| 41 T T Richard Loader Long, proud history in Northland NFM does everything from land preparation, planting, growing the forest, through to harvesting and marketing the logs. Northland Forest Managers: NZFOA FORESTRY Proud to be in partnership with Northland Forest Managers Ltd Complete agricultural and commercial helicopter service Ralph HELICOPTERS LTD Schultz Agricultural & Forestry spraying • Orchard & Crop spraying Bulk & Bagged Fertiliser application • Li ing Contact us: Ralph: Ph. 09 431 8590 Ben: Ph. 09 431 8125 / Cell. 027 692 1188 TRANSPORTING NORTHLAND WIDE - THE SMART CHOICE FOR LOG TRANSPORT PH. 021 245 4835 TRANSPORT SOLUTIONS LTD WHANGAREI MARSDEN Managing 18,000 hectares of forestry estate, the team at Northland Forest Managers Ltd (NFM) has a long history living and working in the Northland region. Initially formed in Kerikeri in 1995 as a private forestry management company looking after ex-State Forest estates, in 2011 NFM was engaged by Hong Kong based Greenheart Group to manage a 10,000-hectare estate that runs through the Mangakahia Valley. Four years later Greenheart Group purchased NFM as its forest management company. There are now an additional 3000 hectares of leasehold forestry land under Greenheart Group’s umbrella. Those estates include 500 hectares just south of Dargaville on the Pouto Peninsula and 2500 hectares in Waipoua. Beyond Greenheart Group, NFM has responsibility for another 5000 hectares, including some of the MPI’S billion trees programme. Utilising a trusted and loyal contractor workforce, NFM does everything from land preparation, planting, growing the forest, through to harvesting and marketing the logs from both carbon and traditional forests, supplying local mills as well as the export market. “The export market supply is higher than normal because of the downturn in residential construction in New Zealand,” says NFM’s General Manager Neil Geerkens. “If the domestic sawmills want logs we supply as much as we can.” In addition to its Kerikeri Head Office, NFM has an office based in Dargaville with a total of eleven staff across the two locations. Roles range from administration, mapping, health & safety, field-based roles including harvest, road construction and silviculture supervision. Neil acknowledges there can be challenges finding people with the right skill set to join the team. “Not everybody wants to come right up north to work. The further north of Auckland you get, the harder it is to attract people. There are plenty of opportunities out there and people can weigh up what the various roles offer and where they are in the country, and so they have choices.” While there are a number of forestry schools around the country, Neil says there are occasions when experience and good technical ability are necessary for successful fulfilment of a role. “The challenge is finding a person with experience, and some good sound skills, as well as people willing to either live in Whangarei or Kerikeri. Rather than just finding anyone and fitting the role around them, it can be a matter of taking the time to find the right person. That’s the way I’ve been doing it, but of course the impact is that it takes longer and that places more load on the remaining staff until the roles can be filled.” Making use of available technology is another solution to the challenge of finding people and Neil says one of the key things NFM has done over the last couple of years is the adoption of drone technology to do small area mapping and measurements in the forests. “In the past we might have walked the areas with a GPS unit that we’ve harvested. What used to take us two hours to do manually now takes twenty minutes. Because we can do it quickly, easily, safer and accurately using technology, we can do it monthly, whereas in the past it was a quarterly task. There are lots of technologies that we can utilise to take time out of some of the more repetitive manual tasks. It means that staff can be redeployed in more productive areas of the business, so that we can become more efficient and effective in the time available.”
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