I’m not planting the big numbers I once did, mainly because I’ve filled in all the places where trees were a better option but partly because I’m slowing down.
I’ve planted something like 60,000 trees myself, which sounds reasonably impressive until I mention 30,000 were pine trees.
I decided to start planting pine tree blocks in the early 1990s for several reasons. The high prices being paid for logs had caught my attention just like many others. I believed they would complement my farming system and provide another income stream even though it’s a lumpy one.
And, at the time, given the poor product prices we had been experiencing I couldn’t see any other way of getting out of debt without a capital injection at the end of my farming career.
Over a few years I would order about 4000 seedings each year and cart them up into my little hills and start planting up and down hillsides that I’d cheaply fenced off.
I’d do a few hundred a day and leave their mates in a nice, cool, shady spot and go off and tend to my flock and do some farm chores. I’d plant over the subsequent days until they were finally all in the ground.
I must have planted them well because hardly any toppled.
I followed my planting years by going through each block doing the low prune but by the time I was halfway through the medium prune I realised I was getting behind so got a contractor to finish that and do the high pruning as well.
But I did my own thinning and with the subsequent slightly high-density harvest have concluded the chap who plants shouldn’t be the one making the thinning decisions.
This year I had a 14-hectare replant where we had last year’s harvest.
I didn’t even consider doing it myself this time.
The contractor brought his gang of 15 fellows and they started in the frost at 7.30am and had planted 14,000 trees by 3.30pm.
I ferried a few bags and got them water but mainly watched and chatted to them as they went about their business.
There were two young fellows doing their first day. They had answered an advertisement. I watched them get some instruction on how to plant a seedling and reminded them a little later to give the trees a small pull up so the roots faced downwards.
They battled away and both did four boxes or 400 trees. At 35 cents each they grossed $140 and I’m not sure they were considering returning for another day or that the quality control guy was going to let them.
A couple of Fijian lads had been planting for two weeks and did 900 trees to gross $300 for the day and could make $1500 for the week.
Typical Fijians, they were happy, friendly, polite and worked steadily at their task.
A young Maori lad did 1000 and was in his off season from the meat works and was using the tree planting opportunity to get some money in.
He told me he’d got off the dope in recent years, was working hard and saving money and had bought himself a house. I was very pleased for him and suggested he should knock the fags on the head as well but he reckoned that was helping him keep off the weed.
Then there were a couple of fellows who have been planting for several years and they did 1400 trees to gross $500 for the day and $2000 for the week if they ended up with a full week.
Finally, the rock star of the gang planted 20 boxes or 2000 trees. He’d grossed $700 for that day but told me it was a clean site for a replant so he had gone hard out. All the same, it was a terrific effort and shows what a fit, keen and hard-working fellow can do and make if they set their mind to it.
And yet, all around the country contractors are struggling to get workers to turn up and keep coming back day after day.
The nursery released me the trees only when I reassured them I had the planters available to get them into the ground.
Next job is to have a cull of the hares before they start vandalising my newly planted trees.
