PHOTO: DALIA ABBAS
production
Harvesting and collecting biomass turned out to be very different than harvesting timber, researchers found. However, as loggers gained more experience the process became much more efficient.
material is going to be free or at a very low cost. That may be true if you are just picking up tops and branches at a timber harvest site, but if you want to get beyond the boom and bust volumes that come with the timber market, you need to recognize that pricing has to be greater than zero.”
Loggers Adapt Another aspect of the study was trying to capture the logger’s voice, as the study titled one of its chapters. There is a large body of academic literature on removing biomass for energy or forest management, but very little of it comes from the perspective of the operators who actually do the work of cutting the trees and moving them out of the forest. “We found that in many instances existing equipment could be adapted to biomass harvesting,” Arnosti says. “But operating train-
ing and experience greatly increased productivity. For example, a particular logger that worked on a number of our tests figured out on his own how to carry two or three times as much biomass in a forwarder as he did at the beginning of the project. He figured it out and it was very different than the techniques he used to forward round wood.” A forwarder is a piece of equipment used to move wood from the cutting area to the collection area. Abbas did most of the formal interviews with the loggers. She says one of the most profound differences for the loggers is that they had to walk every area before they would bid on clearing and collecting the biomass. Usually experienced loggers, who have worked a particular region, are familiar enough with the costs and paybacks of gathering round wood that they can calculate the expected costs and paybacks just from looking at a map of a timber offering. Gathering biomass was so different for them that they needed to walk the land to understand the pitfalls they would be facing. “It was normal for them to go into an area and extract a larger tree from the site,” she says. “But this was the first time they would enter a site solely to remove the smaller material.” Arnosti described logging work as something so familiar to the workers they could do it on “semi-autopilot” which allowed them to become very skilled at what they did. Abbas found that one of the skills that made loggers so efficient was that they knew how to fell trees and position them so that the workers moving the trees out of the woods could do so with the least amount of wasted time and effort. For biomass harvesting, the loggers had to relearn these skills. “It was important that operators communicated with each other on the site,” Abbas says. “For example, they learned which machine would follow the next. So the operator would cut the material to be forwarded in a way, even though it would have taken him longer, that made the entire operation more efficient. But if you get a divided operation, where someone is responsible for cutting the material without thinking of the best way to lay it out, then you get a lot of hours of harvesting and that isn’t a very practical option for the loggers.”
9|2008 BIOMASS MAGAZINE 39