Business South September 2022

68 | Technology, innovation drive production Richard Loader FML manages 30,000 hectares of forestry estates in Canterbury, Otago, Southland and the West Coast. Forest Management Ltd FORESTRY to page 70 Proud to support Forest Management Ltd Phone: 03 327 8843 Email: sales@sutherlandtimber.co.nz SILVICULTURE SPECIALISTS PROVIDING PRUNING, PLANTING AND THINNING APPLICATIONS TO FOREST OWNERS CONTACT Alan 027 204 7222 Nikki 027 275 8017 WWW.JBFORESTRY.CO.NZ Carry bundles of seedlings, and planting these in rows across the forest blocks. PLANTING Carrying a chainsaw and working in rows making the correct selection to thin to waste THINNING Carrying Ladder and Pruning equipment, and working in rows to make selection to prune up to approximately 6 meters PRUNING Mitchell Bros are proud to support Forest Management Limited For Glenn Moir, the man proudly conceived amongst a bed of pine needles in a forest, and now a Director of Forest Management (FML) Ltd, much has changed in the forest industry over the last 35 years. Back in the day, Glenn would trot out into the bush with a bunch of burly contractors running Stihl 66 chainsaws, and to get their respect he would jump on the end of a saw and drop a few trees. Well, those days are gone and for a range of reasons. “The contracting nature of our industry has changed,” says Glenn. “The piece rate payment – paid by weight – has meant that the actual industry innovators are the contractors. We have all this innovation around technology – grapple carriages, tethers, and different hauler systems – and that has all come from within our contracting work force, and that has also changed the face of the workforce. “Our most productive harvesting crews now are only four or five people at maximum, where they used to be twelve plus. “By embracing technology, they have become more productive and with those different systems and the structures we put around them. They have also become a lot more lenient on the environment.” For FML, and many other forest management companies like them, IT is being embraced within their own organisation, with cloud-based systems for log docketing, ERP accounting, and CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

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