp increase until the stud contract was filled. We were so far behind on the studwood contract, we had to force producers to cut better-quality studwood at a lower price. There was a lot of grumbling, but we filled the contract and got the pulp price increase – which was probably the last pulp price increase on record with JDI. 

After the loss of primary supply in the early ’90s, there was a big market shift to tree-length, which put an end to many small producers. The era of the mythical “little guy” was almost over – with one exception. In Madawaska County, in the far northwest of the province, a woodlot owner can still sell four-foot pulp for a decent price. According to Diane Landry, manager of the Madawaska Forest Products Marketing Board, that market has been a big factor in supporting the region’s 2,200 woodlot owners and keeping them engaged in tending their land. Proportionally, there are more working woodlots in Madawaska than anywhere else in the province.  

I asked Vincent Miville what had become of the once-thriving four-foot pulp market in Quebec. “It is basically extinct,” he said. “We haven’t sold any since 2019.”

As for the future of the Quebec Federation of Woodlot Owners and the 13 marketing boards that are under the FPFQ umbrella, Miville is optimistic. The boards have full exclusivity for private wood with all pulp and panel mills in the province, and six of the 13 have exclusivity on all products. That means that a company may not bypass the board and contract directly with contractors or woodlot owners – unlike in New Brunswick. The boards that do not have full exclusivity have recently made two unsuccessful attempts (in 2017 and 2019) to rectify their situation, and a third effort to establish a sawmill contract (with prices indexed to the price of lumber) will go to court in February 2022. In the meantime, the status quo is holding, and it’s business as usual.