January 2001 - Logging and Sawmilling Journal -

This past July 15, Vancouver Island's Timfor Contractors Ltd became the first forest industry company in Canada to be certified as a resource manager and it was a proud day for Esmond Preus. "This means that Timfor could manage a pool of land made up of a variety of ownerships and the wood could all be certified," says Preus, a Registered Professional Forester and president and owner of Timfor Contractors of Campbell River. One gets a sense from looking at black and white turn of the century photographs in Preus' office of loggers bucking wood with a cutoff saw and a still earlier photograph of an old growth red cedar that certification is just another step in the evolution of the forest industry. But it is not a step that has been taken easily. To achieve certification, Timfor Contractors had to meet 10 principles and a list of criteria established by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

Timfor uses pretty much conventional logging equipment slightly modified Madill 044 grapple yarders to do certified harvesting.

Forest certification is the process of inspecting forests or woodlands to ensure management according to a set of standards. Based on a scoping trip and report by Smartwood, a certifying agency run by the Rainforest Alliance, Preus had an indication of what had to be done in addition to what the company was already doing to be certified. This gave him the option of going for certification either on the basis of the land or as a resource manager. "I applied for certification as a resource manager," Preus continues. "They then did a very thorough field examination of the operation and debriefings." There were three public hearings: one each in Campbell River, Victoria and Vancouver. Included was a 90day period for public input. The process then went before the board of directors at Smartwood who gave the go-ahead for certification. The whole process took just over three years. Attaining certification wasn't particularly frustrating from the point of view of what type of logging Timfor Contractors Ltd was practising.

The environmental community had concerns about what would happen to a particular piece of land after the loggers left. Then there were the usual frustrations with the time it takes a process to go through various levels of bureaucracy. "We had to get the manager of the land, the Ministry of Forests, to provide assurance that the type of management we had initiated would be continued," Preus explains. "And that was the problem because present legislation really doesn't facilitate this process." Timfor went through about six months of negotiations and discussions with the Ministry of Forests regional office in Nanaimo and then dealt with the executive branch staff in Victoria. The company's certification as a resource manager is significant because this is the first certification of a substantial volume of timber and the first on Crown tenure. Timfor will harvest 76,000 cubic metres of certified wood in 2000 from their forest licence on the south side of Knight Inlet. "The whole process of certification is driven by the markets," Preus explains. "It is third party verification of good forest practices so that the end users of our BC forest products can be assured that we're practising good forest management."

He views certification of BC forest products as a good thing for the industry. "Ultimately, we have to make it work because either FSC certification or something very close to it is going to be the only thing that will be accepted in the market," Preus says. The demand for certified wood is growing through companies like Home Depot, Lowe's, and some of the British home improvement retailers. The big problem over the next few years is going to be meeting that demand. Preus wasn't pressured at all into certification, but he saw it coming. "We were looking for a means to keep our organization going for a few years until we got reestablished," he says. "What happened was that because of requirements of the Forest Practices Code for visual quality and adjacency rules and so on, we were basically put out of business in 1994."

Preus was looking for a means to meet the visual quality requirements of the code and had applied for a special forest licence to experiment with some ideas he had for harvesting. "Once we got into that, we realized we were doing more than just meeting visual quality requirements," he says. "We were protecting biodiversity and the ecosystem by the very nature of alternative logging we were doing. I had become aware of the growing popularity of third party certification and decided to try for it." Traditionally, Timfor Contractors had done grapple yarding and clear cutting on the central and west coast of Vancouver Island in challenging conditions typical anywhere on the coast. They're currently logging on the south shore of Knight Inlet in adverse grades through a 1,500foot pass in difficult terrain. Crews are harvesting 40 to 60 per cent cedar and the remainder is hemlock, balsam, and cypress.

Being certified is going to yet again test the ingenuity of loggers working in tough terrain. "One of the objectives of our forest licence written up in the licensing document was that we were to experiment with alternative harvesting using conventional logging equipment," Preus says. "That's why we ended up using the 044 grapple yarders that have been modified by adding a guy line for skyline logging." A Madill 044 is used as a skyline machine with a motorized carriage. "We've had to adapt them to some degree but it's conventional logging equipment," Preus says. "Now other people might choose to go with skyline yarders such as the 171 Madill, but we're making these old grapple yarders work very well. We feel we can extend the life of these machines for several years by using them as skyline machines."

Meeting the requirements of certification and adjusting logging practices effects production. Productivity will vary from 25 to 35 cubic metres an hour, depending on the yarding distance and what kind of a show they're in using an 044 grapple yarder for conventional grapple yarding. Productivity using the 044 for skylining with a drop line carriage averages around 21 or 22 metres an hour. Logging certified wood is also more labour intensive than conventional logging. A grapple yarder requires two or three men while skylining and alternative harvesting require five men. As Preus explains, logging certified wood is a meticulous operation. "First of all, we're attempting to harvest the stand profile, leaving 40 per cent of the volume behind and harvesting 60 per cent," he says. "In other words, we start out with 40 per cent cedar and attempt to remove 60 per cent of that cedar and so on for each species. Crews log in corridors taking the wood from leave strips. At the end of the job, the crew falls the rub trees along the edge of the corridor that have been damaged and bruised during the yarding process.

When the work is completed, they will have attempted to have left 40 per cent of the stand. But protecting the residual timber is a fastidious task. "It's time consuming and has a negative impact on productivity," Preus says. "The other thing is yarding timber out through standing timber slows up the whole yarding process." Certification is a progressive move, but Preus is quick to add that the problems in the forest industry won't solely be solved by certification. There are market problems, particularly in Asia, which have had an impact on markets in the United States, resulting in a surplus of wood. Then there's the ongoing American softwood lumber agreement discussions. "So we're getting hit with the requirement of certification at a time when the industry has major problems," he says. "Now what certification will ultimately do is provide assurance for the market. Many of our customers are saying that without certification, they're not going to buy our product." Timfor Contractors has three customers for their certified wood.

Their main customer is Shaw Wood Lumber in Langley, BC, a value-added company working strictly with red cedar. Lumber is custom cut at Mainland Sawmill's primary breakdown facility to be best utilized in the value-added plant. Early indications are that even though volumes of wood are low, certification is going to be a good thing for the market. But in practical terms it may mean big changes in the way logging is done. "The big one is there has to be sustainable yield over the rotation," Preus says. "So certification will have an impact on the annual cut in British Columbia and we don't know what that will be."

He isn't sure if the overall annual cut will be reduced utilizing certified wood harvesting methods. However, once the industry gets through the transition period, the cut will be the same and may even increase. "There will be a temporary disruption of the annual allowable cut, but again, we haven't really done enough work on that to know what it is," he explains. As more companies become certified, there could be sweeping changes to the way wood is harvested. "If certification continues to be necessary, as we think it will be to market our products, then it's going to mean a complete switch over of the type of logging we're doing," Preus says. "It's going to mean some form of partial cutting." So far the reaction to certified logging practices from the public arena has been very positive. "We've had a tour of all the senior Ministry of Forests people," Preus says. "The World Wildlife Federation and Greenpeace have flown the area and the reaction has been excellent." Preus believes that if the market problem in Asia is overcome, certification will bring stability to the forest industry. "The coastal BC logging industry has been very productive in the past and pretty ingenious at coming up with new logging systems," he says. "What we have to do is accept the need for certification and work to perfect the systems to do it."

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Certified!

BC's Timfor Contractors recently became the first FSC certified resource manager in Canada, but found the process was sometimes complicated.

By Rick Crosby