Kate and Marks second vocational day

Kate and Mark's vocational day at Grande Prairie kicked off with a tour of a local tree nursery which grows seedlings for local forestry companies. The nursery is called Pacific Regeneration Technologies and is located at beaver lodge. Our enthusiastic tour leader Max quickly demonstrated that while the nursery was not the largest around (10 million seedlings per year) it was still quite high tech. White spruce and lodgepole pine are the main species grown and there are some very interesting techniques used here.

The greenhouses can be blacked out to shorten daylight hours to mimick fall / winter conditions to prepare seedlings for planting or alter growth patterns. Greenhouses are all fully insulated and heated as temps can drop to -40 C around sowing time in January. As strange as it sounds they also can freeze seedlings to -2 to carry over to next season which is pretty handy. Our next stop was the Ainsworth OSB Plant which was nothing less than a humbling experience for us. This plant is of a scale like nothing we had ever seen. The first thing to make our jaw drop was the log yard. I have never seen what 450000 cubic m of wood looks like in one spot and let me tell you it is mountainous!

This plant is a thirsty monster consuming 900000 cubic m of aspen and poplar per year sourced mostly from adjacent provincial forests. The plant produces orientated strand board (osb) which is sold to domestic and export markets as far away as China and Japan. This plant has been able to survive the US housing market collapse by value adding their products eg insulated OSB and OSB I-beams. After touring the plant and learning about the manufacturing process we were able to spend some time with one of Ainsworths planning foresters to chat about GIS and LIDAR which was Kate's gig but I still got a lot out of it. It appears these guys are at about the same stage as we are with this technology so it was good to swap stories.

Next stop was a quick tour of some adjacent forests and operations. Unfortunately spring is a quiet time for harvest due to the winter melt off so we didn't see any harvesting but we got to see some nice forest and have some tree talk. The forests here are very enviable and the fact that there is 38million has of productive forest in Alberta and much of this is virgin made our mouths water. Typical harvests produce 240 m3 of product per ha from a 110 yr old stand. Harvesting and haulage is by contractors supervised by foresters. Harvest scheduling is focussed on oldest stands first to limit senescence and it appears they cannot harvest it quick enough! Poor buggers. Silviculture is aimed at replicating fire regeneration events. Stands are slow growing, regenerate readily and stands are turned over at about 100 years. Interestingly product certification and forest stewardship programs are seen as important tools in building community trust and acceptance. Our last stop was to one of Ainsworth's tree improvement orchards where they have already achieved a 700% genetic gain and there is heaps of suitable cleared land at cheap prices so planation potential is quite exciting. Of course log trucks are bigger over here. They gross out at 56 tonne here and from what I have seen often carry logs full length. Hopefully i can get a photo of one soon