Since then I’ve had a lot of queries of how it all ended, so here we go.
I planted these nine hectares of trees myself 29 years ago. I bought the seedlings off my old Lincoln mate Gary Hope, who, in those days, ran the successful Puha Nursery at Te Karaka. He talked me into buying cutting-grown GF 28 seedlings, so they were great genetics.
I planted the rows five metres apart with two metres between trees as was the recommendation. I remember having thousands of little trees bedded in the garden and would take several hundred up at the end of the farming day and plant until dark. I was listening to my Sony Walkman as I clambered up and down the hills.
Four years later I was pruning and did the low prune myself. I was halfway through the medium prune a couple of years on and mindful my next blocks were coming up for their first prune when young Michael Cassidy appeared and wanted to know if I had any pruning needing doing. He got the job on the spot and did most of my silviculture work thereafter.
I did the thinning and came to believe the fellow who plants and prunes probably shouldn’t be the one making the thinning decisions. I kept seeing all the good trees and didn’t thin hard enough and ended up with a high stocking rate of around 350 stems a hectare. I fussed about that for the last 15 years.
However, Bruce Gerdes from Pan Pac reassured me that while I didn’t have the larger diameter pruned logs I had a lot of trees per hectare with good second and third logs with very modest branching due to the competition.
The harvest took two months and in that time we had just the one rain event that made a bit of a mess but the logging trucks were rolling again within several days.
The total volume harvested off the 9ha was 5070 tonnes or 563t/ha. The pruned percentage was 26%. Bruce reckoned I’d nailed the silviculture and final stocking rate as I got a high percentage of pruned but not to the detriment of total volume.
Unpruned sawlogs amounted to 54%. That left 20% or 1000 tonnes as pulp.
I have a photo of a whole truckload of pulp weighing 30 tonnes heading away from the skid site and sent it to a mate about to harvest with the cautionary note that it was a zero return to me. We are 90km from the pulp mill and the gross return on pulp now is just high enough to cover the harvest and transport costs.
If you live closer you make money and further away or when the prices are lower, it costs you.
But I didn’t want it here and it is a by-product of the other 80% and is needed to help cover the harvest cost.
The gross payment was $375,000 excluding GST and deducted from that was the modest $2500 needed to put in a crossing and $1400 Forest Owners Levy.
The remaining $371,000 meant the per hectare return was $41,000. I’ve anecdotally heard of other folk’s returns being well north of $50,000/ha but I was well pleased with this as for the last three decades I’d had $30k/ha in my head.
Of course, Grant Robertson will be looking forward to a bit more than $100,000 to assist in keeping the country going and it’s the least I can do and it will be nice to get a note of thanks. We have good plans for the balance, which I might tell you about at some time.
The return works out at $1400/ha/year and if you disregard the 30 year wait and the time use of money is nearly twice what my economic farm surplus/ha is each year. And this is off my poorest country.
I won’t bother to refence the small grazing areas I nurtured through this rotation but will replant all the 15ha and look forward to my next small harvest in three or four years.
