$400 a day but no-one wants job
Pay rates of $400 a day are not enough to attract workers to plant trees, potentially putting a brake on the Government’s 1 billion trees by 2028 campaign.
Forest nurseries have doubled plantings to 100 million seedings in response to government incentives, but finding staff is the biggest hurdle to getting them in the ground.
Forest Management director David Janett said the bottleneck was not so much acquiring seedlings from forest nurseries, but finding people to plant the trees. ‘‘We are fully booked up for this year.’’
Planting rates in the North Island were reaching 60 cents a tree, which equated to pay rates of $300 to $400 a day, he said.
‘‘And we still can’t get people. The greatest impediment is finding the labour to plant the trees. We can mechanise a lot of the work, but we can’t mechanise a person on a spade.’’
Tree planting was done in autumn and winter, and seasonal workers from the Pacific Islands would need to be recruited.
Forest Nursery Growers Association president
Kevin Haine said its member nurseries would grow 100m tree seedlings this year, almost double the 54m trees grown two years ago.
Of this, the Government was responsible for about 20m trees through its Crown forestry partnerships, such as its agreement to establish a commercial forest on Ngati Rehia iwi land in Northland.
Tree planting had already increased to 70m trees last year in response to demand for replanting of harvested forests, as the ‘‘wall of wood’’ from a peak planting in 1994 reached maturity.
Nursery growers were aware that a change of government might lead to a change in treeplanting policy, which had occurred before, so they were wary of gearing up too quickly, Haine said.
‘‘The contracts signed have only been for one year. The Government hasn’t signed any longterm contracts, so it’s year-by-year. However, for nurseries to scale up is reasonably doable,’’ said Haine, nursery manager at PF Olsen.
Patrick Murray, of Murrays Nurseries at Woodville, said it had doubled plantings of pinus radiata from 5m to 10m trees in the past year, with Crown Forestry contracting a lot of the trees. This surpassed its previous peak production of 9.3m trees in the early 1990s.
Murray said that while the operation could expand, he had turned down further business in the meantime, as he was cautious about having sufficient staff.
Janett said the surge in tree planting meant landowners needed to consider scale, or face not being able to harvest their commercial plantation forests.
There was already a shortage of forest harvest contractors in the North Island who could chose to only log forests with scale and good access.