Meeting the RFA without woodchipping is easy

Pete Godfrey

We who have the audacity to question the politicians or forest masters are told constantly that they have to pillage our forests because they have a statutory requirement under the RFA (Holy Grail) to supply 300 thousand tonnes of Category 1 and Category 3 sawlogs. The figures used in this article come from the Sustainable High Quality Sawlog Review No. 3 put out by Forestry Tasmania…
So it appears that the RFA is incredibly easy to meet without resorting to wholesale woodchipping and clearfelling. Isn’t it nice to know that we can easily return to single stem, selective logging without the current environmental damage. We can stop the burnoffs that are only necessary because of clearfelling, we only need to do a little selective thinning and pruning to achieve “ Real Worlds Best Practices”.

Meeting the RFA without woodchipping is easy.

We who have the audacity to question the politicians or forest masters are told constantly that they have to pillage our forests because they have a statutory requirement under the RFA (Holy Grail) to supply 300 thousand tonnes of Category 1 and Category 3 sawlogs.

Category 1 sawlogs are Old Growth Sawlogs of first quality.

Category 3 sawlogs are Regrowth Sawlogs of first quality.

The figures used in this article come from the Sustainable High Quality Sawlog Review No. 3 put out by Forestry Tasmania.

From this review Forestry Tasmania have 700,000 hectares of production forests. Eucalypt forests make up 87% of this area so we have 609,000 hectares of eucalypt production forests in the public forests.

To meet the requirements of the RFA from this area requires that we harvest only 1 cubic metre of Category 1 and Category 3 sawlog for every 2 hectares of production forest per annum.

Doesn’t seem like much does it.

To clarify this:

A sawlog that is 400 mm round mid diameter and 6 metres long is 0.75 cubic metres
A sawlog that is 500 mm round mid diameter and 6 metres long is 1.18 cubic metres
A sawlog that is 600 mm round mid diameter and 6 metres long is 1.7 cubic metres

So to meet the RFA from the above small sized logs we only need to cut:

677 of the 600 mm round logs per day;

975 of the 500 mm round logs per day;

1524 of the 400 mm round logs per day;

this is on a 5day working week.

Lets compare this with the stocking rates in forests and plantations.

Plantations are usually planted out at 1000 stems per hectare, which means that the trees are planted on a 3 metre square pattern.

If we were to prune the native forests so that we had only 100 stems per hectare then that would give us 100 X 609,000 trees in our production forests which is 60,900,000 trees to choose from.
Lets reduce this to a quarter assuming that only a quarter of the trees that are pruned and thinned are actually useful for sawlogs then we have 15,225,000 trees to choose from.

To meet the RFA we need to cut the following numbers of the sample logs above.

400 mm round 387,997 logs 2.5% of the trees available which gives a 40 year rotation
500 mm round 254638 logs 1.67% of the trees available which gives a 59 year rotation
600 mm round 176,839 logs 1.16% of the trees available which gives an 86 year rotation.

From the above figures it appears that this figure is easily possible given that plantations manage to get to approx 300mm round in 12 to 15 years.

It seems that it should be possible to grow:

400 mm trees in 40 years or
500 mm trees in 59 years or
600 mm trees in 86 years

Remember that these figures are calculated on the absolutely minimal assumption that we are only logging 25 trees per hectare over this rotation time.

Meaning that with only 100 stems per hectare there are 75 trees left per hectare growing to become habitat and old growth trees (they should be all the bendy ones or branched ones).

So it appears that the RFA is incredibly easy to meet without resorting to wholesale woodchipping and clearfelling.

Isn’t it nice to know that we can easily return to single stem, selective logging without the current environmental damage. We can stop the burnoffs that are only necessary because of clearfelling, we only need to do a little selective thinning and pruning to achieve “ Real Worlds Best Practices”

Pete Godfrey