Forest Management Healing while harvesting Passion for revitalizing forests turns into big business By Andrew Snook Mathieu LeBlanc is passionate about restoring the Acadian forests in New Brunswick. So pas-sionate, that he quit his job at a forestry consulting firm in West-ern Quebec, sold his home, and moved himself and his pregnant wife to the Moncton area. Once there, he started up his forestry restoration and management business, ACFOR – an acronym for “Acadian Forest” – and so far, the gamble has paid off. ACFOR performs integrated wood harvesting as part of its restoration and management services, where they harvest wood for a variety of purposes for private wood lot owners and the local municipalities in the Moncton area – Moncton, Dieppe and Riverview. The company harvests stud saw logs, poplar for OSB and firewood, in addition to harvesting the waste for bio-mass-to-energy projects in P.E.I. ACFOR moves all of its wood through the Southern New Brunswick Forest Products Marketing Board (SNB). “They negotiate contracts with all the local mills,” LeBlanc explained, while offering a tour of his operation at Turtle Creek in Riverview, N.B. His goal is to make woodlot management a pleasurable and enjoyable experience for woodlot owners; ensuring that they get the maximum return on their forests for generations to come. HOW IT ALL STARTED While living in Gaspe, Que., LeBlanc and his then-girlfriend-now-wife graduated post-secondary schools their respective de-grees – LeBlanc with a degree in forestry and his wife with a degree in environmental sciences. “She was trying to save the trees and I was cutting them down,” jokes LeBlanc. After graduating, the couple moved to Montebello in Western Quebec and LeBlanc went to work for a forestry consulting firm that specialized in multi-resource planning in recreation, wildlife and forestry management. “We were in charge in the Outaouais region, the Laurentians, Montérégie and the Ottawa region,” he said. “We mainly worked with private wood lot owners.” LeBlanc really enjoyed the hands-on, project management ex-perience he obtained while working for the company. “They put you there with 25 harvesters and said, ‘Listen, you’re going to be in charge of this project,’” he said. “That com-pany gave me a lot of experience in this field. The philosophy of the company was to always improve the quality of the wood lot [through selective harvesting].” During his six years with the company, LeBlanc went back to One of ACFOR’s two Ponsse Wisents piles logs at the company’s Turtle Creek operation in Riverview, N.B. 34 Canadian BIOMASS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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