Golf tournaments

A huge THANK YOU to the golfers, volunteers, and sponsors who participated in the annual Log A Load for Kids Golf Tournaments. Together the tournaments raised more than $115,000 - critical funds to help make miracles happen for kids receiving care at Maine’s two Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center and The Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital.

AMERICAN FOREST

MAN AG EMENT

BBC Land, LLC

Southern Maine Golf Tournament Friday, August 25, 2023 Lake Kezar Country Club, Lovell Northern Maine Golf Tournament Friday, September 15, 2023 JaTo Highlands Golf Course, Lincoln

SYL-VER Logging feller buncher operating on fresh snow in November in northern Maine. All photos courtesy of SYL-VER Logging.

FORT KENT MILLS – November 18 was a typical early winter Friday for SYL-VER Logging owners Ben and Marty Pelletier. The brothers had returned the day before from the company’s logging camp on the Blanchette Road, deep in the woods of northwest Maine, where they had been working long days Mondays through Thursdays in recent weeks. That schedule left them Fridays back at the garage to deal with issues that piled up during the week and to plan for the next one. This week there had been plenty of issues.

An early winter storm that brought a dusting of snow to most of Maine had hit the roof of the state much harder, dropping several inches of snow and ice across Aroostook County. Vehicle crashes had closed Route 11 north of Portage periodically for two days. SYL-VER Logging’s crew on Irving Woodlands land had shut down operations due to mud and ice, while the company’s other crew was still operating as best it could on Prentiss and Carlisle land. The north woods logging roads were treacherous – the day before a driver hauling for SYL-VER met a pickup that had no radio to call out its position and was struck, leaving one front wheel of his log truck hanging off a bridge. Both drivers were ok, but it was a close call that could have been avoided if the pickup had followed the rules of the road.

In addition to being co-owners of SYL-VER since 2021 and managing its two crews and five full-time employees and one part-time employee, each brother also runs their own company: Ben is owner of Wiles Brook Logging based in Allagash. Marty owns M.L. Pelletier Trucking based in St. John. Logging is a tough industry at the best of times. Asked if running three companies at once on widely separated jobs makes life a challenge, the brothers laughed. “The trick is not getting discouraged,” Ben said. “I made my mind up a long time ago that there's gonna be tough days and times you’re just not gonna have any money and you’ve just got to try to power through it and wait for better days because it's not hard to get discouraged doing this.” Both brothers have now been logging for decades and they bought SYL-VER Logging knowing exactly what they were getting into. There are plenty of difficult days, but they are loggers to the core, love what they do, and hope they can keep doing it for a long time, until their children take over if that is what they want to do. Logging is in the family’s blood. Ben and Marty’s grandparents, Louis and Ethel Pelletier, started logging in the 1940s. They had sawmills and started out logging with horses, then tried crawler tractors, then eventually moved on to cable skidders as logging technology evolved.

SYL-VER Continued from Page 15 SYL-VER Logging got its name when Marty and Ben’s parents, Sylvia and Vernon Pelletier, took over the family business decades later, continuing to adapt and grow it as the industry changed. The brothers recall the first delimber being added to the company in the late 1980s, with the first feller buncher added not long after. Ben studied diesel hydraulics after high school and went into logging in 1993. He eventually started Wiles Brook Logging and today the company has three full-time employees including himself operating three feller bunchers, two John Deeres and a Tigercat with a brushing head that mainly brushes out old roads. Marty started working in the family business in 2000 right after high school and started his own trucking business, ML Pelletier Trucking, seven years later. Today M.L. Pelletier Trucking has four trucks – three running full-time – and two cranes with one running full-time. While both brothers’ businesses have operated independently for years, the bulk of the work they have done has always been as subcontractors to SYL-VER Logging, so when Ben and Marty decided to buy SYLVER Logging when their parents were ready to retire it was a natural move for all three companies. “SYL-VER Logging is the hub company, and everything funnels through that company, so Wiles Brook and M.L. Pelletier are essentially subcontractors to SYL-VER Logging, that was the best way to do it for all of us,” Marty said. As in most family logging businesses, spouses are vital partners. Marty’s wife, Heather, and Ben’s wife, Edie are critical to success. Ben’s son Greyden is already working in the family business. Marty’s much younger son Maverick is already very interested in equipment and logging, and his younger sister Emily says she is going to drive trucks with her brother when she grows up, giving the families hope that the fourth generation will continue logging for decades to come. SYL-VER Logging has worked for years on commercial timberlands. The company also does small woodlot management and buys and sells woodlots of its own. SYL-VER has also worked on state lands in the past. The Pelletiers do their own road maintenance, and between the three family companies and their garages can handle any job that comes their way. In the last year or so SYL-VER has added a new Weiler skidder and a CAT delimber to its equipment lineup, and is currently in the process of building a large new office in St. John.

SYL-VER is also close to completing the steps necessary to become Master Logger Certified®, the highest stamp of professionalism in the logging industry today. Wood markets have been a challenge in northern Maine just as they have elsewhere in the state but in the last couple of years buyers have been paying more for softwood than they had been in a decade or more. Meanwhile, in the hardwood market SYL-VER went from being unable to sell any to some buyers now asking for it, though that is a mixed blessing, Ben said. “They don't pay as much for it and there are a lot of trucking logistics that just don't add up very well for us compared to harvesting and hauling spruce and fir,” Ben said. “We just don't get paid as much for it and it's a lot further for trucking.” “With hardwood pulp you do twice the work for half the reward,” Marty agreed. Right now, the unpredictable weather is the biggest challenge the company faces, but finding and retaining good workers is also a major concern just as in most heavy industries. “We finally got a good handle on employees for our cutting equipment, that was a big hurdle,” Marty said. “We started a retirement plan and we're trying to do some stuff to support longevity in the employees and retain good employees.” While they are managing to find good employees right now, the brothers worry about the future. “It’s a problem now but it's gonna get a lot worse,” Ben said. “So many of them are getting up into the

Opposite and above: SYLVER Logging harvest underway in Township T-12 R-14.

neighborhood of 60 years old and the next few years here things are gonna be a lot different, we’ve got a population up here that's just dropping all the time.” The local high school draws students from a vast area from Allagash to Frenchville and down to Cross Lake. When he graduated from high school in 1991 Ben recalled there were 172 graduates in his class. When his son graduated in 2017 there were 72. When his daughter graduated in 2019 there were only 60. “And most of them are going on to college, they're not staying around and working in the woods,” Ben said. “A handful of people can't keep an industry going. It takes a lot of people to make it economical. The ones we do see moving to the area they're not here to work in the woods, they’re coming for the hunting and fishing and that kind of stuff, they don't move to Saint John Maine because they

want to be loggers, so I don't know what people are going to do to attract the workforce but it's going to be tough.” Such challenges and the need for an organization that speaks up for loggers and fights for the industry were among the reasons SYL-VER became a contractor member of the Professional Logging Contractors of Maine (PLC) after the brothers bought the company. M.L. Pelletier Trucking was already a Forest Contractor member. “I’ve always been involved with the PLC as far back as I could be and liked what they represent so as soon as Ben and I took over SYL-VER Logging one of the first things we did was approach PLC about becoming a fullfledged member,” Marty said. “Politics affects logging more than most people realize and I've always liked how PLC is a mouthpiece if you will for the loggers. I've always been a fan of the PLC.”

VILLE DE SAINT GEORGES, Quebec. – The Flying Moose logo of Manac® is a familiar a sight on the roads and highways of Maine, where the Canadian semitrailer manufacturer’s connection to the logging industry runs deep. Manac® today is the largest manufacturer of semitrailers in Canada and a leader in the manufacturing of specialty trailers in North America. Like many industries started in eastern Canada, if you follow its origins back far enough you will find roots in logging, and in the case of Manac® –to logging in northern Maine. “Anybody with gray hair in Maine has probably heard at some time about my great grandfather Ed Lacroix,” Charles Dutil, President and CEO of Manac® , said. “Back in the ‘20s and ‘30s he was operating up in northern Maine, logging. You've heard about the steam engines up on Eagle Lake? He's the one that left them there.”

Edouard Lacroix was a legendary Quebecois entrepreneur who a century ago owned logging rights throughout northern Maine, eastern Quebec, and northern New Brunswick. Among many other noteworthy accomplishments, the lumber baron built the Eagle Lake and West Branch railroad in Maine’s remote Allagash region as part of a system to get pulpwood to paper mills in Millinocket and East Millinocket, and later left behind the famous “ghost locomotives” that can still be found deep in the woods of the Allagash Wilderness. His

Photos: Opposite page, workers at the Manac® factory in St. Georges Quebec put the finishing touches on a live floor chip trailer. Above, a chip trailer nears the end of the production line in St. Georges.

successes would become the foundation on which succeeding generations of his family built two major companies. Lacroix’s daughter, Gilberte, and her husband Roger Dutil founded the first, Canam Steel, in 1961 in St. Gédéon, Quebec with partners in Boston. The company was formed to import raw European steel to Quebec, build steel joists for construction, and then ship them into the Boston market, thereby avoiding U.S. tariffs on imported raw steel. It was a profitable business model, and the company prospered. Charles’s father, Marcel, began working for Canam as a young man. The growing company needed to truck its products to market and was encountering long delays waiting for trailers from existing manufacturers. It was Marcel who saw a solution to this, and an opportunity. “So in 1966, at 24 years old, he started Manac® doing flatbeds,” Charles said. “Then not long after somebody said if you put posts on each side, I can carry logs, so there was a request that a trailer have stakes on each side and let's call it a logging trailer. So that's how it started.” Manac® – Canam spelled backwards – began in a barn behind Marcel’s house in St. Georges. Only eleven units were manufactured that year, but from that small start the company began to grow. In the early 1970s, Manac® acquired Canam Steel, and the Canam Manac Group was formed, officially binding the families’ two companies together. While there have been changes over the years with Canam and Manac® in terms of their ownership and public versus private status, the family businesses have always remained closely related, and today Charles’ brother, Marc, is President and CEO of Canam, while Marcel remains Chairman of both

Manac Continued from Page 19 companies. Manac® offers an amazing range of vans, flatbeds and specialty trailers such as dumps, low beds, grain hoppers, chassis, chip and logging trailers, all of which are sold in Canada and the United States under the recognized brands Manac®, CPS®, Peerless®, Darkwing®, UltraPlate® , UltravanTM, Liddell® Canada, Cobra® and AlutrecTM. Manac services the heavy-duty trailer industry for the highway transportation, construction, energy, mining, forestry and agricultural sectors and manufactures its trailers in facilities located in Saint-Georges, LaurierStation and Val-des-Sources (Quebec), Penticton (British Columbia) as well as Oran (Missouri, USA). Denis Larochelle, Sales Support Manager for Manac®, is starting his 40th year with the company and has seen Manac® grow immensely from its small beginnings. The vast Manac® factory in St. Georges, a former water pumping building the company moved into in 1967, has approximately 900 employees working in it today, many friends whom Denis has known for decades. “We have five production lines here, doing about 100 vans a week and 32 flats,” Denis said. “Right now the main plant is here, but we're talking about more than 1350 employees in all the different facilities.” Company-wide, he estimates Manac® and its subsidiaries are producing 8000 units per year, making Manac® first in Canada, 7th or 8th in the United States and approximately 13th globally in terms of trailer production. The variety of trailers Manac® and its subsidiaries produce fit the needs of many industries. Trailers destined for the forest economy represent perhaps 12-15 percent of the total units produced in St. Georges, with logging trailers, chip trailers, and low beds among them, Denis said. While the factory produces many stock trailers for its network of dealerships in North America, some are also custom, including many destined for the logging industry. Denis has fielded requests from loggers for custom modifications and additions for a long time and said Manac® prides itself on meeting those requests whenever it can. “Our goal is to get for you the maximum out of what you are doing with the trailer,” Denis said. “Tell us what you need, the challenges that you have to deal with, and we will try to find a solution for you.” “The Saint Georges plant is probably the most flexible plant in the industry in North America as far as the

type of products we can run during the same day,” Charles said.

Steel trailers are the focus of the St. Georges factory, while Manac® manufactures a variety of aluminum trailers through subsidiaries. Galvanized trailers are something the company has gotten into in recent years, building the trailers and having them galvanized by a separate facility before they are shipped back to St. Georges for final assembly, and they are quite popular with Maine loggers due to their longevity, Derek Knutsen, Manac’s regional sales manager for Maine, said.

“Demand for galvanizing has shot through the roof,” Derek said. “Within the past five or six years we started coming up with a fully galvanized log trailer and the demand and interest in that is high because it lasts and there's no paint maintenance required. It’s all hot dipped and they hot dip up to a 53-foot trailer. We've also started doing a new paint procedure on our galvanized trailers - guys are wanting the long-lasting galvanized trailers but also wanting a look of paint.” The majority of

Manac

® trailers are still sold in Canada, but sales in Maine and elsewhere in the U.S. are strong. The company works with a network of dealers throughout the U.S., with Hale Trailer, Brake & Wheel Inc., a Preferred Supporting Member of the Professional Logging Contractors of Maine (PLC), being the largest network. Hale has a dealership in Portland, ME, where many loggers in southern Maine buy Manac® trailers. In northern Maine and northern New Hampshire, direct sales from the factory are typical. These sales include delivery from the factory, and when necessary, support from the factory for any repair or warranty. "We have an excellent warranty program and we

stand behind and support our products, in partnership with our OEM parts suppliers. Even if the warranty period has ended, if the product is deemed to have a manufacturers error, Manac® will continue to stand behind our trailers. It is this kind of support after the sale that builds long lasting relationships, of which Manac® prides itself upon," Derek said, adding that Manac® trailers are built with quality, specifically for the conditions common in Quebec and New England so they hold up very well. “I feel like our product is more catered to the Maine and New England environment than some of our competitors.” Loggers seem to agree. The list of Maine’s Manac® customers includes some of the biggest names in Maine logging including TNT Trucking, WT Gardner, Khiel Logging, and Pascal Lessard – all Photos: Opposite, work underway on a low bed trailer in the Manac® factory in St. Georges. Above, a robotic welder at work in the factory. Below: A completed log trailer at the factory entrance in St. Georges. PLC Members - to name only a few. Manac® is an Enhanced Supporting Member of the PLC. “Yes, we are being built in Canada, but we have a local presence,” Derek said. “The main factor in joining the PLC was we wanted to show our commitment to the local Maine economy and our Maine customers.” Every Manac® facility has a flying moose statue to mark it as part of the company. The moose originally became a symbol of the quality of Manac® trailers in the 1980s when the saying was, “there’ll be a better trailer when the moose fly,” but is also linked to an Abenaki legend, and the story of the flying moose can be found on Manac’s website, Denis said. One key to Manac’s quality and success is a skilled and veteran workforce. The workers in St. George are unionized and the company has a good relationship with the union. The company actively solicits ideas from its employees to improve its operations, rewarding the best Manac Continued Page 22

Photos: Above: The Manac® factory’s axle assembly line. The line produces axles for more than 130 trailers per week. Opposite, the Manac® flying moose in Rockwood, Maine.

Manac Continued from Page 21 ideas with bonuses. Many workers in the factory have been there for decades, a testament to the quality of the jobs and their loyalty to their employer. That loyalty has been returned by the company over the years, perhaps most memorably in the late 1990s when Marcel Dutil was on the verge of selling Manac® to buyers in Chicago but walked away on the day of the signing. “At the end of the process, they would not guarantee the jobs of the workers here, so Marcel said no way, no deal.” Denis said. Still, like most manufacturers in 2022, one of Manac’s biggest challenges is finding enough skilled workers, and with the average number of years worked with the company on the day shift now at more than 25, it is a challenge that is not going away as older workers retire, Denis said. Most of the trailers coming out of the factory each day are sold long before they are assembled. Lead time for vans averages about a year, and for flats about six months, so demand exceeds what the company can currently produce, Denis said. That demand is not something Charles foresees going away in a world where so much moves by truck. “As you look at the new technology, the autonomous vehicles coming online, the electrification of trucking, all of these aspects will help trucking keep on gaining market share because it will make trucking more competitive. So for us, it shouldn't decrease demand,” Charles said. More than a century after Edouard Lacroix first saw great business opportunities in the north Maine woods, his descendants remain closely tied to the state, and not only for business. Charles’ mother is a Giguere from SteAurélie whose father used to bring the family into Maine for recreational opportunities in and around Brassua Lake. One day he drove 10 miles further and discovered Moosehead Lake, Charles said. “They've had a camp on Moosehead since the late 1950s, so we've always had a relationship with the north side of Maine,” Charles said. The family chalet, located on the east side of Moosehead Lake near Rockwood, is still a place he and the family visit often. It is easy to find: A large flying moose statue stands next to the driveway.

PLC Board of Directors 2022-23. Back, from left, Ron Ridley, First Vice President Chuck Ames, Marc Greaney. Middle from left, Bob Linkletter, Steve Hanington, Aaron Adams, Second Vice President Duane Jordan. Front, from left, Randy Kimball, Treasurer Andy Irish, President Will Cole, Past President Tony Madden, Secretary Kurt Babineau. Absent from photo, Brent Day, Jim Nicols, Wayne Tripp and Gary Voisine.