IT TOOK INNOVATIVE PLANNING AND engineering on the part of NZ Forestry and Rosewarne Logging to complete a challenging harvest at Kaihu, North of Dargaville and close to the Kaiwi Lakes.
“We got started on this block in May 2020 and it was tough timing coming into winter. Plus we had some pretty challenging roading to get done with our roading programme pushed out due to the COVID lockdown. But probably the biggest obstacle was trying to come up with a solution for a corridor of wood that was on the other side of a large stream crossing,” says Beth Owen, NZ Forestry Harvest Forester for the project.
In her first year on the job just out of university, Beth is one of a growing number of females in Supervisory roles in the industry. Her role covers all aspects of crew supervision, ensuring health and safety requirements are met, environmental considerations and standards are being upheld and wood outturn is optimised.
This diminutive 23-year-old is following in her father and brother’s footsteps making her career in the bush. She is enjoying the challenge of learning the trade and acknowledges that there are a lot of good people in the industry with vast knowledge and skills to draw on in her role. “My job is to ensure that everything gels and the forest owner’s interests are looked after. “In that regard, I often do health and safety checks or audits when I’m out there, plus log quality audits, running over the logs before they go out the gate to make sure that we’re optimising the grade outturn. I double check that all wood is being collected from the cutover and has made it onto a truck and out the gate. And then the other aspect is that we’re working within the National Environmental Standards (NES) rules, so ensuring that slash and debris hasn’t made its way into waterways and that the crew is on top of tracking and sediment controls,” says Beth.
Finding solutions
The project, which was completed in November 2020, used a combination of harvesting systems involving ground-based forwarder and swing yarder extraction, and truck two-staging of wood to harvest a long corridor beside a large stream. The harvest systems were quite diverse for the size of the block.
“Installing a shipping container crossing limited the environmental impact to our whenua while providing a cost-effective solution for the client,” says Beth. The shipping container dimensions fitted the stream cross-section well, minimising the earthworks required to the stream bank, and the log infill and bearers effectively bridged the container so no structural strength was relied on with the container. This is the third such container/log bridge NZ Forestry has installed in Northland so they have the installation process down pat. By using log infill around the container it eliminates the chance of dirt going in the stream and makes deconstruction easy with just logs to pull out. The crossing was deemed as temporary under...
