Craig Ford was formerly the Research Group Leader: Plant Development and Physiology for Scion. Today he is at TIMBERLANDS based in Rotorua. TIMBERLANDS manage some of the largest scale forestry operations in New Zealand.
We recently chatted with Craig about a legacy project he led at Scion to revitalise its 10-hectare nursery operations. Scion is a Crown Research Institute (CRI) who specialise in research, science and technology development for the NZ forestry sector. You can read more about that fascinating interview in our blog, ‘Reflecting on a landmark project for Scion’.
Craig has an immense depth of knowledge and expertise in forest research and management, so we took the opportunity to ask a few high-level questions about the NZ forestry industry. Here’s what he shared.
What technologies do you think might revolutionise the New Zealand forestry industry?
Forest Growers Research Ltd would be great to interview. They are researching fantastic automation and remote sensing technology to mechanise the bare-root lifting process. There is exciting stuff happening.
For me, the big shift for forestry propagation would be year-round propagation of radiata cuttings in fully controlled growing environments, setting high genetic gain cuttings into paper pots (like we see in South America and South Africa).
In the face of labour supply issues, social licence-to-operate and climate change, it is becoming increasingly important to consider moving towards this method. However, I recognise there is still a strong bare-root resource, supplying large volumes of trees to the industry and a niche for those trees, so it will be a slow ship to turn.
Rolling benches like those we planned with the PrimeHort team for Scion, are a no-brainer for investing in a containerised nursery. The industry would benefit hugely from more uptake of rolling benches to optimise productivity and work more comfortably.
Is there a resource or mechanisation you wish existed that would streamline productivity (and profitability) in growing pines?
Yes, an automated lifting, sorting, and grading apparatus to remove the manual tasks of our work. The tech is there for lifting asparagus, carrots, and potatoes, but all our lifting in the forestry industry for bare-root (circa 90 million+ trees per annum) is pulled out of the ground by hand and manually sorted, graded and boxed. I eagerly watch the work of Forest Growers Research Ltd in this space!
Monitoring our crops remotely using new near-infrared tech, where we can pick up diseases and deficiencies before they are visible to the human eye, would be a huge win. Using cameras on irrigation booms that tell us when a plant gets to a certain nutrient status, we automatically flag macro and micronutrient issues and up the dosing to compensate – now that would be a first prize!
Finally, how would you characterise the current state of the New Zealand forestry industry?
The golden period of the past few years was driven by a strong timber market and the global Emissions Trading Scheme. This has slowed down recently. In the last year or so, the Chinese market (New Zealand’s primary export market) has slowed dramatically – the housing boom has come to a grinding halt. So, those NZ companies that rely on export will likely need to slow down their harvesting and replanting plans. We might, therefore, see production soften a bit over the next couple of years.
A regroup and recovery is what I see on the horizon for nurseries, not ‘boom to bust’ for most operators, but likely a return to where we were at five or so years ago.
Thanks Craig for the interesting insights!
At PrimeHort, we are dedicated to helping growers maximise crop yields and streamline their operations – nursery automation is a game-changer for both, so please get in touch if we can help.
