How the kiwis do it

[StihlKiwi]

Impressive growth! Do they prune them to improve grade during growth? Down south they do 3 prunings, spaced about 7 years apart. Only costs about $1.20~$1.30/tree and adds quite a bit to the value. Still hard to come up with that sort of cash multiplied by however many 10's of thousands or hundreds of thousands though.

Shaun

They prune for clearwood grades, although it is less common now than it used to be - some companies don't prune anything anymore. Radiata is pruned to get clearwood grade logs. It seems cheap to prune at the time but the price differential between pruned logs and sawlogs needs to be around $50/m[SUP]3[/SUP] to actually make it worthwhile. Lack of demand for clearwood and improvements in the quality of structural sawlogs means the differential is much lower than $50.
Most of th pruning in the north island is done in eother 2 or 3 lifts to around 5.4m, and the final lift is done arund age 10, if not earlier

Sounds like the stuff you worked in was pretty ####ty timber

 

[OlympicYJ]

No worries Samlock.
It was late April, so not full-blown winter but the breeze was pretty cold. I think we were at about 800m asl up there.

Am I right in thinking that Valmet has recently been bought by Komatsu? They make some nice machines

I read somewhere that komatsu did buy them out.