Growing Tree Species, Brazil

IUFRO Symposium and Workshop on Genetic Improvement and Productivity of Fast Growing Tree Species, Brazil

The IUFRO Symposium and Workshop on Genetic Improvement and Productivity of Fast Growing Tree Species was held in Aguas de São Pedro, São Paulo, Brazil, 25 – 30 August 1980. My attendance at the symposium, and study tours before and after, formed part of my paid terminal study leave from the PNGUT. Overall, I spent the period 17 August to 6 September (three weeks) in Brazil.

I flew Armidale – Sydney – Honolulu – Los Angeles – Lima - São Paulo City, arriving on Sunday 17 August 1980. 18 to 20 August were free days.

In summary, the then situation with forestry in Brazil was that of a large rapidly developing country with a huge demand for wood of all kinds. Government policy was aimed at the rapid development of the country without increasing the already substantial international debt that had expanded rapidly because of rising oil prices during the 1970’s energy crisis. Fiscal incentives had been introduced to stimulate

the enormous investment required for domestic production of wood products. The result was that private enterprise companies aided by foreign investment were running the majority of forest activities in Brazil.

Set against the poor genetic bases of the original species introductions, especially for the eucalypts, the potential of large productivity increases from tree improvement programmes led to their rapid inception and substantial funding. At the timeof the visit many programmes were in various stages of development and Brazil had one of the largest endeavours in the world for plantation forestry development and associated research on genetic improvement.

The pre-Symposium tour started in São Paulo City on 20 August with a visit to the Instituto Florestal de São Paulo. Its work programs were described and some of its facilities visited. Participants returned to São Paulo City overnight.

On 21 August the Companhia Melhoramentos de São Paulo was visited. Tours were made to plantation trial plots of Araucaria angustifolia, Cunninghamia lanceolata and Cryptomeria japonica ending with an overnight stay in Piracicaba.

Duratex S A was visited on 22 August. Trips were made to plantations, seed production areas and progeny trials of E. grandis, E. saligna and E. urophylla. Until 1968 Duratex had based its eucalypt plantations on “Brazilian alba”. At the suggestion of Professor Pryor, a new introduction of E. grandis had been made from near Coffs Harbour (NSW, Australia), which raised MAIs from 15 to 20 m3/ha/yr to 35 m3/ha/yr over a seven-year rotation. The plantations seen on this visit were mainly derived from the new introductions of E. grandis from Coffs Harbour. A small trial of E. saligna and E. urophylla had been made. The Company had conducted a small provenance trial for E. grandis from four locations in northern NSW. Kyogle was best and the Coffs Harbour control was ranked third leading to the conclusion that a choice of a provenance from farther north in the range of E. grandis could bring a further gain in yield but at the time of our visit Duratex had no plans to introduce more new material on a large scale. The overnight stay was in Baurú.

Progeny trial of E. grandis age 3.5 years.

A six-year-old eucalypt species trial. This trial was an example of collaboration between Riocell (a forestry, pulp and paper company), Embrapa (the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation in the Ministry of Agriculture) and IPEF (the Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Florestais [Forest Science and Research Institute], Piracicaba).

On 23 August the visit was to Companhia Agro Florestal Monte Alegre S A (CAFMA). Trips were made to Pinus caribaea, P. oocarpa and other species provenance trials, progeny trials and seed production areas. The tour ended in Aguas de São Pedro, the venue for the symposium.

Sunday 24 August was a free day. Registration and the opening session of the symposium and presentation of position papers took place on Monday 25 August. There were 352 registered participants from 29 countries, 251 were from Brazil. About 250 papers were presented and sessions were conducted in English, French and Portuguese with simultaneous translation. Sessions on tropical eucalypts and pines drew the largest numbers of attendees reflecting the interests of the large number of participants from the host country Brazil. Sessions on other tropical species were poorly attended.

The first technical session on eucalypts took place in the afternoon of 26 August. This was “Exploration, conservation and variation of Eucalyptus grandis - Study of the present situation of the program”. The next session on eucalypts took place on the morning of 27 August: “Provenances collected and provenance tests in other species of eucalypts”. (That is other than E. grandis). In this session I presented a paper on “Provenance trials of Eucalyptus deglupta in Papua New Guinea”. In the afternoon the session on “Methods of selection and improvement in eucalypts” took place. I was Rapporteur for this session and also presented a paper on “Progress in breeding Eucalyptus deglupta”. This paper covered E. deglupta in other countries like the Philippines as well as in PNG.

A morning tour on 29 August was made to Champion Papel e Celulose S A in Mogi-Guaçu. Here the participants learned that the most important early introductions of eucalypts to Brazil were made at the nearby Botanical Garden at Rio Claro in 1919. A number of species was introduced including what was known then as E. alba but since identified as E. urophylla. The E. “alba” seed had come from one or two trees in the Bogor Botanic Gardens in Indonesia151raised in turn from seed collected in natural stands of E. urophylla on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The first extensive plantings of eucalypts in Brazil were made using seed collected from the Rio Claro introductions and mainly from plots of E. “alba”. The plantation stands that resulted showed a high degree of variability in many characters suggesting a high frequency of hybrids. The E. “alba” was planted next to plots of E. tereticornis, E. saligna and E. robusta and this combined with an overlap of flowering across some ten months of the year would make hybridization very probable. Examination of the original plot layout at Rio Claro gave an indication of which combinations were improbable or impossible. Professor Pryor examined many plantations of the

151 These two trees still existed in the Bogor Botanical Gardens in the 1990s. One still labeled as “E. alba” and photographed by me appears in Fig. 16.3 on page 146 in: Eldridge K, Davidson J, Harwood C and van Wyk G 1994 Eucalypt Domestication and Breeding. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

hybrid mixtures and concluded most were hybrids of E. urophylla x E. tereticornis and E. urophylla x E. robusta. Plantations still called E. “alba” during the tour showed the characteristics of uncontrolled hybridization such as variable bark colour, pattern and texture as well as a wide range of leaf shapes and sizes.

Champion being an older company had originally established most of its plantations with seed from Rio Claro resulting in poor yields. In 1967 the Company was obtaining only about a MAI of 15 m3/ha/yr over bark over a seven-year rotation. This was raised to about 21 m3/ha/yr with additional silvicultural measures such as better soil preparation and fertilisation. New and better introductions were made around this time including E. saligna (25 m3/ha/yr over a seven-year rotation) and E. urophylla (30 m3/ha/yr). Pryor suggested Champion also obtain E. grandis from the Coffs Harbour area. At the time of the symposium participants’ visit large areas of the low yielding plantations were being clearfelled and coppicing prevented by treating the stumps with arboricides or by successive de-budding. New improved seedlings were planted between the stumps. The seed was being obtained from seed production areas of their new introductions of E. grandis. The Company had calculated that an increase of 10.5 m3/ha/yr in MAI over a seven-year rotation would pay for the programme. Since an increase of 13.5 m3/ha/yr MAI had been obtained already, this goal had been achieved. However, Champion had not conducted any provenance trial(s) of E. grandis to find out if any would be better than the lone Coffs Harbour one.

The review of the symposium by Dr E C Franklin of North Carolina University and closing session were held on the morning of 30 August. With the advent of mass vegetative propagation, it was clear that breeding work for the tropical eucalypts was far ahead of that for other tropical species and justified the formation earlier by me of a dedicated Working Party for Breeding Eucalypts at the IUFRO World Congress in Oslo in 1976. Dr Franklin made the following observations: 1. The need for full and comprehensive species and provenance testing had been emphasised and must be the most important stage in selection and improvement. Before any work is started a detailed programme must be set out. This should list possible alternatives and projected gains. 2. Basic density and wood quality are important factors which should be assessed in a programme as soon as is feasible. As a programme develops, emphasis must be placed on quality rather than gross yield, aiming for uniformity in wood properties of wood properties both within plantations and within individual trees. 3. At the moment too little emphasis is given at an early stage to disease and insect problems.

Climbing to lop seed-bearing branches from E. grandis in a seed production area.

Hexagonal extruded earth tubes with holes (left) ready for dibbling eucalypt seedlings. This innovative method meant that no rigid plastic or polybag containers were required and there was nothing to be removed before planting. A heavy clay mix was used in a machine modified from sawdust briquetting equipment. The relatively large holes allowed the seedlings to be bedded in with a friable potting mix (right) to give them a good start.

Left: A stand of E. grandis managed under a coppice with standards silvicultural system to produce both large (saw log) and small (pulp log) dimension timber. Right: A coppice stool just after reduction to three leaders. The leaders are 8 to 10 cm in diameter here and firmly attached to the stump.

4. Vegetative propagation has been highlighted as the newest and most exciting prospect in the improvement of eucalypts and pines. The broad scale application of tissue culture is forecast as the next major step. 5. The use of cloning brings with it certain requirements from improvement programmes: a) it does not remove the need for sexual programmes using genetic recombination, b) clones must be proven in properly designed clonal tests and not presumed on the basis of ortet performance (not adequately done so far at Aracruz), c) the genetic base should not be narrowed too much, the potential gains from cloning are high but so are the risks, a programme must strive for optimal gains while incurring minimal risks. 6. The role of the forest geneticist is to assess the available variability for characters involved in utilization as soon as is practically possible and that because variability in forest trees is much greater than in animal or annual crop breeding the same techniques are not necessarily applicable to trees.

I was pleased that the tree improvement programme on E. deglupta in PNG that started more than 30 years earlier had already incorporated most of these points.

The post-symposium tour started on 31 August with a bus trip from Aguas de São Pedro to São Paulo City for a flight south to Vitoria in the State of Espíritu Santo, passing over Aracruz Florestal S A pulp mill and eucalypt plantations on the way.

The visit to Aracruz Florestal S A started on 1 September 1980. The project started in 1967 and is located in two different regions 150 km apart on the coast of Espíritu Santo State. One block is in Aracruz County, with an area of 43,784 ha; the other is in São Mateus and Conceição da Barra Counties with an area of 30,633 ha. Of the total gross area of 74,417 ha, a net area of 59,100 ha had been planted with Eucalyptus species by the time of our visit. This area had been planted in only a decade, starting with 1,300 ha/year in the beginning and reaching 15,300 ha/yr. The flat topography had allowed maximum use of mechanization.

The mill located in the Aracruz region went on stream in October 1978 and at the time of our visit had just reached its capacity of 400,000 tons of pulp per year, consuming 1,680,000 m3 of wood with bark. Pulp logs were 3.5 to 6 metres long, mostly the latter. The maximum haulage distance to the mill was

Right: Aracruz Florestal S A pulp mill, port and nearby eucalypt plantations.

only 190 km and several of the earliest plantations were so close to the mill that they could be felled and moved directly to the mill log yard with a wheeled loader.

An extensive tour of the nursery was conducted where mass vegetative propagation techniques for eucalypts and the production of planting stock from both seed and cuttings were demonstrated.152 Species trials, provenance tests and progeny trials were visited in the afternoon before returning to Vitoria overnight. The next day, it was back to Aracruz, where the pulp mill and adjacent port facilities were inspected. Then tours were made to eucalypt spacing trials and to areas of coppice used to produce cuttings. Seed orchards were inspected. A controlled pollination technique for E. grandis was demonstrated. Harvesting and planting operations were observed before proceeding into Linhares for the overnight stop.

At the time of my visit to Aracruz in 1980 the oldest clonal plantation was six years old and located adjacent to the nursery.

152 The mist control equipment followed a circuit design and other details that I had presented in two Tropical Forestry Research Notes in 1973 that I had given to Dr Edgard Campinhos Jr of Aracruz when he visited me in Bulolo in 1974. However, the scale of the nursery operation at Aracruz in 1980 was huge in comparison to what had been achieved in PNG.

The clonal plantation programme was demonstrated at Aracruz in 1980. Top left: Coppice sprouts from which shoots were harvested. Top right: The coppice shoots in buckets of water were transported to the nursery in a closed van to minimize wilting. Bottom left: The coppice shoots were processed into one- or two-node cuttings depending on the internode length. The leaf area was halved. The bases of the cuttings were dipped in a systemic fungicide for 15 minutes then into hormone (indole butyric acid, indole acetic acid, naphthalene acetic acid) diluted in talcum powder. Bottom right: Cuttings were inserted into growing medium of subsoil with no fertilizer in plastic polybags.

Aracruz in 1980. Top left: Cuttings under intermittent mist spray after 50% overhead shade had been removed after 35 days. Top right: Lifting cuttings at the end of the nursery stage for transport to the field for planting. At this time about 1 cm was cut from the bottom of the polybag plant container to eliminate coiled or twisted roots. Right: Typical two-node cutting at the time of lifting shown removed from the polybag and washed free of growing medium (and already wilting). If more than one axillary bud developed, only the largest was retained. (Photograph about one-third actual size.) The total process from harvesting coppice shoots from the stump to planting the cuttings in the field typically took about 75 days.

Aracruz in 1980. Grafting E. grandis. Left: A trial of patch grafting PNG 1967 style. 1. Patch still bound by non-adhesive clear plastic tape, 2. Patches after removal of the tape but no shoot yet visible, 3. Shoot developed from a patch. Right: A developing double-cleft graft, successful at least until this point in time.

Aracruz 1980. Larger pulpwood billets were debarked by machine in the forest. In the right hand photograph small and crooked billets were left to one side to be debarked manually. The leafy tops and branches seen here in windrows on either side were put through a chipper, which discharged directly on to truck that took the material to the mill to be burned in the power boiler, producing 170 tons/hour of high-pressure steam. This procedure prompted questions about what effect these removals and the nutrients contained in them would have on long term sustainability of yields.

Manual debarking of small stems.

Aracruz in 1980. Control pollination of E. grandis. Left: Removal of the stamens. Right: After application of the donor pollen a cloth bag was drawn over a wire frame to surround and isolate the pollinated flowers from outside contamination.

Using heavy machinery to remove stumps and rake up coarse woody debris prior to disk cultivation.

Aracruz 1980. Planting. Left: Disk cultivation, with a profiled roller attached behind that left a low mound in the middle of the row. The hopper on top delivered a measured dose of fertilizer (100 gm of NPK (5-37-5) at each planting position). These fertilizer drops also visibly indicated the correct spacing to place each rooted cutting (spacing was 3 x 2 m). Planting holes were made manually with a mattock. The eucalypt cutting, optimum size about 25 cm, was removed from the plastic bag, placed in the hole and firmed down with the fertilized soil around it. Right: The plants were watered immediately after planting. The planting crew is shown in front of the tanker with the supply of rooted cuttings carried along ahead on a trailer in the distance. The mound profile after disking and rolling is also evident in the right hand photograph. Four rows were being planted and watered in each pass. At this location at the time of our visit an average of 100,000 cuttings was being planted per day.