As an industry, we will be harvesting a lot more woodlots – and harvesting woodlot is typically more expensive than working in our larger plantation forests. One potentially big cost is building infrastructure to get the job done. But do we need more or less forest roads when harvesting woodlots compared to our larger estates? That was the research question Jacob Allum worked on for his final year Forest Engineering project. 

Some basic forest road numbers have already been published. As an industry we are building somewhere between 1600 and 2000km of new forest roads each year, and we will be expected to do so for another 10 years – as long as we are still harvesting many first rotation forests. And many of our woodlots coming up for harvest are areas with limited infrastructure. 

We also know that building a road can cost anywhere from $30,000 up to $180,000 per km – with a national average of $90,000 per km. While access to quality aggregate is one of the big cost factors, another is the slope of the terrain. 

More roads means easier access and shorter extraction distances for our harvesting systems. But roading costs are often paid for ahead of harvesting, so small-scale forest owners can be apprehensive about justifying such investments.