Harvester info highlights value recovery

CLEAR STEM GRADING AND VOLUMETRICS, BETTER CUTS, minimised mechanical damages and reduced injuries are all benefits of the move to mechanisation, says Hancock Forest Management’s Leisa Small.

But without collected harvester information in the form of the STICKS tool, this would be difficult to gauge. Collected harvester information is a crucial part of judging the move to mechanisation and as a business driver, she told delegates at the HarvestTECH 2019 conference in Rotorua.

Using high tech machines in challenging environments pushes the need for continued production and increased value recovery.

“We had to change the mindset of contractors and staff to get value out of every stem that we cut,” says Ms Small. Training of competent machine operators is a major hurdle but one of many benefits is that there is “no soft person trying to work alongside metal anymore.”

“This increased our productivity tremendously,” she says. “For a while we struggled with productivity and we had to come to terms with how we were going to build our skid. Along the way we’ve worked out that we’ve actually improved our value.”

Using the STICKS system allows them to see all the metrics coming out of the harvesting machines: “From every stem we can work out the volume that comes out, every grade, every length that comes out of that run out of the processor.

“One of the key things is that we’re able to do this not just at harvester level, not just at regional level, but also at national level. Also, we’ve now got the opportunity to do it at an international level and integrate all of this together. This gives us great scope for making decisions, not just at crew level, but right at the top.

“Daily knowledge of what’s out there gives us negotiating power and instead of trying to promise something we can’t deliver, we can actually be upfront and say ‘this is what we’ve got, is this going to suffice?

“Using this tool, harvesting foresters are able to look at different areas within the crew workplace, managing crew performance using machine data, so they know volume, where the crew is tracking based on what the weekly targets are and can look at manual versus automatic cuts and the full operational process.”

This bird’s eye view opens opportunities too: “The closer we can marry harvester parts with what goes out on the truck, the less recuts and batch pay. Plus there’s less damage to the forwarder and the possibility of adding centimetres to each log for adjusted value recovery.”