BREAKING OUT
Just how do small woodlot crews acquire the right equipment to help them successfully harvest trees on steep sites? Read how a Wanganui crew got a helping hand from its forest manager.
IT’S GETTING HARDER TO BE A GROUND BASE CREW THESE days, as harvesting jobs increasingly migrate to the hills. Learning how to run a swing yarder or hauler operation isn’t something you pick up overnight when making the switch to logging steep sites. It can take many years of trial and error, and considerable hard work to perfect the dark art of cable hauling or grapple yarding.
Every cable and yarder logger would say you never really stop learning.
Fortunately, Morepork Forest Harvesting had some previous experience with yarding when they were called on to convert to cable logging in the Manawatu.
Brian Merwood, joint-owner of Morepork, had worked with a yarder crew in Northland for a couple of years before returning to his home base in Wanganui. And his son, Brad, is a bit of a dab hand at the hauler controls, too.
So, when the inevitable word came from forest manager FOMS that there wasn’t enough work to keep their ground base crew busy on the flat, they had to change horses.
Anyone who has been in that situation knows what comes next – a huge dollop of self-doubt and nagging questions, such as ‘where the bloody hell do I pick up a decent yarder, how do I pay for it and how do I make it work’.
It was another piece of good fortune that smoothed the transition for Morepork; FOMS is a rare beast among forest managers because it owns a fleet of cable haulers that it leases to crews who work on the woodlots that make up much of the company’s business.
That meant Morepork was able to lease a nice Madill 071 to tackle its first harvest on the hills without Brian and crew’s other jointowner, Sid Soulsby, having to sell their souls to the bank. Or worse, not being able to lay their hands on any sort of yarder.
The Morepork predicament is typical of many small woodlot crews around the country. Lack of capital to purchase the equipment to do a proper job and lack of opportunity to make enough money to cover a sizeable loan, because this type of work does not deliver big production numbers.
As more back-country woodlots come on stream in the next decade, this predicament will become more widespread in New Zealand.
It’s something NZ Logger has flagged in several articles we’ve published on the approaching Wall of Wood recently. That’s one of the reasons we’ve come down to the Manawatu, to get a first-hand experience of how these crews cope and how an enlightened forest manager can ease the burden and facilitate the right equipment.
The yarder lease programme was started by Mike Bartells, who founded FOMS a dozen years ago. Sadly, Mike passed away after battling with cancer, but the baton has been passed on to his team at FOMS and they are continuing to run with it.
We spoke to FOMS Director, Dan Gaddum, a year ago about why FOMS had decided to purchase towers and yarders to lease to crews and he says the issue had potential to be a drag on business.
“Given the volatility and the harvest profile based around fluctuating prices in woodlots, the ability to offer surety of work is always a challenge in our business,” says Dan, who is based at the company’s headquarters in Feilding. “So, we took the view that if we took some risk on those pieces of kit it would balance things out.”
Whilst acknowledging that the equipment FOMS has purchased is nowhere near new, Dan says the company has targeted specific machines that suit the type of work and the environment in which they are used.
“The majority of our fleet are Madill 071s, which is a solid workhorse – you can fix them with a sledgehammer and a 24-inch crescent generally,” he says. “They are easy to operate and set up, three-to-four guy lines and pound-for-pound they perform very well.
“We’ve also got a double drum Skagit swing yarder, along with a Komatsu PC400 Harvestline, one of the first ever to be built. Plus, we have two Bellis towers, a BE50 and a BE70. And an old Eco Logger, a good little tool for shot-gunning terraces in the Manawatu, which is mounted on an old Clark 668 skidder base.
“All-in-all it works pretty well. They certainly aren’t things that makes us any money, in fact they probably cost us money to have. And we have all the issues around people treating them the way they should, given that they don’t own them. They are difficult to manage and ultimately our R&M cost is probably higher than you’d expect if you owned them and ran them yourselves.”
This arrangement helps cushion the blow when the tough times inevitably come around and harvesting dips, as the contractors who use its machines are not saddled with large equipment sitting around idle.
Of the 40 crews FOMS has working around the country, about fifteen are hauler crews, with four or five of those outfits using its equipment at any one time.
The financial arrangements are simple, Dan says: “Generally we look at the average monthly operating cost of the machine, the expected production and then throw that in the mix with the crew daily costs to work out a composite logging rate, with FOMS deducting the hauler lease component from the contractor monthly. Formally, we also have a lease agreement that covers use of the machine and a machine logbook.”
Back to the present and I’m over in Wanganui, where I catch up with another of the FOMS Directors, Marcus Musson, who is going to take me to see a couple of their woodlot crews today – the Morepork team who are working not far from the riverside city and Steve Henderson Logging, who will be covered in the next issue of NZ Logger magazine.
The Morepork crew is using one of the FOMS Madill 071 haulers
and Marcus reiterates some of the points made by his colleague, Dan, in the earlier interview.
“Owning haulers is not something we wanted to do, but it’s a way that we can guarantee our clients that we are going to be able to harvest the wood,” says Marcus. “And it’s a way for a ground base crew to get into a hauler and whether we finance them into it over time or whether they buy their own machine.
“If you go back six or seven years there were a high number of ground base crews and a small number of hauler crews and the reason we currently own nine haulers was we bought lower capital haulers to try and convert some of our ground base crews into cable crews and it’s worked very well.”
The conversation turns to the merits of purchasing used machines versus a brand new yarder/hauler for this type of work, in order to gain the latest technology and reliability, and Marcus says: “We’ve actually looked at buying new haulers but when you look at $1.3to-1.5 million for a new smaller pole hauler you can spend, say $300,000 completely rebuilding one we’ve already got. Bit of a no-brainer.
“They are only a 400hp 50ft tower so it’s no point going and spending a million dollars on them. You are never going to pull 300 tonne a day with it – between 150 to 220 tonne a day is where they work most efficiently.
“What we’ve learned out of this exercise is that owning haulers is pretty expensive and the only way to be efficient is to minimise your downtime, so we rebuild them to make sure they keep working.
“Our 071s are around 40 years old and we’ve got a rebuild programme running for them and basically the only thing you use is the drumset and the tower, everything else is new or gets rebuilt. And this hauler we’re going to see today has got bloody good uptime. Very reliable and it’s cheap enough to run.
“For the different sites we have around Wanganui and the small landing sizes, the 071 is perfect, it’s easy to shift, light to move, you don’t need to pull it to bits to move it. It has an excavator undercarriage, so it walks around quite easily and we can run an Acme carriage on it from time-to-time, and we’ve run an Alpine grapple off it as well.”
The Morepork team’s 071 has recently gone through a major upgrade, but it wasn’t exactly part of the scheduled programme, as it had been damaged in an incident recently. Brian Merwood explains how it happened shortly when we catch up with him.
Meantime, we’ve just got onto the track taking us into the River Ridge Forest, which is owned by the Oskam family, who have farmed and forested around these parts for a number of years. FOMS has had crews in this forest for almost two years and it’s typical of many they manage around Wanganui; steep, broken hills criss-crossed by narrow valleys. This one also has the added complication of being right next to the Wanganui River, which is only just starting to recede after torrential rain a week or so earlier had caused it to overflow its banks in some areas, forcing Morepork to move the 071
Above: Desmond Lister, left, and Jamie How carefully make their way to the safe zone after chaining up these meaty stems. Below: The Madill 071 is one of a fleet owner by FOMS and leased to crews working in woodlots managed by the company.
and other machines to higher ground for safety. Try writing that one up in your incident book!
The crew has returned to the terrace that was threatened by the river and is now pulling wood from a very steep face. In fact, it’s beyond steep. I’d go as far as describing it as a bloody cliff face. Any tree that decides to take off wouldn’t stop until it hit the bottom. I reckon the same thing would happen to a breaker-out if they lost their footing.
Normally, a steep face like this would be a good thing because it gives you plenty of deflection, but this one is so long the stems are dragging on the ground as they’re pulled down the slope.
We’ll talk more about that steep face in a minute. First thing is to sign the visitor’s book, get our safety briefing and introduce myself to the boss, Brian Merwood.
Formalities over, we discuss Brian’s background in forestry, which he’s been involved with for around 14 years.
“I started in a small ground base crew up around Waverley and mostly worked in the Wanganui/Taranaki area, apart from two years up in Northland,” he says.
“The crew I was with up there went into liquidation and just after that there was the big storm down here nearly five years ago and my business partner, Sid Soulsby, he had a forest near town that he was managing (Belmont Forest) and half of that blew down and he says come and give me a hand because he couldn’t find a crew. We did that, plus a little bit of his own trees, and that was how we started up Morepork.
“We were solely a ground base crew and we worked up to buying a harvester (Tigercat 855) to ramp up loads a little bit. And then Marcus talked us into a hauler. We always knew it was going to happen. Around this area it’s almost all hauler work and it was always a fight to get enough ground base for us.
“We took on the hauler. Them owning it and us running it – sortof works and sort-of doesn’t. We are looking to see if we should buy our own. We couldn’t have afforded to get into one when we first started to do this work. We just couldn’t do it. We were slightly over-capitalised with the harvester and the weather stuffs us a lot. So it made sense.
“Working with a hauler is a big change, but we did have
experience with yarding previously. My son, Brad and I, when we were up in Northland, we ran a swing yarder crew. Brad is very smart on the hauler side of things so when he came back down from Northland we took him on and he’s such a good logger for a young guy – he’s been in the bush since he was 14 and logging since he was 15, a lot of experience for his age.”
The conversation inevitably turns to that huge hill in front of us and the challenges it poses, and Brian is the one who brings up the subject of the ‘incident’ with the 071.
“We did have one little stuff up with it where the breaker-outs thought they knew best and cut some windthrow and there was a combination of errors and it ended up with the hauler tipping over,” admits Brian.
“The drag got jammed in the wind-throw and we were running the carriage and tried to back it out and shock load it through. It didn’t work.
“But we ended up with a better machine because now it’s got a 4-speed transmission in it and a new motor. It’s by far a better machine. Being able to return with four gears as well means our line speed is better, it was a big issue before, but not anymore.”
In spite of its challenges, this face is very straight and carries on for the length of the terrace, some distance away to our right, but there are pockets in behind that are almost impossible to log conventionally. So, FOMS has engaged a helicopter to fly logs back to the skid site.
“There are a couple of faces with a razor-back ridge at the top and a river at the bottom where we can’t sit a hauler, so we’ve got a Hughes 220 working here, flying out single logs,” says Marcus.
“We’re bucking on the hill to make sure we get a maximum lift weight of 1.8 tonnes. He brings them out with branches on, drops them here to be processed and loaded out. It is quite expensive, but with the current log prices it is worth it.”
Another challenge with many forests in this region is the standard of roading. In this particular block the road is better than most but Brian says: “Unfortunately, the roading isn’t always up to scratch down this way, compared to Northland and that with the big corporate forests.
“It’s always hard getting roads done 12 months in advance. Hence why we’ve got 60 odd loads stacked up at the moment. It is what it is, and we just deal with it and FOMS are really good, if we are running a bit short and we’ve got loads in stock, they’ll pay us on stock.”
The recent run of wet weather has made the ground exceptionally boggy and truck drivers find it difficult to get traction in places, requiring a tow from the Morepork Cat 527 tracked skidder on occasions. That’s affected the crew’s output.
“We need to be doing about seven truckloads a day to actually get ahead and be able to afford to replace gear, but we’re kicking along at about six or maybe a bit over five per day, around 120 loads per month,” Brian adds.
I like the way Brian and the crew have arranged the stack of logs that have built up as a result of the transport woes. The effect is quite arty when viewed from the top of that big hill, as you can see in the photo on the opposite page.
“Putting them in a semi-circle like this saves trundling around too much with the machine,” says Brian.
“The least movements you can do with your fleeting the better and we’ve put poles in to keep all the stacks nice and separate. Then it doesn’t matter who loads outs, they can get at them easily. We’ve got 25 grades here.
“Because of the weather dependency and the access to the skids we are only cutting export – with prices the way they are there is not a lot of difference between export and domestic.
“It’s good because our export grades drop into each other, so 3.9 and 3 metres, and the 5 and 5.9 metres. It makes it easier on the harvesting operator because he can just cut straight logs and it doesn’t matter if it’s an A grade, or if it’s too small it goes into a U-grade.
“There’s not a lot of cutback and we 100% QC everything as well. It’s quite knotty wood and isn’t uniform, so your measuring wheel does skip a little bit and you have to take that into account. We’re cutting through 50mm to 100mm bark on some trees and we’d rather over-cut a bit.
“It’s just part and parcel of running a harvester. We’ve got a Woodsman 700 on the Tigercat – the 850 would be too heavy for that base, but it still does bloody well. We process 9 cube logs with it, so there aren’t many occasions where we would need a bigger processor.
“When we first started, we were pulling up a 30 ft bluff and we were having to grab every log and assist it up the chute and they were up to 9 cube. It’s a good package, that Tigercat 855 base and the Woodsman. The machine is a non-leveller – it would be nice to have the leveller because Brad does quite a bit of cutover work in it.”
But on hills like the one in front of us, the trees have to be brought down manually, and Morepork has its own faller, plus a contract faller who assists when required. There’s no falling today, since there is plenty on the ground that have been already felled.
“We don’t like too much wood on the ground, it’s bit of a balance,” says Brian, then points up the hill and adds: “They are quite big settings – this face here will take us a couple of weeks. Now that we’ve busted the line through, hopefully it will get quicker and quicker.
“If we could get a swing yarder in here, a 123 or 124, we could be up to 20 loads a day. There’s not a lot of lift at the top and we’ve had to do a few tail spars, topping trees about 8 or 9 metres high. But the 071 is a good machine for what it is, it’s done pretty well.”
The setting does look huge from down here and Brian says it’s around 450 metres, meaning there’s only another 100 metres of rope left on the drum.
Up the top, the two breaker-outs look like tiny specs and are probably enjoying some spectacular scenery in between chaining up stems. Marcus offers to drive me up the ridge to view the operation from their ‘eagle’s nest’.
And what a view it is. Lush hills with a mix of native and plantation trees as far as the eye can see, with Mt Ruapehu’s snow-covered cap on the far horizon. Then, down on the flat at the foot of the hill is the nice semi-circle of logs surrounding the Tigercat, with the 071 looking like a Tonka toy to one side and the Wanganui River curving around the terrace behind the crew.
Working just a few metres down from the Komatsu D65 backline machine on the top of the ridge, breaker-outs Jamie How and
Above: This grapple-equipped Caterpillar 527 is a handy machine to have in these parts, not just for skidding on boggy surfaces, but also for assisting logs trucks when they lose traction.
Facing page: The Komatsu D65 backline machine is dug in at the top of the hill
Desmond Lister (who’s actually the crew faller, but is helping chain logs today) agree that there can’t be many views to beat this.
Back down on the flat, the crew is gathering for smoko and a group photo. All up there are seven of them and I ask Brian how long they all been together and whether it’s easy to get workers in Wanganui.
“Crew-wise it would be good if we could have a more stable crew – we are finding it very hard to get hold of staff,” he says, acknowledging that the current line up of guys are working well together and do a good job. But it’s still hard attracting people to take over those who move on, adds Brian.
“I don’t know whether it’s because they think we work too hard or we don’t pay enough or what it is, but we just find it very hard to get staff, particularly good qualified staff. Finding guys to operate machines is just about impossible.
“And yet, it’s a stable job, we’re close to home at the moment – we have travelled down as far as Wellington, did three months down at Pauatahanui. But, generally we try to stay this side of Levin and this side of Maxwell or Waverley. This forest is ideal because we all live in Wanganui.”
Apart from Brian, the longest serving member of the crew is his son Brad, who joined three years ago and is the foreman. He can operate any of the machines and if he’s not behind the controls of the Tigercat he’ll be found in the cab of the Madill.
Then there’s Rihari Pehi, who has been with Morepork two years and drives the Hyundai 250 loader and can also operate the hauler.
Breaker-out Jamie How has been there one year, as has Peter Roy, who does the QC-ing. The other regular breaker-out, Hamish Pointon, joined three months earlier and faller, Desmond Lister, is also a recent newcomer.
If the crew get stuck, they can always call upon Sid, the other joint-owner. He’s not a regular and being in his 60s he doesn’t get thrown up on the hill, but Brian says he can do QC work and help around the skid.
Brian says that Sid is managing a 3,000-acre block, also near Wanganui, that he is hoping to be able to talk him into letting Morepork harvest.
“That would set us up for five or six years,” says Brian.
If that doesn’t eventuate, there’s plenty of other forests coming on stream in the Manawatu and Taranaki over the next few years, most of it on steep hills. So the haulers and yarders on the FOMS books are likely to be kept busy for some time to come.
NZL