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Industry awards return for 2021
THE Green Triangle Timber Industry Awards are back on the calendar after being cancelled last year due to Covid-19.
The awards will be presented on October 29 at The Barn, Mount Gambier.
Bringing together companies from both Victoria and South Australia, the awards acknowledge the standout contributors within their sectors across the Green Triangle and showcase innovative, sustainable and environmentally friendly practices across the industry.
GTTIA Chairman Adrian Flowers said he was grateful for the timber industry’s continued patronage and was excited about what was in store for the 2021 event.
“We are very fortunate to have the support and recognition of our peers as the flagship timber industry awards in the region,” he said.
“The GTTIA committee are excited to build on our past awards nights, which were really well received, by adding exciting new categories in response to industry feedback.
“With these new awards, the GTTIA committee believe we can truly showcase best practice in an ever-evolving and dynamic industry”
To find out more, including sponsorship enquiries, visit www.gttia.com or contact GTTIA Event Manager Gaylene Newton on info@gttia.com or 0409 021 984.
Protocols in place for re-born AUSTimber
Planning for AUSTimber 2020/2021 is now at full steam, with a slightly new look to reflect the pandemic.
What was envisaged for early last year – and again late last year - will go ahead as planned in November 2021.
AUSTimber will run from November 10 to 13 with the welcome dinner - with special guest speaker Dr Karl Kruszelnicki - scheduled for November 11.
But world-wide travel restrictions and Covid-19 mean there will be some minor changes.
“Regardless of anything else at the moment we have to have COVID safety protocols in place,” Dionne Olsen, who is coordinating the event, said.
“We’re very fortunate being an outdoor venue. It gives us a lot of flexibility to ensure social distancing.”
Missing this year will be the conference and there will be no need for extra exhibitor space off-site as there was in 2016.
However the popular field trips will still be on.
The first day of tours – November 10 - will include trips to the AKD Softwoods mill at Yarram which produces outdoor garden products, Alberton Timber and Treatment Plant which provide treated and structural timbers, and a visit to the Gelliondale Nursery (HVP Plantations).
A mill, fabricating and Inforest tour will start with the Heyfield timber mill supplying Australian sustainable hardwoods, Kennedy Trailers to see some of their custom trailer solutions, and finish at flat pine and bluegum coupes.
Other tours will include examining the practicality of creating a farmer-grown hardwood saw log resource in the Strzelecki Ranges as well as visiting the Radial Timber sawmill in Yarram, and various demonstrations of small-scale harvesting operations including a visit to a Heartwood Plantations site.
The second day of tours will include a visit DJM Fabrications’ modern workshop with state of the art equipment, regenerated ash and mixed species harvesting coupes, steep country harvesting from thinnings, to clearfall to an ash plantation.
Tickets are already available online at https://www. eventbrite.com.au/e/austimber202021-the-largesttimber-show-in-australasiatickets-79476451205
Independent advisor to the world’s forest and agricultural industries
Margules Groome are independent consultants to the forestry, wood products, bio solutions, pulp & paper, and agriculture sectors.
Our unique combination of forest management and consulting skills, deep industry knowledge and technical know-how, enables us to provide a wide range of expert services. These include forest valuation and transaction due diligence, sales advisory services, analysis and advice for forest owners, resource planning and business strategy, markets and market forecasts, operations and tech solutions.
At its core, Margules Groome stands for objectivity, impartiality and ethical business practice. Professionalism and integrity underpin everything we do.
BRIEFS
MILL FUTURE
NORSKE Skog, the owner of the Tasman newsprint mill in Kawerau, has begun talks with staff over the mill’s future, following a lengthy review. Unionists have been expressing concern for some months about the mill’s viability, given the declining world demand for newsprint.
A spokesman for Norske Skog, David Quin, said the mill had about 160 staff, and they were briefed on Wednesday about the outcome of a strategic review that was initiated last September.
He said the company did not want to say what the review’s conclusion was until the consultation process was complete, but stressed that “no decisions have been made.”
RESTRICTIONS PANNED
NEW Zealand’s Forest Owners Association says the Federated Farmers’ call for the government to restrict forest planting ranks as an unnecessary intrusion on the right of farmers to plant trees on their land if they want to.
The Association also says a restriction would make it more difficult for New Zealand to reach its vital climate change targets.
Federated Farmers are stating the government has failed to live up to its promise during the election campaign to make landowners apply for a resource consent if they intend to plant more than 50 hectares of trees on land capability classes 1 – 5.
DEALER DEAL
FINNISH forest machine manufacturer Logset Oy and South African forest machine dealer Green Projects have signed a dealer agreement to market and sell Logset products in Southern Africa. For Logset this means claiming an area on a new continent: Africa.
Under the terms of the agreement the new dealer will provide sales, service and parts for the Logset equipment. Green Projects service territory includes all of Southern Africa.
Trio of hurdles blocking plantation development
Why is developing plantations in Australia so hard?
We’ve got plenty of demand, both domestically and in the export market, we’ve got lots of land.
We’ve got the know-how, we know how to grow trees pretty well, pretty efficiently. We’re a wealthy country and we’re a smart country.
And our forefathers developed a fantastic estate of softwood in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. But after they finished in the early ‘90s, the expansion stopped.
We had a crack at hardwood plantations through the Managed Investment Scheme, but that wound up due to the global financial crisis and that estate is now if anything shrinking.
So why is it so difficult in Australia? I think there are many reasons, but there are three in particular that come to mind.
The first one is access to land. The second is the lack of a free and open price market. And the third is an over-reliance on government.
In terms of access to land, there is no vacant cleared around land anywhere in the country that is sufficient to build another estate.
There may be some small areas in each state, but these are pretty minor. The only option for us is to look at farmland, agricultural land and buying land in Australia is really expensive.
There’s been consistent growth in land prices over the last five or six years and even with the drought conditions, land prices have continued to increase.
The Rural Bank of Australia reported in 2019, which was the drought year, that land prices in New South Wales had increased by 17%.
The medium price for land in New South Wales now is over $5000 a hectare.
But it’s pretty similar around the country. If you look at Victoria, a jump of about 12%, went up a whopping 28%, and even in Tasmania, it moved up by 11%.
And the medium price in Tasmania for rural land is over $11,000 a hectare.
But competing with farmers is absolutely impossible for us. We’ve never been able to do it so we have to learn to work with them.
And agricultural prices, commodity prices, are now at almost record highs; it’s nothing to pay $1800 for a weaner steer, that’s a growth of around $150 a month on one animal.
So agricultural processes and land are all time high. This make competing really hard and if anything, the higher and better use for a lot of plantations in Australia is agriculture. And we’re seeing conversion of hardwood plantations back into farming every year.
Farmers don’t understand forestry at all.
There are too many horror stories about those farmers who were pioneers and decided to put some trees in and were either shut out of the market due to take or pay contracts, or other forms of market exploitation, or the price they received was so low that it just did not warrant them wanting to do anything more.
We need to get industry and the overall industry to use the market power, not to exploit smaller growers, but to make champions of them.
The second point that I think is a real impediment to plantations is the lack of market prices, the lack of a free access to market price.
It’s a veil of secrecy. Farmers can get agricultural commodity prices daily, and it comes in either news media, print media, or even get it online.
And they get different forms. For instance, for cattle, they can get dollars per head in through the side yards, they can get that converted to cents per kilogram live weight or cents per kilogram carcass weight so that they are very well-informed of what their livestock are worth on a daily basis.
But they cannot find or see the price of a pine or a hardwood saw log and this has to change.
We need to lift that veil of secrecy around log prices.
The third point I’d like to make is the over-reliance on government. Government did a fantastic job in establishing the softwood estate that we have today, and they should be congratulated for it, but they cannot do that again.
They have not got the land, they can’t clear it and they can’t go on buying private land without causing community distress.
They tried it in the 1980s and early 1990s, and they will not go back. We have to get the industry to work with farmers and farming communities and I emphasize the “with”.
It is really important that we work together to try to expand our estate. There are opportunities and there are ways to do it, but it will require different thinking.
Large contiguous estates that we had but was built up in the 1970s and ‘80s will no longer appear. It will be impossible to achieve. And by the way, given bushfires history, that’s a high-risk strategy because if your large blocks of monocultures are vulnerable to bushfires so getting them scattered around is actually a protection measure for our wood supply.
In summary, why can’t we get plantations to grow in Australia? The main things are access to land, the lack of free and open market prices that are available to farmers on a daily or monthly basis, and finally, an over-reliance on government.
We keep waiting for the government to come and help us when in fact they can’t, so we have to work on our own and take the initiative, the whole of industry to start working with farmers and farming communities to develop and expand their estate.
Rob de Fégely
Margules Groome
Key Points
•There is no vacant cleared around land anywhere in the country that is sufficient to build another softwood estate.
•Farmers can get agricultural commodity prices daily,but they cannot find the price of a pine or a hardwood saw log and this has to change. •Governments did a fantastic job in establishing the softwood estate but they cannot do that again.
•Picture: FWPA
