Plenty, including a few farm forestry mates, have been through the experience before so I was forewarned.
The operation itself is destructive on carefully nurtured farm infrastructure and disruptive of the farming operation.
Early on I had a couple of visits from Bruce from Pan Pac to look at the trees and then the logistics of getting logging trucks in and out of our property.
I needed a summer harvest because our heavy clay soils can get very wet from March right though until November. They tend to log during the winter in the free-draining soils where the big corporate forests grow with the roading infrastructure already in place then come out to the private woodlots over the summer, which also reduces the chances of large fires in the big forests.
He pushed me from a December/January harvest to February/March back in October. I got a little twitchy and told him it was going to be a cyclone season and I could already be wet in February.
When he asked how I could be so sure, I pointed out the very high sea surface temperatures were building up all that energy just waiting to unleash it on me when we cut the first trees down.
As it happened that was when Cyclone Gita hit NZ but we were much luckier than many of you and got only a skiff. Half way through the harvest and looking at the weather patterns in the Pacific our luck might just hold as I can’t see much happening yet.
I had an inkling of what was in the future when Bruce asked if I wanted the 5000-gallon tank saved. “Yes thanks, that’s an essential part of my farm water supply.” So, he noted it.
Bruce, the harvest contractor and the roading contractor had a look at the access and said I was lucky because they had to fill in only one big gully with a culvert. I thought it was big but they laughed and said not by Wairoa standards.
However, it took a 20-tonne digger a full day followed by Cam carting 200 tonnes of red metal onto it and another 130 tonnes elsewhere for good measure.
I’d already put a double gateway in off the road and had to cut all the fences in a straight line right up through the guts of the farm, rendering about 25% of the property ungrazable. It’s best not to ask the laden trucks to go through the 12-foot gateways because they will get your strainers sooner or later, so I have cut the fences beside them
Another 25% of the farm has become inoperative as I’ve rolled up quite a few fencelines around the forestry, mostly good functional fences. I just got rid of the wire and left the posts, which were in the last third of their life, to their fate. Some might survive.
I now don’t have any electric power in the hills and a water pipe that went through the forestry is disconnected, not allowing me to pump water up to the tank.
Last February that would have been very problematic because I had little feed but this year I’ve been able to push the stock into the other half of the farm.
All this made me anxious about the prospect of the harvest and, more importantly, getting the logs off farm.
However, as I said, we’ve had little rain to date and the trucks have been rumbling out with loads of good-looking logs.
As the person who 30 years ago did the planting, the low and much of the medium pruning and thinning but let the contractor do the high prune it is a very satisfying experience.
I stop and watch the trucks go past and exchange a wave and sometimes a few words with the drivers.
But it will be good when they’ve finished and I can start repairing the fences and trying to get some sort of order back.
