Atlantic Forestry November 2022

Expanding opportunities

At the harvest operations tour presented by the Medway Community Forest Co-op (MCFC) on Oct. 2, there was a lot of chatter about the ravages of post-tropical storm Fiona – based on social media posts, news coverage, and personal connections in the woodlot community. However, southwestern Nova Scotia was spared the extensive timber damage that occurred in the central and eastern regions of the province, so it was business-as-usual for the MCFC. Matt Miller, the group’s general manager, may have been feeling a bit discouraged about the mess that awaited on his family’s woodlot in Pictou County – but here in the Medway District, beneath the canopy of a Yellow birch that has withstood its share of strong winds over the past couple hundred years, he outlined a vision for conducting forest management on long horizons.

Launched in 2013, the MCFC is Nova Scotia’s first community forest, licensed to manage a 15,000-hectare portion of the 220,000 hectares that the province purchased from Resolute Forest Products following the closure of Bowater Mersey the previous year. Part of the idea is being accountable to people who live in the vicinity of these Crown lands. That means giving them a degree of control, not just input. Management encompasses multiple uses, oriented toward generating real community benefits while ensuring long-term forest health.

As is the case for virtually all woodlands, today’s options are determined by earlier generations’ activities and practices. It’s a mixed bag in the Medway, but the condition of this forest is generally pretty good relative to Nova Scotia Crown lands at large. One of the interesting treatments inherited from the previous owner is a type of partial harvest known as “expanding gap group selection” (EGGS). Miller led the tour group to an open area with regenerating trees about two metres high – an EGGS cut that was conducted in 2010 and is now ready for follow-up.

The first entry involved creating irregularly shaped gaps of approximately 0.2 hectares. “That works out to be about a 24-metre radius – which is about two tree heights,” says Miller. “You’re making, essentially, a shelterwood patch. You’re leaving behind some seed and you’re controlling the size of your opening such that it should support recruiting that regen, if it’s not already there.”

Most of the overstory is removed, retaining 10-20 percent. On this particular site there was a lot of blowdown within the gaps, but that is not considered an irredeemable failure, given the robust and diverse regeneration. “It was basically a 90-year-old spruce stand with no previous management, so there was not great height-to-diameter stoutness in the trees,” says Miller. “Some of the hardwood, the maples, stayed up here and there.”

This management system is based on 100-year cycles. “The original plan for these sites, I think, was you regenerate 20 percent of your operating area every 10 years, for 50 years – and then you don’t do anything for 50 years, and then you come back and start over again,” Miller says. “What they did was they gave the operator a grid with one-hectare squares, and said, ‘Go put one of these gaps in every one of those squares,’ and it was up to the contractor to site the trails between the gaps.”

The follow-up treatment that is being undertaken now will involve a harvester making a trail one boom length beyond the perimeter of the original gap. The tracked machine MCFC has lined up for this job is reputed to have a 10-metre reach. It will cut a swath on either side of the trail, with 10-20 percent retention – leaving ecologically valuable trees and desirable species such as oak. “You expand the gap. It’s pretty simple,” says Miller. “The trails you use to get between each gap should stay the same throughout the life of harvest.”

One of the inherent efficiencies of this system, compared to other selection harvest regimes, is that it avoids repeated travel over the same ground. There is no commercial thinning phase, but there are plans to conduct manual tending in the original gaps. “A ‘cleaning’ is the way I’m describing it – a weeding, competition control,” says Miller. “We’re mostly looking to, for example, cut fir to promote spruce and pine, clean up the maple clumps – and by ‘clean up,’ I mean trim them back to two or three.”

Though new to Nova Scotia, EGGS has been used on industrial operations in Maine. Bowater decided to try it on the advice of Robert (Bob) Seymour, a professor (now emeritus) at the University of Maine School of Forest Resources – who recently served as an advisor to William (Bill) Lahey on his review of forest practices in Nova Scotia. The company left scant documentation of the original treatments, so MCFC has mostly relied on information from former Bowater employees who are now with the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables.

“I don’t know if they did it outside the Medway District. My sense is that it was heavily influenced by their FSC certification,” says Miller. “I’m aware of a couple of sites – I can think of three – that had those initial gaps cut into them, and this is the first one where we’re going back to do the second entry.”

For this and other treatments, MCFC is working closely with Freeman Lumber, in nearby Greenfield. The mill’s capacity currently exceeds its annual wood supply by about 100,000 tonnes, so it has an appetite for logs – and the company has a stable of contractors equipped to do a wide range of treatments, with access to more than 70 machines altogether.

“We’ve signed a one-year agreement where they’ve purchased basically what amounts to one year’s worth of operating blocks from us – around 8,000 tonnes, in terms of what’s planned for volume,” says Miller. “They have the market for the wood, they have the contracting capacity, and they handle the road work for us. We do all the forest management planning. It’s been really positive so far. The prescription, the work order, the specs – all that goes through us, and they’ve been really good to work with, in terms of helping us pull it off.”

Steve Ward, Freeman’s private land manager – and a board member with MCFC – briefly addressed the tour group, answering some questions about operational matters. For example, he explained that an excavator-based machine would have a considerably lower purchase price than a purpose-made wheeled harvester, but its hourly fuel consumption could be as much as 50 percent higher.

Though this partnership with the mill is mutually beneficial right now, the MCFC hopes to achieve more autonomy by negotiating a longer-term licence agreement and a larger licence area. “We’d like to be in a place where we’re really enabled to fulfill the vision of not just a self-sustaining organization but operating at a scale that allows us to be reinvesting profits back into the community,” says Miller.

One of the group’s major successes has been maintaining the freedom to implement its own special management practices, reflecting ecological science and public values. “I feel we’ve gotten to a good place with the department now, in terms of having flexibility to be able to make some extra decisions. For example, our ‘singing season’ – no operations from May 15 to July 15, in order to avoid peak bird breeding activity,” says Miller. “That remains really important.” DL