How Harvesting Small Trees Could Create a Future for BC Forestry

It’s just before 9 a.m. at the Prestige Treasure Cove Casino and Bingo Prince George. In the distance, the city’s giant, log-shaped mascot, Mr. PG, grins at me from across the highway.

Like B.C.’s forest industry, Mr. PG has transformed over the years — today his torso is rumoured to be a repurposed septic tank. But when he made his debut 64 years ago, he was crafted from real wood, thick rounds of it, taken from an old-growth forest whose supply once seemed endless.

A dusty black Chevrolet pulls into the Prestige’s entrance, and Mirko and Susanne Jansen get out to greet me. Their 11-month-old baby, Fynn, eyes me curiously from his car seat. It’s a Saturday, but I get the impression that early weekend mornings are standard fare for the family. Luckily, Susanne tells me, Fynn falls asleep to the hum of machines.

The Jansens are taking me to a planted forest they say could hold the keys to the forest industry’s next big pivot.

Since Mr. PG’s inception, B.C. has logged a lot of its forests. Now, its big, old trees are becoming scarce — and with them, jobs in the forestry sector, which have evaporated as mills close across the province.

The problem isn’t a lack of trees — B.C. has billions of them. The problem is that many of B.C.’s forests are too young and feeble to log. Over 80 per cent of the province’s replanted trees are less than 40 years old — and most require around 80 to 120 years to be considered mature. They’ve also grown back even-aged and dense, often creating dark, dead zones for animals and other plants.

The Jansens are the majority owners of Freya Logging, a company that specializes in selective harvesting, and, increasingly, a kind of logging called “thinning,” in second-growth forests. Thinning is a method of tending to a forest by removing some trees and leaving others.

If it’s done right, thinning could help address two of B.C.’s biggest forest challenges.

Cutting down some trees now creates an immediate wood supply for a struggling forest industry, and it can reduce competition among the trees that remain, helping them grow bigger, more valuable wood for later.

And by breaking up the canopy of B.C.’s dark, dense planted forests, thinning can help restore habitat for understorey plants and the wildlife that relies on them. In some cases, it can quell the risk of fire and drought.

But achieving all those benefits at once is more complicated.

Thinning often requires weighing trade-offs, and a region-specific knowledge of how forests might react.

“There’s no free lunch,” U.S. conservation biologist Dominick DellaSala told The Tyee. But, he added, “if the benefits outweigh the cost, then you're on the right path.”

The Jansens say the benefits could be worth it.

“We have so many plantations. If we make them grow better, we don't have to touch old growth,” Mirko Jansen said.

“If we manage them differently, we can probably survive on it.”

The problem with planted forests

Much like cod populations on Canada’s East Coast, B.C.’s supply of big, old trees once seemed inexhaustible. But the forest industry chipped away at it, first with rudimentary tools like handsaws and stakes and eventually with gas-powered logging machines. That technological shift paved the way for clearcut logging to become dominant in the 1950s and ’60s.

Fearing an impending crash in its supply of trees, the government got serious about its planting project in the 1980s, requiring companies that log forests to replant them.

This sparked a generation of baby trees growing in unison, duking it out for sunlight. In the early years, planted trees shoot upward like lanky teenagers, throwing their branches to the ground in a breakneck competition for photosynthesis. Eventually, they reach a stalemate known as full “crown closure,” where the remaining branches plug the last windows to the sky.

At ground level, the forest enters the equivalent of the Dark Ages.

Left to its own devices, the stalemate eventually breaks and the weaker trees fall, opening up the forest to light and space again. But this can take decades. In the meantime, plants and animals in the planted forest struggle.

In B.C., this has contributed to endangered or extirpated statuses for caribou. All wild-born spotted owls have died. Even moose populations, which were once considered sturdy throughout B.C.’s Interior, have plummeted, dropping as much as 50 to 70 per cent in some regions.

Even the forest industry has, so far, steered clear of its planted forests. According to the Ministry of Forests, less than one per cent of B.C.’s logging occurs there.

Thinning can provide a “a really great opportunity” to break the stalemate among competing small trees, offering economic and ecological benefits, said Dominik Roeser, associate dean of research forests and community outreach at the University of British Columbia.

European countries with sizable forest industries have relied on thinning to manage their forests for over a century. The technique became part of their approach to “intensive forestry,” intended to maximize timber output from increasingly limited tracts of land. Today, for example, 75 per cent of Finland’s total logging comes from thinning operations alone, according to the government’s Finnish Forest Centre.

Until now, less encumbered by spatial restraints, B.C. has taken a hands-off approach to already logged lands through a policy known as as the “free-growing standard.” In a nutshell, the standard lets companies off the hook once the forests they logged are considered to be regrowing on their own — roughly around 15 to 20 years.

“We grow it, we cut it, and we replant, and then wait,” said Roeser. “We've always been able to do that because we always had enough fibre.”

“But now that’s not there anymore, and that’s where we have to rethink.”

On the thinning block

Mirko Jansen pushes a black joystick forward, sending a bee-coloured robotic claw into the late morning air.

“That tree there has a defect,” he said, gesturing to a pine tree with a bump on its side. “That’s a good one to take out.”

The harvester’s claw is suddenly vertical, floating towards the tree’s trunk like a backpack with blades for straps. It locks into a momentary embrace before retreating with a disembodied log. The claw then tilts back, sucks the log through its grasp and strips its branches bare, sending them to the ground where they’ll stay, forming a makeshift Band-Aid for the forest floor.

We’re in a privately owned planted forest that Freya was hired to thin.

Next, Freya’s employees will return with a machine called a forwarder to pick up the piled-up logs and carry them, suspended in the air, back to the road.

Processing logs where they’re cut allows for the precision removal of some trees without inadvertently clobbering the rest.

In B.C., harvesters and forwarders are few and far between. Instead, the go-to machine is a simpler contraption called a feller-buncher that cuts trees and lets them fall, branches and all. That’s usually paired with a skidder, a machine that drags bunches of trees behind it on the ground. Together, feller-bunchers and skidders are ideal for clearcut logging scenarios where speed is imperative.

“It’s more cost-effective, but it’s a lot harder on the environment,” said Matt Whitehead, a trained operator on both the types of machines used in clear cutting, and those used in thinning. “You’ve got to cut everything around you to make a path for the skidder to get out.”

Whitehead, a member of the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation, said harvesters and forwarders were more common in the 1990s when he first started working in forestry.

“Over the past couple of decades that seemed to have died out,” he said.

Even with the right machine, thinning in a harvester requires deft skill to avoid knocking down or damaging trees in the process, as well as in-the-moment decision-making on which trees to leave and which ones to take. From the back seat, the process looks like a high-speed video game.

“Every free minute I can jump on a machine I do it,” Mirko Jansen said.

It was happenstance that Jansen, who is from Switzerland, first came to B.C. — he was visiting a former neighbour who had moved to a farm in Dawson Creek. “I really liked it,” he said, so he kept returning in two-year intervals.

Freya had already started up four years prior under different ownership, and when he was offered a job working there as a harvester, he took it, putting his belongings in a shipping container and moving to Prince George. Susanne, then a public administrator in Switzerland, joined him a year later.

“I was like, ‘I’ll give it a try,’” she said.

Now the Jansens are majority owners of Freya Logging, and they work together to run the company. Mirko spends his time on cutblocks, and Susanne manages administration in the company’s office. Baby Fynn provides comic relief to the contractors and employees who stop by.

“He’s like our office mascot,” Susanne said.

Finding staff is a constant challenge; few workers in B.C. are trained to use harvesters and forwarders. Currently, Freya’s mix of employees comes from Finland, Ukraine, Germany, Switzerland, Nova Scotia and Austria along with around a third of their workers being from B.C.

More education may be on the horizon. Quesnel is developing a pilot program with the University of British Columbia to train forestry workers on harvester and forwarder machines, and UBC is developing a program to teach aspiring foresters about techniques like thinning.

For now, though, the skill remains scarce throughout the province. And that presents a challenge, because thinning itself is more labour-intensive than clearcut logging. It takes longer to get through a given patch of land. That’s a good thing for jobs, but it also tends to make the process more expensive.

Ecosystem complications

Thinning’s ability to create bigger trees is well documented. Bigger trees also tend to mean higher-quality lumber.

Research also shows it can help nudge some degraded forests back into balance. But those ecological benefits tend to be case-dependent. If thinning is done the wrong way, or in the wrong kind of forest, it could have unintended consequences.

Take drought, for example. In some forests, thinning has been shown to reduce competition for water, meaning the remaining trees get more. But those benefits tend to be time-limited, and in some types of forest, thinning can make droughts worse.

Biodiversity could benefit from a patchier, more complex forest thanks to thinning, but if the practice takes out all the dead or dying trees, some species of birds and insects will have nowhere to go.

Fire poses another world of contradictions. Some densely planted forests can act like tinder for wildfires, and thinning them out can reduce fire risk. In other ecosystems, thinned forests can increase the strength of a blaze as wind moves through the forest faster. Fire risk also depends on what’s left behind — in some wet forests, materials like branches and small trees might rot, bringing moisture to the forest floor and boosting biodiversity. But in dry forests, those branches might act like kindling.

And, because many of B.C.’s planted forests contain tall, thin trees that grew for decades without tending, thinning in some particularly windy areas could cause those trees to blow over.

Far from a catch-all solution, thinning will often require balancing trade-offs, said DellaSala. But those decisions can be aided by taking cues from what the forest looked like before it was turned into a planted forest.

“That's your blueprint,” he said. “Then you can start doing that simulation in the plantation.”

That means paying attention to the ways primary forests experience disturbance. Over thousands of years, forests form a comfy equilibrium with chaos — they’ve gotten used to forest fires, windstorms and dead or dying trees as the drivers of biodiversity.

While too much death and destruction can push a forest to the brink, so can too little. This fluctuating equilibrium is known by some scientific types as the “natural range of variability” — when it maxes out in either direction, it tends to spell trouble.

B.C.’s clearcuts have already pushed many forests’ equilibriums to the breaking point, replacing their usual mix of living and dead trees with even-aged stands. Breaking up that uniformity can be beneficial, said DellaSala, but it needs to happen in a patchy way that mimics the original forest.

“You want to get sloppy,” said DellaSala. “You're trying to mimic what nature is, which is variability, and you get variability by not following a regular spacing grid.”

And thinning isn’t the only treatment available to restore degraded forests. Other techniques, such as deactivating roads, can play a big role in restoring habitat, too.

A case in point is that some pro-thinning European countries still have major ecological problems. Finland’s forests, for example, have just 10 per cent of the natural levels of dead and dying wood that provide homes to one-fifth of the country’s forest-dwelling species, and one in nine species in the country is considered to be threatened. Ninety per cent of Germany’s spruce trees are dead or dying thanks to drought, climate change and pests.

And because thinning is an intermediary treatment, it doesn’t preclude clear cutting when the remaining trees are considered to be mature. Thinning can also be combined with a non-clearcut approach like “continuous cover forestry,” which uses selective harvesting to maintain a permanent canopy and a range of differently aged trees. In some forest types, a continuous cover approach can boost biodiversity.

B.C. acknowledges that thinning in the province opens up uncharted territory. By email, the Ministry of Forests said it was continuing to adapt and improve thinning practice by updating operational guidance and management practices based on research, including several commercial thinning experiments in interior and coastal B.C.

So far, the province doesn’t require that companies model their thinning after nearby primary forests, nor does it provide specific guidance on how to avoid the potential ecological consequences of thinning.

But that may change. B.C. has launched a series of working groups to research the impacts of thinning on different forest types and to recommend policy change. Roeser, a member of those groups, said new guidance is forthcoming.

Thus far, B.C.’s guidance allows thinning only in forests where companies can prove the practice would have a negligible impact on the amount of wood coming out of the forest once it reaches maturity. In other words, thinning can happen only if it falls within a narrow set of market-based guidelines.

“The requirements are fairly restrictive,” said Roeser. “We in B.C. have to be ready to take some risks to move us away from that clearcut scenario and have other options available to us.”

Roeser extends that calculated risk-taking approach to thinning’s ecological outcomes. He’s wary that excess caution could preclude the learning and experimentation that needs to happen.

“There’s a good thing brewing here,” he said.

“Does it fit everywhere? Absolutely not.”

Beyond the knowledge gaps around thinning’s ecological impacts, DellaSala sees cost as another barrier to implementing a patchy, ecosystem-based approach.

“Variety is restorative, but it's going to come with an economic cost,” he said.

For Freya, a day of thinning in planted forests produces roughly a third of the volume of wood it would get from clear cutting.

Even for them, forest thinning is still on the fringes. Most of their current work occurs in primary forests, where the company often uses a selective harvest approach.

Most companies aren’t willing to incur the lower rate of return from thinning, Mirko Jansen said.

“Right now they don't really have an incentive, and end of the day, it's an open market, so whoever makes money survives,” he said.

“Unfortunately the forest is getting beat up in the works of that.”

In its email to The Tyee, B.C.’s Ministry of Forests said that commercial thinning was a “strategic priority” for the province and noted that it currently provides incentives for the practice through reduced stumpage rates.

Changing BC’s volume-based approach to logging

To make meaningful change, it might be necessary to revisit the way B.C. runs its forest tenure system.

Across the province, B.C.’s government retains ownership over most of the available forest, and companies apply to get a licence to log sections based on a “volume-based” quota system. Essentially: within a large region, companies can take the volume of wood they’ve been allotted from anywhere. Once it’s determined to be growing back, they have no responsibilities to the land, and no entitlement to log it again.

Frank Varga, general manager for the Burns Lake Community Forest, which operates under an area-based licence, sees that as a perfect storm for short-term thinking. “There’s no incentive” to invest in the land, he said.

Currently 90 per cent of the wood logged in the province is under a volume-based licence.

Whitehead said he’s experienced that urgency first-hand. While he tries to ensure understorey is left standing, or to work around deciduous trees companies aren’t interested in harvesting, time pressures sometimes intervene.

But the industry may be moving towards a scenario where harvesters are more inclined to invest in the land they log. The incoming BC NDP government campaigned on a promise to double the land held in community forests, which operate tenures based on area rather than volume. The provincial government also recently amended legislation that opened up opportunities to reallocate tenure to First Nations, who now hold around 12 per cent of the province’s replaceable timber licences within their regionally defined territories. B.C. aims to increase that share to 20 per cent.

Work is also underway to make thinning more economically feasible.

To reduce thinning costs in the Burns Lake Community Forest, where around 35 per cent of the trees are under 40 years old, for example, Varga carried out an experiment using a mini-harvester — basically, a small excavator with a harvester head attachment — and a mini-forwarder. These machines use a fraction of the fuel their larger equivalents use, and cost significantly less to buy.

Using those small machines, the community forest made a profit despite targeting small and diseased trees on the block. “We left the best and took the rest,” Varga said.

Varga argues that many of B.C.’s forests require smaller tools than places like Europe, where thinning occurs often and trees tend to be bigger as a result.

In Quesnel, members of the city’s Forestry Initiatives Program are working out new ways to make products from the wood cut from thinning operations.

If the wood is big enough and of adequate quality, companies tend to sell their wood to sawmills and other lumber manufacturing facilities to get the highest price for their wares. But in particularly young or dense planted forests, trees likely won’t make that grade and are classified instead as “waste wood” by the province, meaning they can’t be processed in sawmills.

But that wood can still be put to good use. Options include using lower-quality trees to make biomass pellets for energy, and mass timber products, which create a lumber substitute by binding together smaller pieces of wood with glue, nails or dowels.

Quesnel’s program is also looking into a product called lignin, a wood-based fossil fuel substitute that uses wood chips heated in a biodigester to create adhesives and thermoplastics. Further along the experimental line are high-tech products like nanocrystalline cellulose, a wood-based plastic alternative that could be used in materials like electronics and packaging.

The manufacturing sector built for B.C.’s primary-forest-focused industry might look different from the one shaped to work with planted forests, said Bob Simpson, former Quesnel mayor and a member of the Forestry Initiatives Program. Creating this new industry will require government to lead the way with funding and strategy, he added.

“Government's going to have to sit with industry to figure out what's possible,” Simpson said.

‘This is my retirement here’

Another five minutes’ drive up a gravel road from the Jansens’ current thinning operations lies a 600-hectare woodlot they purchased three years ago.

When this forest was logged for the first time, Mr. PG had just taken up residence as a symbol of a thriving big-tree industry. Six and a half decades later, the next generation of forest has grown back, and the Jansens are planning to use it.

“This is my retirement here,” Mirko Jansen says as we get out of the truck and walk up a road made of newly felled tree branches. “Hopefully.”

Inside the forest, honey-coloured stumps dot the forest floor, each one a record of a logger’s decision to take it and leave the rest.

Jansen tries to read each decision like a book. Sometimes it’s easy to tell — stumps might bear rings of disease or infestation, or be sandwiched too close to neighbouring trees. But other times it’s less obvious. Unlike in a clearcut, the logging in this forest feels personal, as if the logger, with their individual approach and idiosyncrasies, might return at any moment to survey and continue their work.

Shifting to thinning would require a different kind of forest industry in B.C., one that moves slower and empowers its workers to think with the future in mind. Whether the province, and the industry, can rise to the challenge is another question. But the Jansens are willing to give it a try.

“We’re at the point now where we say, ‘OK, do we let the forest industry die?’” said Jansen. “Or do we start doing something?”