Atlantic Forestry March 2024

Anticipating high production

The Canadian Woodlands Forum (CWF) pulled out all the stops for its “From Seedling to Success” conference, held mid-January in Dartmouth, N.S. In her opening remarks, Becky Geneau, the group’s new executive director, acknowledged the sense of anticipation in the room, and in the industry generally, at the prospect of implementing intensive forest management as part of the “triad” model on Crown land in Nova Scotia – with full support from the provincial government, no less. Tory Rushton, the minister of Natural Resources and Renewables, reiterated this in his address, noting that his mandate letter from Premier Tim Houston specifically included rolling out the triad.

To refresh your memory, this model is dominated by the mixed-use “ecological matrix” zone (where lower-impact forestry combines timber production and biodiversity objectives), while the conservation zone and the high-production zone, residing at opposite ends of the spectrum, account for smaller portions of the land base.

“High-production forestry is very much like agriculture,” said Rushton, assuring his audience that this system will meet the industry’s wood supply requirements. He said his department has thus far selected parcels totalling 60,000 hectares, and will eventually allocate 10 percent of Crown land (about 185,000 hectares) for intensive management. “We anticipate you will be very busy over the next 10 years working on this,” he remarked.

Doug Jones, president of the Fredericton-based company Remsoft, talked about the concept of compartmentalizing forestry objectives into separate zones, instead of attempting to balance all objectives on every piece of land. “I totally believe that multi-use forestry, while it was a good model, and it was intended to be good, was chaos for foresters. It’s really hard to manage that regime. This is much better, in my opinion, in terms of giving you clarity,” he said. “This is a really neat opportunity that Nova Scotia is embarking on right now, going with the triad approach…. We don’t often get chances like this in our careers, where there’s a whole management change, a regime change. It’s a really exciting time.”

Drawing on his extensive international experience, Jones highlighted examples of intensive management in the U.S. Southeast, Chile, New Zealand, and Brazil. He pointed out that in many countries, including Canada, there is growing pressure to preserve natural or native forests, which means the industry is likely to become increasingly dependent on plantations. He talked about the trend toward producing clonal seedlings tailored for specific site conditions, and the elaborate planning required to get them planted in the right place at the right time. “It’s a big analytics game,” he said. “If you get it wrong, it could mean that plantation absolutely fails…. And the cost of producing those clones is very high.”

Jones also stressed the importance of establishing plantations at locations that will allow for efficient management. “If it’s a shotgun blast to get the best sites, and they’re all over the place, I don’t see how you make a dollar,” he said. “You’re moving trucks around, chasing silviculture around. It just will not work, from a financial point of view.”

Sean Power, the provincial forester who is leading implementation of the high-production zone, said logistics is, in fact, a key consideration. The department is looking at operational blocks of 15-20 hectares, within reasonable proximity to mills. “What we don’t want to see is slivers of land, little isolated polygons,” he said, adding that productivity factors such as fertility and moisture are equally important. “We’ve all planted or been a part of planting trees on sites that probably shouldn’t have supported planting trees.”

Power’s colleague Ryan McIntyre, who played a central role in developing the province’s framework for high-production forestry, said that by choosing good sites (old-forest and tolerant hardwood stands are ineligible), and employing the best silvicultural tools, the industry will be able to achieve significant yield increases. However, it will take some time. The province expects to add about 5,000 hectares of Crown land to the high-production zone each year, until it reaches the 185,000-hectare mark. Those lands will be clearcut, site-prepped, planted, and scrupulously tended – and the big gains will be achieved when they are harvested again in 30-35 years.

“You can triple the wood supply on the exact same land base if you do this, and do it well. You have to be using all the tools, you have to be growing the wood. You have to be hitting minimum targets. Six cubic metres per hectare per year is very achievable,” said McIntyre. “To achieve 200 or 300 cubic metres per hectare in a rotation is very, very achievable.”

He said the department did extensive consultations in developing the triad, and even conservationists were inclined to agree that it is a fair compromise. “From the private sector, I would say the biggest thing we heard was, ‘We gotta get this going and we gotta get it on the ground.’ I would argue that probably nobody is completely happy with what we came up with, which is a good sign of good government policy.”

TOOLS

The conference included a session on technology and mechanization, with company reps outlining how they can help the industry tool up for high-production forestry. Amir Soleimani, co-founder and CEO of B.C.-based Tree Track Intelligence Inc., talked about the use of gas-powered drones that can drop as many as 200,000 seed pods per day. He said germination rates are about 85 percent, and the plant-based pods contain enough nutrients to get the seedling established. This system is attracting interest for use on rough terrain, inaccessible blocks, and burn areas that are unsafe for planters.

Rob Moran, from Log Max Forestry Ltd., discussed the PlantMax mechanical planter, which is in use in Sweden, Finland, and Brazil, and has been trialled in New Brunswick by J.D. Irving. It’s based on a 14-ton forwarder chassis, with a disc trencher mounted in the middle and two robotic planting arms at the rear. The machine requires one operator to drive, and one at the back loading seedlings into the chamber. “You want the job at the front,” quipped Moran. “The guy in the back is busier than a cow licking twin calves.”

Dick Johnson, with Bracke – the Swedish manufacturer whose products are now distributed in North America by Quadco – talked about this company’s excavator-mounted tree-planting heads. He noted that contractors need long-term contracts and financial stability to justify investing in such specialized machines. Bracke also makes trenchers and mounders, which Johnson described as more effective than the decades-old scarification equipment still in wide use. He said that for large areas it is more efficient to do site prep as a separate treatment, then follow up with planting.

Jason Monk, with M-C Power Equipment Ltd., talked about his company’s offerings for pre-commercial thinning, such as TMK and Nisula shear heads, or the Jobo head from Syketec for light-duty harvesting – all Finnish-made. He pointed out that if you already own a small excavator, pairing it with one of these attachments is a very affordable way to do woods work. “Small harvesting is becoming bigger and bigger right now,” he said, though he acknowledged that he has to temper customers’ expectations with regards to productivity. “The future is efficiency. Our tree sizes are reducing over time. I think we need to take a look at the machinery we’re using. We need to have the machine to fit the job that we’re looking to do.”

COMPETITION CONTROL

In a sense, Nova Scotia’s adoption of the triad is a negotiated peace deal between industrial forestry and the conservation movement, and one of the bargaining chips for getting industry buy-in was allowing the use of herbicides in the high-production zone, as recommended in the Lahey Report (though there will be no government funding for this treatment). It has been more than a decade since herbicide spraying occurred on the province’s Crown lands, so this is a significant policy shift – and one welcomed by plantation managers, who generally consider the practice extremely valuable, or even essential, for effective and economical competition control.

One of the trends discussed at the conference was the use of herbicides in conjunction with mechanical site prep, i.e., before the seedlings are planted. Ben Lane, manager of J.D. Irving’s tree planting division, said the company has had good success with this approach in New Brunswick. “We’ve moved into some soil-active herbicides, which is going to allow us enough site control for, we’re hoping, at least three, maybe even four seasons, with some small shred of hope that on some sites it’s going to bridge us all the way through to the first mechanical cleaning on that site, which is going to reduce our reliance,” he said. “Getting the timing right, being able to apply these herbicides during the active growing season, allows you to drop rates down, add some surfactants that you wouldn’t be able to use when you’ve got your seedlings already on the site. It really opens a world of tools that we haven’t been able to use before.”

The objective, Lane stressed, is to ensure that the planted trees get a good start, which does not require killing all other vegetation. “If you want to try to eliminate competition, you better bring your wallet – and there’s no need of it,” he said. “The site doesn’t need to be brown, it doesn’t need to be devoid of any competition. For the first few years, those seedlings have a fairly small microsite – it’s a small world that they live in – and if you can minimize the competition on those seedlings, you’re going to see great results.”

At one point when the floor was opened for questions from the audience, Rick Archibald, woodlands manager with Northern Pulp, somewhat tentatively raised the issue of how to navigate herbicide opposition in communities near Crown blocks slated for high-production forestry. “We’ve all got to think about the neighbours beside us,” he said. “If we ignore that, and say, ‘Oh, the government said we can do it,’ we know where we’ll end up.”

Sean Power replied that the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables does not intend to filter potential blocks on the basis of local sentiment. “The licensees know better where the hot spots are in their own working areas, so we are going to leave it up to them,” he said. “Socially, they may not choose some of the areas that we have, for that reason.”

One of the principles underscored in the Lahey Report was transparency, and Power said the department is doing its best on this front, partly by releasing maps of the high-production zone. “We’re trying to show it all, and being very open with folks,” he said. “A lot of people look at that visual map and just get frightened, because they think it’s all happening tomorrow, all happening at the exact same time.”

Stephen Wyatt, a professor at the Edmundston campus of UniversitО de Moncton, had some useful perspectives on this, since he specializes in the social and political aspects of forestry. He talked about the hard work of building acceptance and managing backlash. “You do not need consensus to have acceptability,” he said.

On the other hand, there is a need to anticipate resistance, and proceed with due caution. “Just because a site is biologically good for high production, doesn’t mean it will be socially acceptable,” Wyatt said. “If we do it badly, we’ll be faced with the same conflicts and controversies that we’ve had in the past.” DL