Funding Opportunities Milltown provides fibre for complete supply chain By Andrew Macklin Full of Fibre D riving down a bruised and battered log-ging road shortly after spring weight restrictions had been lifted in Nova Scotia, a peculiar site of stacked logs emerges around the bend. Mas-sive piles of separated logs, each with a dif-ferent size, shape, species or quality form a long row down the winding road. The nine stacks, the results of a selective cutting in the forests east of Stewiacke (65km north of Halifax), represent the different cus-tomers that each of the stacks are provided for. The logging trucks for each customer are then able to pull up along the side of the road, load the contents of the stack into the logging truck, and make the journey back to the mill. The lineup on the road includes stacks of hardwood and softwood for area sawmills supplying the Canadian and Amer-ican lumber markets, as well as biomass op-erations like the nearby Scotia Atlantic Bio-mass Plant in Middle Musquodoboit. For many of the Nova Scotia biomass plants, including the Scotia Atlantic pel-let plant and Nova Scotia Power in Port Hawkesbury, one of the forms of biomass being supplied is cut-to-length wood from the forest, which is then chipped onsite. IN THE WOODS Selective cutting in the forests east of Stewiacke, N.S. includes cutting wood for lumber production, pulp and paper and pellet production. During the visit to the woods, I caught up with Charlie Baird, a local contractor for Milltown Forestry Services who, along with his team, was working on a tract of land in need of selective cutting. Despite being well into the spring months in Nova Scotia, the snow in the forest was still knee-high in some spots, the harsh reminder of one of the worst winters on record in the province, one that forced Baird and his team to spend most of the winter digging the harvester into the snow and cutting blind based on constant variations in the deep snow. JULY/AUGUST 2015 14 Canadian BIOMASS
Canadian Biomass July August 2015: Page 14
