Timber for the operation, which he and his partners invested $26 million in relocating from Surrey in 2019, has become increasingly scarce and expensive due to a confluence of events including government’s announcement last fall on logging deferrals in 2,600 square kilometres of critical old-growth forests.
He’s had hints May might be better, but “if June, July and August are all 10 per cent, that’s pretty dire,” Power said. “We’ve got 40-plus families to feed and 10 per cent of normal supply won’t feed those families.”Photo by RICHARD LAMAnd looming timber shortages are coming at a time when PowerWood has been incredibly busy, said 37-year-old Darryl Logan, one of PowerWood’s key equipment operators and lumber graders.
“It was pretty harsh, pretty devastating,” said industry consultant Russ Taylor about seeing those numbers, which were published in the provincial budget in February. A mill worker moved a piece of wood after being fed through a cutting machine at the PowerWood mill in Agassiz.To the province, the reduction in harvest will also mean a reduction in resource revenues from forestry, which added up last year to $1.8 billion in stumpage and other payments, according to B.C.’s most recent budget.
“It’s a huge fundamental shift, so the whole investment climate has just deteriorated dramatically,” Taylor said. On the ground, though, Power feels like government’s priorities on the environmental side are racing ahead of the industry’s attempts to innovate. Looking at the Lower Mainland’s existing value-added sector, Riley said it is 75-per-cent reliant on old-growth timber from Vancouver Island and the coast, and “everybody just shifting to second-growth hemlock is not a viable option.”
Mohammed is a second-generation operator in forestry with the company A&A Trading, which buys and develops timber tenures on B.C.’s coast to supply mills throughout the Lower Mainland.Article content
Well yeah - you cut all the trees down, you will run out....
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