| 61 Sustainability the common denominator Richard Loader Port Blakely’s core business is growing, harvesting and marketing production timber. FORESTRY Port Blakely 027 441 0866 / 07 347 6322 gaddum@xtra.co.nz www.gaddum.co.nz At the heart of Port Blakely’s 26-year forestry operation in New Zealand is a successful business built upon family values, strong business relationships and sustainable practices throughout the business. Port Blakely is an American owned intergenerational family business that stems back 150 years and its name pays homage to small community in Bainbridge Island, just off Seattle. The company has been operating in New Zealand since the ‘90s, progressively acquiring and planting land in forestry. The company now has land holdings in both North and South Islands encompassing 38,424 hectares. The net productive area is 28,807 hectares including 1840 hectares in Forestry Right land. The majority of landholdings are in the South Island, with Douglas fir making up 40% - 50% of the South Island estate. Operations encompasses three key areas; growing, harvesting, marketing and selling logs from its own land; harvesting and marketing services to other smaller forest owners – particularly farmers; and carbon forestry. Port Blakely is the second largest owner of freehold production carbon forest in New Zealand. Through all of Port Blakely’s forestry operations, sustainability is the common denominator. “For us, sustainability is around the company’s three main pillars; economic, environmental and social,” says Phil Taylor, Port Blakely’s Managing Director NZ Forestry. “From an economic perspective, Port Blakely manages its forests on the basis of a sustainable harvest. We’re working toward harvesting no more logs than the foresters have grown in a year.” Phil says recognising the critical importance of production capacity through the company’s harvesting contractors is another consideration when dealing with economic sustainability. “Unless our contractors are successful economically and run sustainable operations, we won’t either, because we need them to take the produce from our forest. “Forestry goes through commodity and pricing cycles but Port Blakely’s approach is to provide continuity of work throughout those cycles. T “hat doesn’t mean that when the markets are low we will just continue harvesting at a steady rate, but we work with our contractors and our relationship with them to reduce our production so that when the markets return we can re-accelerate. “Our contractor relationship is very much built on a partnership and short of an absolute disaster in the market where the whole system locks up for an extended period our sustainability approach with our contractors is to keep them working as much as we can.” While Port Blakely’s core business is growing, harvesting and marketing production timber, carbon forestry has provided the opportunity to be more economically sustainable by adding value to its bottom line. “Not only do our forests contribute to New Zealand’s greenhouse gas commitments, they also add to our bottom line and make us more profitable, which is key to the economic sustainability of any business.” Through an environmental lens, Phil says unless the environment in which the trees are grown is sustainable — which is about maintaining its productive base — the economics cannot be supported. “The kinds of things we’re looking at include reducing our harvesting impact on our soils. If we run our harvesting equipment across the whole site it can significantly impact on productivity and sustainability of the future crop. We’re also looking at issues around genetics. How do we combine genetics and science with the site and the management to sustain our productivity, and more-so our harvesting productivity? Again from the environmental perspective, there’s a focus around bio-security. Globally we’re seeing significant impacts from climate change with increased risks to forests from fires, pests and disease.” Port Blakely’s commitment to maintaining a sustainable productive forestry is around increasing its focus on biosecurity issues and having a much better understanding of the threats that are emerging from climate change. Increasingly, communities look at all land use with a critical eye and forestry is one in particular with issues like the environmental devastation that occurred in Tolaga Bay a few years ago, where many lessons were learned. “The scrutiny from communities is becoming more intense, and so it’s important that we engage with them in our operations and that we build genuine partnerships and relationships with those communities. “That’s all part of sustainability as well, because without community support and social licence to operate it makes our work significantly more difficult. It takes a very long time to build up social capital and you need to do it in a very genuine way. “If you don’t build it up or it’s not genuine, you can lose it very quickly. Communities are smart, and they will be on to you pretty quickly if you are not genuine in your intent.”
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