Low Impact Forestry- Profiles

Andrew Clark

Hartland, NB
Contractor
Ecoregion - Continental Lowlands
Ecodistrict - Meductic, Brighton and Nackawic

Ten years ago, Andrew Clark left beef and potato farming at Simonds (north of Hartland) and went back to full time harvest contracting. Previous to his adventures in agriculture, Andrew had two skidders contracted to the Flemming and Gibson sawmill. He started contracting to Flemming and Gibson, after graduating from Maritime Forest Ranger School in 1972. With the return to full time woods work Andrew decided that he wanted to do more than straight "clear cut harvest, with its focus on cutting the most wood in shortest time, at least cost" scenario.

Mr. Clark offers woodlot owners, throughout central Carleton County on the upper St. John River Valley, an alternative to conventional clearcut harvesting that offers the woodlot owner maximum stumpage and little else. His philosophy is to harvest in a manner that leaves the woodlot with a stocking of good quality trees at a spacing that allows good growth potential. This approach provides moderate stumpage return on the first harvest and increasingly valuable stumpage potential in the future as good quality trees mature.

Clark’s contracting business serves woodlots in essentially three ecodistricts: Brighton, Meductic and Nackawic. The Brighton Ecodistrict is quite hilly and supports tolerant hardwood woodlands. Pure stands of sugar maple, yellow birch and beech cover the ridges, sometimes mixed with red spruce and balsam fir. Softwood communities increase slightly on the slopes. Balsam fir and spruce, with the occasional white pine and eastern hemlock occupy the valley bottoms. Cedar, black spruce, red spruce and balsam fir are found on the poorly drained sites that exist. Following clearcutting, the forests tend to be dominated by poplar, mixed with a scattering of balsam fir and spruce.

The Meductic Ecodistrict is a gently rolling landscape. Its relatively dry, warm climate combined with its rich soils make it quite a distinct area. The low ridges support sugar maple and beech, with scatterings of scarce species such as white ash, ironwood, butternut, and basswood. The slopes tend to be covered with sugar maple, balsam fir and beech. Moist areas and steep slopes support red spruce and eastern hemlock. The poorly-drained flats are dominated by cedar, black ash, red maple, and white elm.

Forest Management Philosophy

Andrew Clark said that his woodlot management philosophy developed as he grew up observing the role of nature as it related to his family's farm operation and woods work. He adds that at thirteen years of age he and the family's Shire work horse went to work with a neighbour, Harry Hatfield. Looking back at this part of his life he speculates that the only reason that his parents would let a thirteen year old go to work in the woods was that the horse was a lot smarter than the kid, and Harry was a thoughtful and considerate employer and worker. Andrew recalls, "Harry later told me that he hired the horse - and I came with it."

"Working with Harry gave me a new perspective on the forest and an early introduction to forest management. Harry was always looking at growth rings and showing me how the trees had grown. He was also observing the volume of wood in the stands. It was a closer observation and a deeper appreciation for forest dynamics that stuck with me."

Years later Mr. Clark bought the piece of woodland from Harry, harvested wood to help pay for it and has continued to manage and cut and still maintains a healthy inventory of wood on the lot.

Low Impact Harvesting

Mr. Clark decided when he went back to contracting that he wanted to offer his philosophy of woodlot management to other woodlot owners and went to work with his skidder offering to buy stumpage and harvest by selection, commercial thinning and small clearcuts.

"In the woods, trees are felled manually along a trail and the loader is used to pick up the stems and place in the processor where they are mechanically delimbed and bucked into pulpwood, studwood and log lengths. We use the head almost exclusively in softwood thinning. It is not terribly big and strong but does a good job with Balsam Fir and Spruce up to sixteen inches in diameter."

Mr. Clark says that his low impact harvesting methods lends itself to short wood harvest method. Short wood allows for narrow forwarding trails and piling along the main truck road avoiding the need for large yards that skidding forwarding system requires. He also views skidding as presenting greater potential for damaging natural regeneration and crop trees that are left on the site.

Shortwood system also allows for efficient utilization of harvested trees. Andrew explains, "the best way to devalue Cedar is to mass buck it. Cedar, by it's nature, has a high potential for multiple defects; rot in the butts, sweep, quick taper. The market for Cedar logs on the other hand is quite broad. You can select the hollow butts for shingle logs. If the stem has severe sweep you may want to straighten it out by taking a couple of six foot blocks. As well there is a variety of specifications that go for post and rails. If all the cedar from a cut is simply mass bucked as eight foot or say 12 foot logs, there will be a lot of scale deduction on the rotten butts, sweep and crook."

While harvesting Andrew has to assess the health of all the trees in the stand and carefully consider if the trees that he is leaving will remain standing and growing for five to ten years. "Five to ten years is my rule of thumb, I don't have the option of going through the woodlot on an annual basis to pick up blowdowns, broken trees or other casualties as a woodlot owner would. When I do a job I have to be pretty sure that it will be intact for those ten years or so. With some stands I would like to have the option to maybe thin a little lighter and more often but that doesn't always fit in with the land owners plans, or because of the size of the area, it may be impractical to bring machinery in again."

Appropriate Machinery

As his business developed Clark found that often woodlot owners were hesitant to have him work on their woodlots because he was using a tree skidder. He says that skidders had developed a reputation for death and destruction of woodlots and it was hard and sometimes impossible to convince a skeptical woodlot owner to have a skidder on their land.

In order to over come the aversion for skidders, Mr. Clark decided he required a forwarding machine that could be seen as having a low impact on the forest and forest soil. The search for a sensitive machine lead him to an F-4 Dion forwarder. This rubber tracked machine has an extremely low ground pressure as well as a narrow working width of only six feet. Surface area of the contact patch of the tracks on the power unit and the tracks of the trailer unit are around 4' x1.5', making for a very sensitive footprint. "I bought the Dion with the help of a tech transfer grant which meant as it turned out, that I ended up paying about what it was actually worth."

The Dion works effectively on any forest soil in western Carleton County. With a brush mat it can cross most swampy areas without any rutting. The machine has also worked on slopes up to 45% grade. In addition to being an efficient forwarding machine the Dion was seen by woodlot owners as a forest friendly machine and his reputation for sensitive harvest jobs grew.

Mr. Clark kept his C-4 Tree Farmer skidder, but found that he was getting fewer and fewer jobs where it was worked. Looking for an opportunity to get more use out of the skidder, he went to see a similar skidder owned by Sean Lynch in the Fredericton-area that had been adapted for the power unit of a processor and forwarding unit. After seeing Lynch's unit in action, Mr. Clark took the skidder into a shop and modified the cab, removed the winch, installed a Patu loader on the rear frame section. A quick hitch was also fabricated to accept a Patu processor and a hitch was fabricated on the rear frame to attach a Patu Forestry trailer. This unit makes an effective forwarder for operating on "not too hilly" ground that has good carrying capacity. If the ground is too soft the Dion would be more effective. Forwarding with the skidder and trailer is some-what faster and cheaper than the Dion on good soil.

Harvesting Crew

Mr. Clark’s harvesting crew is made up of three key people, himself and Chris and Henry Hatheway. The Hatheways have worked with Mr. Clark on and off for the past ten years. "Chris has an interest in mechanics and so he is developing into a key man. If there is a piece of machinery that needs to be repaired I can set him to work on it. He is also a good operator on the skidder and the Dion. And of course he is also a good saw operator."

Mr. Clark says that he is a jack of all trades in his operation; sometimes on the saw, handling either of the forwarders, handling the truck driving, supervising the cutting, tree marking in complex stands, searching out new contracts and most important of all pay master for the crew.

Mr. Clark says that close supervision of the crew is key to having a good job completed. In difficult stands he will go ahead and paint mark the trees that will be cut. He says that he pays good rates to his cutters and expects them to provide a superior job.

New employees are introduced into the operation by explaining the importance of directional felling. Mr. Clark says that new employees face a very steep learning curve, and some workers simply don't adapt to the low impact approach. "Many cutters with skidder felling experience have relied pretty well exclusively on gravity and tree lean as well as wind direction to determine what direction the tree will fall. And then rely on the horsepower capacity of the skidder to line the tree up with the skidder trail." This approach not only compromises worker safety, it also can be extremely hard on natural regeneration and larger trees that should be retrained. The reliance of horsepower to swing poorly placed trees is also an inefficient use of fuel and machine life.

With proper directional felling techniques, worker safety is improved because there is a plan for where the tree is going and what the potential hazards are so that the cutter can plan for hazard avoidance. The tree is also felled in a location that has a calculated effect on the natural regeneration that is present. The tree may be felled to avoid valuable regeneration, or purposely felled into dense regeneration so that the processing and forwarding will reduce the density of targeted patches.

In addition to directional felling techniques and the use of the felling lever, there are still trees that cannot be felled safely. For the problem trees and trees that have become hung up, Mr. Clark expects his workers to wait for one of the forwarders to render assistance. "We use the machines, usually to pull down hung up trees. Once the tree is down and limbed the loader will pull the stem in close enough so that when the butt log is cut off, the loader can reach the stem and pull it close enough so that another log can be taken and the stem reached again, and so on until the entire tree has been processed and loaded. The same method is used on big trees that are very difficult to fell effectively without brushing up the forwarding trail. These trees are dumped into an area that causes the least damage, and then it is limbed and processed with the assistance of the loader.

Waiting for the forwarder does not mean that the cutter has to stop cutting. "There are always smaller and or more controllable trees that they work at while they wait on the difficult ones. It is simply good team work and having the machine for the big hard ones makes the work easier and safer for the cutter and it still allows us to do the silviculture job that we need too do."

Another consideration for cutter training is explaining which trees are cut and which ones are left in an undamaged condition. The great thing about sensitive silviculture is that there is a myriad of considerations that go into the decision of who gets cut. Mr. Clark points out that the complication of applying silviculture rules is further convoluted by subtle stand type changes that tend to occur with every couple feet of terrain elevation. Andrew says that he would like to see workers with the equivalent of Introduction to Forest Management course in the Maritime Forest Ranger School curriculum. This is not practical, so Andrew relies on close supervision and encouragement.

Andrew has found that technical education isn't assurance that workers understand his approach to woodlot management. He recalls hiring a Maritime Forest Ranger School graduate who he had to deprogram before he could bring him to understand some of my silviculture approaches. "He was a good worker, intelligent and conscientious, as well as being really interested in understanding my approach to silviculture and woodlot management. There was one mature balsam fir stand, where he looked and saw mature softwood, for which he was taught, was best clearcut. However, my immediate goal for the stand was to thin and get more natural regeneration established before harvesting the mature softwood. It took a while but I finally convinced him that it was this thinning from below that would give us regeneration. As well we would be able to keep some big trees to nurse the regeneration while it becomes better established. I like to think that this experience gave him a broader appreciation for silviculture."

Marking the entire harvest area may be the best alternative to constant supervision in some stands where there are a lot of complicating factors. Marking however is an expensive, time consuming process. Supervision of the cutters in marked stands will help explain the silviculture reasoning behind the marking and will help develop the cutter's skill level so that they can better follow verbal instruction in similar stands in the future.

Tree Marking Program Needed

Mr. Clark says that a funded tree marking program would offer a multitude of benefits for woodlot management and the province's forestry industry. He points out that it would reduce the amount of clearcutting, which in some cases results in serious environmental and social costs. He feels that it would provide more wood in the long run to industry, because at present there are many woodlots not being managed or harvested because many contractors do not have the skills to carry out responsible partial harvests.

A marking program would also help woodlot owners carry out complicated silviculture that would allow them to maintain high quality, high value trees that can rapidly grow and appreciate in value. It would also help avoid inappropriate harvesting where high potential trees are harvested before the develop to their full potential. A marking program would also help woodlot owners to maintain a larger component of mature stands and trees across the landscape which in turn would provide special habitat components for wildlife that require mature trees.



		Andrew Clark Hartland, NB Contractor Ecoregion - Continental Lowlands Ecodistrict - Meductic, Brighton and Nackawic
Ten years ago, Andrew Clark left beef and potato farming at Simonds (north of Hartland) and went back to full time harvest contracting. Previous to his adventures in agriculture, Andrew had two skidders contracted to the Flemming and Gibson sawmill. He started contracting to Flemming and Gibson, after graduating from Maritime Forest Ranger School in 1972. With the return to full time woods work Andrew decided that he wanted to do more than straight "clear cut harvest, with its focus on cutting the most wood in shortest time, at least cost" scenario. Mr. Clark offers woodlot owners, throughout central Carleton County on the upper St. John River Valley, an alternative to conventional clearcut harvesting that offers the woodlot owner maximum stumpage and little else. His philosophy is to harvest in a manner that leaves the woodlot with a stocking of good quality trees at a spacing that allows good growth potential. This approach provides moderate stumpage return on the first harvest and increasingly valuable stumpage potential in the future as good quality trees mature. Clark’s contracting business serves woodlots in essentially three ecodistricts: Brighton, Meductic and Nackawic. The Brighton Ecodistrict is quite hilly and supports tolerant hardwood woodlands. Pure stands of sugar maple, yellow birch and beech cover the ridges, sometimes mixed with red spruce and balsam fir. Softwood communities increase slightly on the slopes. Balsam fir and spruce, with the occasional white pine and eastern hemlock occupy the valley bottoms. Cedar, black spruce, red spruce and balsam fir are found on the poorly drained sites that exist. Following clearcutting, the forests tend to be dominated by poplar, mixed with a scattering of balsam fir and spruce. The Meductic Ecodistrict is a gently rolling landscape. Its relatively dry, warm climate combined with its rich soils make it quite a distinct area. The low ridges support sugar maple and beech, with scatterings of scarce species such as white ash, ironwood, butternut, and basswood. The slopes tend to be covered with sugar maple, balsam fir and beech. Moist areas and steep slopes support red spruce and eastern hemlock. The poorly-drained flats are dominated by cedar, black ash, red maple, and white elm. Forest Management Philosophy Andrew Clark said that his woodlot management philosophy developed as he grew up observing the role of nature as it related to his family's farm operation and woods work. He adds that at thirteen years of age he and the family's Shire work horse went to work with a neighbour, Harry Hatfield. Looking back at this part of his life he speculates that the only reason that his parents would let a thirteen year old go to work in the woods was that the horse was a lot smarter than the kid, and Harry was a thoughtful and considerate employer and worker. Andrew recalls, "Harry later told me that he hired the horse - and I came with it." "Working with Harry gave me a new perspective on the forest and an early introduction to forest management. Harry was always looking at growth rings and showing me how the trees had grown. He was also observing the volume of wood in the stands. It was a closer observation and a deeper appreciation for forest dynamics that stuck with me." Years later Mr. Clark bought the piece of woodland from Harry, harvested wood to help pay for it and has continued to manage and cut and still maintains a healthy inventory of wood on the lot. Low Impact Harvesting Mr. Clark decided when he went back to contracting that he wanted to offer his philosophy of woodlot management to other woodlot owners and went to work with his skidder offering to buy stumpage and harvest by selection, commercial thinning and small clearcuts. "In the woods, trees are felled manually along a trail and the loader is used to pick up the stems and place in the processor where they are mechanically delimbed and bucked into pulpwood, studwood and log lengths. We use the head almost exclusively in softwood thinning. It is not terribly big and strong but does a good job with Balsam Fir and Spruce up to sixteen inches in diameter." Mr. Clark says that his low impact harvesting methods lends itself to short wood harvest method. Short wood allows for narrow forwarding trails and piling along the main truck road avoiding the need for large yards that skidding forwarding system requires. He also views skidding as presenting greater potential for damaging natural regeneration and crop trees that are left on the site. Shortwood system also allows for efficient utilization of harvested trees. Andrew explains, "the best way to devalue Cedar is to mass buck it. Cedar, by it's nature, has a high potential for multiple defects; rot in the butts, sweep, quick taper. The market for Cedar logs on the other hand is quite broad. You can select the hollow butts for shingle logs. If the stem has severe sweep you may want to straighten it out by taking a couple of six foot blocks. As well there is a variety of specifications that go for post and rails. If all the cedar from a cut is simply mass bucked as eight foot or say 12 foot logs, there will be a lot of scale deduction on the rotten butts, sweep and crook." While harvesting Andrew has to assess the health of all the trees in the stand and carefully consider if the trees that he is leaving will remain standing and growing for five to ten years. "Five to ten years is my rule of thumb, I don't have the option of going through the woodlot on an annual basis to pick up blowdowns, broken trees or other casualties as a woodlot owner would. When I do a job I have to be pretty sure that it will be intact for those ten years or so. With some stands I would like to have the option to maybe thin a little lighter and more often but that doesn't always fit in with the land owners plans, or because of the size of the area, it may be impractical to bring machinery in again." Appropriate Machinery As his business developed Clark found that often woodlot owners were hesitant to have him work on their woodlots because he was using a tree skidder. He says that skidders had developed a reputation for death and destruction of woodlots and it was hard and sometimes impossible to convince a skeptical woodlot owner to have a skidder on their land. In order to over come the aversion for skidders, Mr. Clark decided he required a forwarding machine that could be seen as having a low impact on the forest and forest soil. The search for a sensitive machine lead him to an F-4 Dion forwarder. This rubber tracked machine has an extremely low ground pressure as well as a narrow working width of only six feet. Surface area of the contact patch of the tracks on the power unit and the tracks of the trailer unit are around 4' x1.5', making for a very sensitive footprint. "I bought the Dion with the help of a tech transfer grant which meant as it turned out, that I ended up paying about what it was actually worth." The Dion works effectively on any forest soil in western Carleton County. With a brush mat it can cross most swampy areas without any rutting. The machine has also worked on slopes up to 45% grade. In addition to being an efficient forwarding machine the Dion was seen by woodlot owners as a forest friendly machine and his reputation for sensitive harvest jobs grew. Mr. Clark kept his C-4 Tree Farmer skidder, but found that he was getting fewer and fewer jobs where it was worked. Looking for an opportunity to get more use out of the skidder, he went to see a similar skidder owned by Sean Lynch in the Fredericton-area that had been adapted for the power unit of a processor and forwarding unit. After seeing Lynch's unit in action, Mr. Clark took the skidder into a shop and modified the cab, removed the winch, installed a Patu loader on the rear frame section. A quick hitch was also fabricated to accept a Patu processor and a hitch was fabricated on the rear frame to attach a Patu Forestry trailer. This unit makes an effective forwarder for operating on "not too hilly" ground that has good carrying capacity. If the ground is too soft the Dion would be more effective. Forwarding with the skidder and trailer is some-what faster and cheaper than the Dion on good soil. Harvesting Crew Mr. Clark’s harvesting crew is made up of three key people, himself and Chris and Henry Hatheway. The Hatheways have worked with Mr. Clark on and off for the past ten years. "Chris has an interest in mechanics and so he is developing into a key man. If there is a piece of machinery that needs to be repaired I can set him to work on it. He is also a good operator on the skidder and the Dion. And of course he is also a good saw operator." Mr. Clark says that he is a jack of all trades in his operation; sometimes on the saw, handling either of the forwarders, handling the truck driving, supervising the cutting, tree marking in complex stands, searching out new contracts and most important of all pay master for the crew. Mr. Clark says that close supervision of the crew is key to having a good job completed. In difficult stands he will go ahead and paint mark the trees that will be cut. He says that he pays good rates to his cutters and expects them to provide a superior job. New employees are introduced into the operation by explaining the importance of directional felling. Mr. Clark says that new employees face a very steep learning curve, and some workers simply don't adapt to the low impact approach. "Many cutters with skidder felling experience have relied pretty well exclusively on gravity and tree lean as well as wind direction to determine what direction the tree will fall. And then rely on the horsepower capacity of the skidder to line the tree up with the skidder trail." This approach not only compromises worker safety, it also can be extremely hard on natural regeneration and larger trees that should be retrained. The reliance of horsepower to swing poorly placed trees is also an inefficient use of fuel and machine life. With proper directional felling techniques, worker safety is improved because there is a plan for where the tree is going and what the potential hazards are so that the cutter can plan for hazard avoidance. The tree is also felled in a location that has a calculated effect on the natural regeneration that is present. The tree may be felled to avoid valuable regeneration, or purposely felled into dense regeneration so that the processing and forwarding will reduce the density of targeted patches. In addition to directional felling techniques and the use of the felling lever, there are still trees that cannot be felled safely. For the problem trees and trees that have become hung up, Mr. Clark expects his workers to wait for one of the forwarders to render assistance. "We use the machines, usually to pull down hung up trees. Once the tree is down and limbed the loader will pull the stem in close enough so that when the butt log is cut off, the loader can reach the stem and pull it close enough so that another log can be taken and the stem reached again, and so on until the entire tree has been processed and loaded. The same method is used on big trees that are very difficult to fell effectively without brushing up the forwarding trail. These trees are dumped into an area that causes the least damage, and then it is limbed and processed with the assistance of the loader. Waiting for the forwarder does not mean that the cutter has to stop cutting. "There are always smaller and or more controllable trees that they work at while they wait on the difficult ones. It is simply good team work and having the machine for the big hard ones makes the work easier and safer for the cutter and it still allows us to do the silviculture job that we need too do." Another consideration for cutter training is explaining which trees are cut and which ones are left in an undamaged condition. The great thing about sensitive silviculture is that there is a myriad of considerations that go into the decision of who gets cut. Mr. Clark points out that the complication of applying silviculture rules is further convoluted by subtle stand type changes that tend to occur with every couple feet of terrain elevation. Andrew says that he would like to see workers with the equivalent of Introduction to Forest Management course in the Maritime Forest Ranger School curriculum. This is not practical, so Andrew relies on close supervision and encouragement. Andrew has found that technical education isn't assurance that workers understand his approach to woodlot management. He recalls hiring a Maritime Forest Ranger School graduate who he had to deprogram before he could bring him to understand some of my silviculture approaches. "He was a good worker, intelligent and conscientious, as well as being really interested in understanding my approach to silviculture and woodlot management. There was one mature balsam fir stand, where he looked and saw mature softwood, for which he was taught, was best clearcut. However, my immediate goal for the stand was to thin and get more natural regeneration established before harvesting the mature softwood. It took a while but I finally convinced him that it was this thinning from below that would give us regeneration. As well we would be able to keep some big trees to nurse the regeneration while it becomes better established. I like to think that this experience gave him a broader appreciation for silviculture." Marking the entire harvest area may be the best alternative to constant supervision in some stands where there are a lot of complicating factors. Marking however is an expensive, time consuming process. Supervision of the cutters in marked stands will help explain the silviculture reasoning behind the marking and will help develop the cutter's skill level so that they can better follow verbal instruction in similar stands in the future. Tree Marking Program Needed Mr. Clark says that a funded tree marking program would offer a multitude of benefits for woodlot management and the province's forestry industry. He points out that it would reduce the amount of clearcutting, which in some cases results in serious environmental and social costs. He feels that it would provide more wood in the long run to industry, because at present there are many woodlots not being managed or harvested because many contractors do not have the skills to carry out responsible partial harvests. A marking program would also help woodlot owners carry out complicated silviculture that would allow them to maintain high quality, high value trees that can rapidly grow and appreciate in value. It would also help avoid inappropriate harvesting where high potential trees are harvested before the develop to their full potential. A marking program would also help woodlot owners to maintain a larger component of mature stands and trees across the landscape which in turn would provide special habitat components for wildlife that require mature trees.