With some old hands, a young boss, new machinery, and women at the controls, all working on schedule for a well-respected forestry company, Goodman Logging is a snapshot of the modern era.
And if there’s a type of character who might illustrate the changes that have taken place in forestry in recent years, it could well be Nick Goodman.
Nick has the easy drawl of someone comfortable in his own skin, and in the kind of forest where he has spent most of his 35 years. Yet he’s a long way from the traditional image of the hard-arsed kiwi logger, or the pressured types you see on North American TV shows about logging.
He’s lean and laid back. He had a go at farming, driving tractors, harvesting, but he found it too boring. He couldn’t escape the pull of logging and soon went back to the family business.
“I like the machinery, it’s just more full on – and pine trees smell better than cowsh*t,” says Nick.
“The mechanisation is all good but you do miss the fitness. I still help out on the ground with the QC and stuff, and do all the manual falling.”
Nick runs a crew currently working in the Waimiha Forest, near Benneydale, for Manulife. He is the second-generation owner of Goodman Logging, having taken over the family business a couple of years ago from his parents, Paul and Carol. They had run a variety of forest operations before buying this crew from Alan Sinton (AG Sinton) nine years ago.
The current crew still includes two of that original team, Jack Ngatamariki and Teau ‘Rutz’ Ratai. There are two more very experienced older guys who joined in the past couple of years – Bruce Tukaki and Shane Humberstone – and two young women, Hilary Dahm and Kelly Goodman. They are driving the processor and loader stacker when we arrive on the skid.
Nick is almost surprised when I remark on there being two women in the crew. “There’s a lot of women in forestry now,” he says.
Born to run… a logging crew
Carrying on the family business seems as natural to Nick as breathing; “I was working for my dad basically my whole life. Logging is all I wanted to do.”
His mum says Nick has been in and out of logging machines since he was four years old: “He didn’t really stand a chance of being anything but a logger.”
As mechanisation came in, Nick was the one to manage it. He says his dad was very much of the chainsaw/manual generation and was happy to let Nick choose, manage and drive the new machinery.
Nick’s parents, Paul and Carol, started Goodman Logging in 1993, predominantly production thinning.
Like Nick, Paul had spent his working life in forestry, starting at age 22 in a two-man gang falling native timber on farm stations in Hawke’s Bay, before moving to Rotorua to work, felling radiata in Kaingaroa.
Paul moved into silviculture for Tasman...
