Liam Parfitt thinks he has a forestry management solution that will keep northern B.C. mills operating, reduce the risk of wildfires and create habitat that will give plants and animals a better chance to thrive.
Parfitt is convinced that a switch away from clearcutting to selective logging practices that have been used for decades in European countries is what is needed to make Canada’s forest economy thrive again.
Selective logging involves the use of specialized equipment to cut some, not all, trees from a specific area.
The co-owner of Freya Logging says the thinning of forest cut blocks, ones that were clearcut and replanted as recently as 30 years ago, will create more than enough fibre to rejuvenate a forest industry decimated by beetle kills and wildfires. He said the industry is also challenged by a government bureaucracy that has delayed permitting and contributed to a shortage of economically available timber, which has forced companies to curtail mill operations at the cost of hundreds of jobs.
“We have to look at other ways of keeping the industry going,” said Parfitt. “All we’ve been doing is salvaging dead things, whether it’s beetle-killed or fire-killed, we’re like a bunch of morticians. Forestry is all about live trees, habitat, ecosystems.”
Selective logging proponents think they have an alternative the province should be encouraging to inject life into what is seen by some as a dying industry. They are convinced an industry shift to thinning practices would provide more than enough economical fibre to keep mills open and stop the trend of curtailments and closures.
Parfitt picked a privately owned 30-hectare woodlot on the McBride Timber Road on the western outskirts of Prince George as the site of a two-day demonstration of selective logging a few weeks ago. It was attended by close to 200 foresters and industry stakeholders.
They came to see what can be accomplished using an agile harvester that fells, delimbs and measures trees to lumber length, and a nimble forwarder that gathers the fallen tree trunks and brings them to the road for transport.
Parfitt explained the effect this system has. Sunlight hidden by treetops for years suddenly beams down to the forest floor where the harvesters cleared five-metre wide trails that run the length of the cut block. With the sky visible the forest floor is exposed to sun, rain and snow, which encourages the growth of willows, poplar, mountain ash and other broadleaf plants that moose and deer love to eat. The downed tree limbs and bark left by the harvester creates places for small animals to hide and new homes for insect populations.
Much like thinning a carrot crop, he said, if you take out some of the trees in close proximity to each other the remaining trees will grow faster because they get more light and moisture. With less competition for nutrients they will mature faster and be better able to survive droughts, windstorms and beetle attacks.
The provincial forest ministry doesn’t like seeing all those branches left on the ground by the harvesters, citing a fire risk, but Parfitt says in northern B.C. boreal forests, which typically receive high snowfalls and moist growing seasons, that fallen material won’t be a fire hazard for long before it rots. He says the risk of crown fire from keeping an unbroken tree canopy intact is far more likely to get out of control than a ground fire would be.
“Instead of looking down, we should be looking up,” said Parfitt, while a nearby harvester made short work of a tree. “We’ve increased the windspeed needed to push a crown fire through this stand by several orders of magnitude.
“A crown fire, when it’s burning, will throw up dinner-sized plates of burning ash and that will go up to five kilometres ahead of the fire, and how far will your campfire spread a fire, maybe five metres? If a fire gets up in the crown it stays in the crown, and it can’t do that here because we’ve created some gaps.”
In Europe, a demonstration of the capabilities of harvester/forwarder logging would likely be ignored by the industry because selective logging is so pervasive and has been for decades. But it’s still relatively rare in British Columbia, where most logging utilizes feller-bunchers and skidders in clearcutting operations.
“The reason why we have so many bunchers and not as many harvesters in this province is that’s all we’ve been doing, salvaging dead trees, especially this last 20 years, so bunchers is the most effective way to salvage when you’re doing a clearcut,” said registered professional forester Gord Chipman, executive director of Woodlots B.C.
“Our entire forest industry in British Columbia is centred around sawlogs. When we manage a forest like this it’s not about volume and sawlogs, we’re managing for the ecosystem and for tree resiliency for the forest to be able to survive. We’ve been so focused on volume and not focused on value, that’s a big shift we have to make in this forest industry.
“We have to move away from our clearcut mentality and (consider) value of the forests. It’s about the habitat recreation, water quality and fire prevention.”
The private land Freya focused on for its harvesting demonstration was logged in 1987, replanted in 1989 and chemically brushed with an aerial spray in 1993. The Vegetation Resources Inventory provincial government model predicts the trees will be 21 metres tall in another 18-22 years. But those trees have already reached 20 metres and will almost certainly exceed those projections and that suggests to Parfitt that there’s a lot more fibre available for harvesting than the industry has been led to believe.
In addition to underestimating growth rates, Parfitt said there’s a lack of modelling research data to estimate how much wood can be produced in a thinned forest. Government models based on clearcutting fail to take into account the value of pulp logs too small to make dimensional lumber, which are converted to wood chips to feed pulp mills.
Waiting 80 years for a forest to mature before it can be clearcut is no longer feasible, he said, with B.C. sawmills living on borrowed time and young workers leaving the province to find work or steering clear of forestry careers due to an uncertain future.
Harvester operator/forest consultant Nico Kilgast moved to Prince George from Germany a year ago and says thinning and selective logging dominate forest harvesting practices in his native country, where cut blocks larger than a half-hectare are rare and larger cuts require a permit that can take years to acquire.
Scandinavian clearcuts rarely exceed three hectares, compared to 80-hectare cuts commonly seen in B.C. He says the goal in Europe is to have forest plots that contain multi-generational trees growing in the same spot.
“Most of the people I’ve met, the impression is they are tired of clearcuts and I think (selective logging) is the best thing you can sell to the public,” said Kilgast. “I think it’s better for the environment. You don’t want to see that kind of erosion on steep slopes that you have in a clearcut. You have bigger diversity in a managed forest.
“If you look at the quality of what you harvest in (primary forest) stands, it’s pretty poor quality, I would say 90 per cent (of the trees) are damaged one way or another. In a managed forest what we do is take all the crooked ones, the forked ones, the damaged ones out to leave a better and healthier forest, which creates a higher value of wood.”
Woodlots represent about 1.5 per cent of the province’s total timber supply. Of the 841 woodlots in B.C., about 100 of them are within an hour’s drive of Prince George, averaging about 800 hectares each. A woodlot license grants the license holder the right to manage and harvest Crown timber within that area.
Frank Varga, general manager of the Burns Lake Community Forest, is overseeing a managed forest research project and from November-March used a harvester and forwarder to log a woodlot similar to the McBride Timber Road lot he visited for the tour in July.
The Burns Lake experiment started with a 35-year-old stand that had never been thinned. Now, after thinning treatment was applied, that same pine/spruce stand has fire breaks and is producing marketable timber while also encouraging new plant growth and increasing animal counts.
“It was so obvious,” said Varga. “To go from one summer walking in the stand and it was pretty quiet, to the next summer when it was full of songbirds - that was an eyeopener for me.”
The annual allowable cut is 197,000 cubic metres, mostly dead pine, and Varga says there’s enough harvesting work in the 92,500-hectare Burns Lake Community Forest to keep a team of two working year-round for the next five years. He said if selective logging takes root in the industry and the big companies get behind it there are enough trees in northern B.C. to keep mills operational.
“We need some policy support to push the innovation that’s happening at the private land level, at the community forest level, at the woodlot level and even at the licensee level,” said Varga. “There’s a push to make it happen at the executive level, it’s still stuck in that middle ground and we need to get the operational piece to link with the policy. The policy is not there for the certainty at this time.”
Varga toured Finland with a UBC research team last October and saw forests being managed for fire hazard abatement and to encourage sustainability. Finland has one-third the land base of B.C. but it’s harvesting two-thirds more volume of trees than our province is.
So what is Finland doing that B.C. isn’t?
“If you look at this stand that we’re in today, this is the first time in 35 years this stand has been entered,” explained Varga. “You would never have a stand like this in Finland. That stand would have been cleaned, it would have had been pre-commercial thinned and potentially even a second entry.
“With our tenure system there’s no incentive to manage beyond the legal free-to-grow obligation, that’s 20 years. Unless you’re in an area-based tenure or on private land there’s very little incentive for you to put value back on the land base because there’s no guarantee that you’ll be a license holder that will reap the rewards at year 40 or year 60. The tenure system needs some tweaks.”
While it costs 30 per cent more in stumpage to thin a forest than it does to clearcut it, Parfitt says there are savings that justify area-based tenures on previously-logged plots that are already accessible.
“We don’t have to plant trees when we’re done and we don’t have to build roads, and the layout is cheaper,” said Parfitt. “The biggest reason why we’re not logging (private woodlots) right now is the government wants to study it more, they’re uncertain, which is ridiculous, because in Sweden and other places they’ve logged the exact same species with the same principles for decades if not half a century now.
“Permitting should be very easy. We’ve already logged this, this is a clearcut and the road is already in, and when we thin it we’re decreasing the fire hazard and increasing biodiversity and we’re not asking the government for money to do it. There should be no delays for thinning.”
He said recovery of the forest industry hinges on the government providing companies certainty they will have access to the fibre and they will be able to secure cutting permits without delay to get people working again.
“Logging is deemed as bad for the forest if you live in Vancouver,” said Parfitt. “But in this case it’s good for the forest. It increases the biodiversity and decreases the fire hazard, and as we do it we increase tax revenues that will pay for more nurses.
“We’ve got to stop closing mills. There’s more wood than we’ll ever need if we just changed how we did things. We need to move fast to get it back.”
