Match made in heaven? Loggers have questions they want answered and always welcome more summer work, mills are looking for efficiency gains and a more uniform inventory flow, and students need meaningful summer work. Coincidence? It needn't be

Canadian Forest Industries, Nov/Dec 2004 by Jamieson, Scott

Loggers have questions they want answered and always welcome more summer work, mills are looking for efficiency gains and a more uniform inventory flow, and students need meaningful summer work. Coincidence? It needn't be.

In case there was even the slightest doubt in my mind, a recent trip to northeastern Ontario erased it: There is no ideal logging system. Cut-to-length (CTL) or full tree; delimber or processors; at the stump or roadside; buncher-processor or harvester solo; harvester-forwarder or two harvesters paired to a bigger forwarder - all have their place, depending on such a wide range of factors that it's hard to believe we're all in the same business. For those new to the business, or removed from daily operations, these factors can include (but are not limited to):

* Forest: Terrain, tree size & species, soil type and sensitivity, temperature extremes, harvesting season.

* Infrastructure: Road density, forwarding/skidding distance, availability of trained operators or schools, organization style (contractors, company crews, unionized) and your ability to control working conditions (i.e. to change shift configurations or maintain regular operators).

* Markets: Sorts (number and product length), value differentials, importance of quality, mill infeed.

* More factors beyond a contractor's control: Environmental pressures and forest management issues, block size, government-First Nations treaty negotiations, oil & steel prices, the degree of communication/co-operation between mill and woodlands, available annual wood volume, operator's willingness to change and/or local availability to replace them, government willingness to accept new technology (i.e. CTI).

I started out in the pulp & paper side of the forest industry over 20 years ago, and if the engineers and paper scientists I dealt with had to handle this many variables in designing a production system, they'd still be making formulas, not paper. It's what makes putting out a magazine in this business so much fun, but it's also what makes trying to optimize the business "spread-sheet style" so frustrating, and at times, meaningless.

Imagine how hard this variability makes it for the isolated logging contractor to try new operating techniques, when constantly changing conditions make it difficult to measure improvement (was it a better system or a better block?), while high capital costs, relatively thin margins, and increasingly lean mill inventories conspire to make the cost of failed experiments increasingly hard to absorb.

Where's help?

A case in point is this issue's cover story on Nighthawk Timber, an innovative, hardworking crew from northeastern Ontario. Surrounded by full-tree systems, Nighthawk has relied on its own version of CTL logging for years, using bunchers, stump-side processors, and large forwarders. They have seen considerable success doing so. For starters, they are still in business, which says something in a region where CTL logging is viewed with hostility.

The principals of Nighthawk, brothers Dave and Don Stringer, constantly look for ways to hone their operation, and you can run into them at a variety of industry events, from conferences in Moncton to live logging shows in Quebec.

Such generic educational opportunities are great, but what about the site specific challenges that such contractors face? For example, Nighthawk deals with up to 10 sorts depending on the block, making efficient forwarding with their 17- and 18-tonne machines a challenge. In theory, it may pay to pull a single sort at a time where feasible, to avoid a lot of extra travelling and loader work at roadside. But the operators find they often can't fill the load, and are understandably reluctant to go with the one-sort-at-a-time method without proven benefits. Perhaps what's needed is a GPS aided time trial, but there is little time or money for such studies in a 200,000 m^sup 3^/yr operation.

Similarly, the operation uses large dangle-style harvesting heads to handle the mixed wood (pine, fir, poplar, birch) and the wide range of tree sizes they are expected to harvest (3.5 inches to over 25 inch). They have worked well for 10 years, hut some, including the company they work for, have suggested moving to a heavier, butt-plate style head. Interesting for the poplar, perhaps, but what about the variety of products, as well as the significant portion of time they get stuck in small conifers? It would be nice to find out how such a head would fit into the entire operation, but productivity/up time experiments with harvesting heads in a variety of stands take time and money.

See what I mean? Even innovative logging contractors like this are limited in the amount of trial and error improvement they can handle in any given year. Nor do they have access to R&D tax credits that perhaps (and new rules are changing this, too) wood consuming mills have, either on their own or through organizations like FERIC.

That means that if we expect a lot of these leading edge contractors to continue innovating and experimenting, the industry may want to get more directly involved. This may mean funding FERIC-style studies when your leading contractors have identified key potential sources of improvement (especially those that might apply to other contractors in the area), helping off-set advanced training along the Rocan "video analysis" model (and in other regions), or through extra-volume jobs where the cost of analyzing new techniques is off-set hy additional revenue.