Replant.ca - Tree Planting Canada

Pandion

Given the public bids results, I'm not overly optimistic about rising wages. Combine that with the recent mill closures in the private sector and it looks grim for the next few years...

Pandion

I always wonder if there are that much slash like people claim there is. what average portions of the pieces are head tall slash like 1/3?

Best way to find out, is to give it a try. If you like shitty weather and worse wages, the Coast is for you!

Pandion

I worked a shift at Blue Collar before my season started at another crappy Northern BC company once, and they had a planting school where they basically taught their planters how to plant J-roots. Other than that it was pretty much standard Northern BC planting, with inexperienced management and low...

Pandion

Are these guys still working? I did my rookie year in 98 with these clowns, after a Celtic foreman dropped me last minute. All the stories are true, unfortunately. Dave Callan should not work in silviculture. He bragged about once planting 900 trees and taught us to back cut all four sides of the tr...

Pandion

^^
Why do you work for a company where this nonsense happens?

Pandion

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/brit ... -1.3652496
It makes sense, but it will suck to lose those easy spots, especially in areas where you have to screef.

Pandion

The rumour says that the owner of Wildwoods acquired his heli licence and was pressuring the client to let him do the Heli. The Client said no and wanted to continue to use the existing heli contractor. Owner of Wildwood gave an ultimatum to the client telling them that he would do the heli or Wild...

Pandion

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/brit ... -1.3668891
I wonder how much more of this stuff is out there. I'm surprised they were even caught.

Pandion

I agree that the success rate of seedlings is more important than whether or not the planter looks like they give a shit about these seedlings. However, I have a contract in BC where the forester specifically prohibits the toe close because the resulting compacted soil inhibits root growth. This is ...

Pandion

3.6m spacing and working the snowline for us today.

Pandion

3m spacing works out to about 6.5 trees per plot or 1300 stems per hectare which is around average for most of the work I do. On the coast, we do 5s mostly and in the interior it's usually 7s. I just finished a small contract at 4s or 800 stems per hectare. That was a lot of walking.

Pandion

You obviously don’t want people who are impaired by drugs, alcohol or fatigue on the job, especially drivers, foremen and supervisors. We have a “reliable” test for alcohol impairment, but we don’t really have anything for fatigue or marijuana, so how can it be proven that impairment by one of these...

Pandion

It really depends on the contract. There can be heli time, barge time, tree delivery and storage, cones and stakes etc., that a contractor would have to cover or sometimes the licensee takes care of all that. On your typical BC interior show, planters get 40-50% of the bid price. Better companies ar...

Pandion

So we’re at a point where prices on the Coast are now lower than they are at some of the better companies in the Interior. They don’t have far to go before being lower than some interior prices for prepped ground. Think about that. How much lower can they go? A dime a tree on the coast, perhaps. May...

Pandion

Wow!
What does that leave the planters? 9 cents.
Must be nothing but sand.

Pandion

I have no idea about Folklore’s operations this year but it would only cost one person a little extra time to stop in at the laundromats in 100 mile, Williams Lake, Quesnel and PG on their way north. If you know of someone making the trip, you could give them a case of beer for their trouble. I find...

Pandion

The biggest group of people that need to see this website are the first-year planters. But a lot of the bigger companies that hire a lot of first-year planters have been fairly unwilling to bring attention to Replant I think (and even some supervisors and crew bosses) because of negative reviews ab...

Pandion

Here's a video of planting some of the hoe plowed land with WW. The three types of land planted are rips (giant trenches), hoe plow (3-5 tree lines scattered through the land), and direct (unscarified). Contract minimum is 1.2m, 1600 stems/ha-- (no those aren't double plants). https://www.youtube.c...

Pandion

^It's funny how you don't see that at better companies.

Pandion

Princeton is a solid contract. They're very well organized with a good safety program. The screef isn't too big. There is some sandy ground around there too. With another another cent or two it would be quite good, but that is relative to what you're used too. I would say they are on par with Zanzi ...

Pandion

Wouldn't it be nice if Minister Thomson and this government had the foresight to begin to invest more in silviculture in order to mitigate the large declines we're about to see in AAC, and consequently the number of seedlings planted each year, over most of the interior because of the MPB salvage lo...

Pandion

In BC, the median hourly wage for a professionally accredited land surveyor is about $30/hour. It seems the average coastal vet would be making about this amount, if not more, even today on the average contracts (excluding the Osprey type low outliers and the Rainforest type high outliers). I would...

Pandion

timberline, rainforest, nootka and sitka. I know personally that crew averages for Sitka are close to $400/day in the spring. Not too many openings though. PM me if you want to know more. Thanks, but I know Paul well have something far more lucrative to do. To the OP, you'll have to pay your dues o...

Pandion

I think that might be an uneducated assumption. Just avoid the big dirties. Maybe timberline, nootka or bivouac could be worth your time, good luck with that though. One of sitka's contracts is supposed to be decent, the other not so much. Zbar, fieldstone, hawkeye and evergreen, are pretty sad the...

Pandion

Don't do it, the island is wretched these days.

Pandion

The larch is my favourite tree, just not to plant. It's usually a heavy 4-12A, soaking wet or individually wrapped and frozen with 5m of wrapper to deal with. A fill plant early in the Spring that had a good larch component can be fun though.

Pandion

Right, not less safe just more injury prone. The nature of injuries that occur while planting should absolutetly be studied, but this study needs some serious re-work. It merely points out the obvious, when much more could have been learned with more in depth questions. At least I know not to hire a...

Pandion

The typical coastal crew I've worked on for the last 15 years has way higher average experience and a much larger male component than the interior crews I've worked on for the last 20 years. More experienced planters who work the coast usually plant over 100 days a year while, less experienced plant...

Pandion

http://wsca.ca/2015/06/who-is-getting-injured-a-recent-analysis-contradicts-some-general-assumptions/ This study seems to contradict the idea that more experienced workers are more safe, however it fails to take into account the number of hours or days worked per injury or the type of terrain being ...

Pandion

What's up with the Vanderhoof bid? Some difficult logistics? Seems high for that country.

Pandion

Why do they even plant western hemlock, when it comes in like a weed? I like planting little 3-10 lodgepole pine simply because of their size, however I think yellow cedar looks best when planted, and they're usually 4-10s which is about as small as it gets on the coast.

Pandion

I think it’s likely a case of you get what you pay for, but without knowing the company and what the planters where being paid, it’s hard to say for sure. Ultimately the responsibility does lie with the foreman. They should be on top of their planters and know if their blocks will pass or fail. If i...

Pandion

http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/canada/british ... -1.3205159

Not much to worry about yet.

Pandion

I’ve seen it too Mike. Sometimes good companies even hire rookies, and as unfair as it may be to someone who has paid there dues working at a rookie mill for a few years, it’s not likely to change as these inexperienced planters are being hired because they have an in, not because there are no exper...

Pandion

What good is posting the contact info of the better companies if they don’t have enough work to take on new planters? The bigger issue is the bidding environment that currently exists. That won’t change until some companies bid themselves into oblivion. It could of course happen sooner if the workfo...

Pandion

I was wondering how free to grow requirements work on government contracts, like BCTS or FFT. Does the government fine itself for not reaching free to grow targets? Seems unlikely, so what is the incentive to have successful plantations?

Pandion

Bids should take these rate increases into account, but I would wager tree prices will just continue to drop instead.

Pandion

Actually, there is: bag up with less. The only problem is that it isn't an appealing solution for planters. So they do what they're best at, and figure ways to circumvent the system such as by squeezing the water out of the bundles. We're just all too afraid to admit that all planters do this. Yeah...

Pandion

These boxes were way too common this Spring. They often did have a couple of inches of water in the bottom of the bag and the trees smelled skanky too. For some reason planters were doing a little dance before bagging up.

Pandion

Really, Brinkman complaining about decreasing planter wages. How many formerly high paying contracts have gone to Brinkmart over the years, resulting in much lower tree prices for planters?

Pandion

I guess they managed to tow her back to Campbell River, but the trucks, and trees are in the chuk. I think some planters where able to get some of their gear back but their electronics were toast. The picture I saw looked pretty hopeless, so I was surprised to hear they were able to salvage it.

Pandion

Fish habitat now. Glad no one was hurt.

Pandion

What you don't think a whistle will save your ass? It's a complete joke, that most companies ERPs are dependant on a whistle being heard from across a block on windy or rainy day by someone rocking out to their tunes. I carry my own radio and it's made me many times more money than it cost. The only...

Pandion

http://www.deakin.com/products/Details.aspx?p=3452

This one.

Pandion

Helly Hansen stretchy rain jacket gets my vote.

Pandion

A few of my own comments: - I haven't seen a lot of planters who prefer the slanted-grip shovel handles. - Are there any companies out there who still do five-day shifts? 1) I've never seen anyone use one of those shovels either. I find a 60 degree clockwise rotation of the handle, which puts my ar...

Pandion

Thanks for posting this up. Interesting to see the average winning bid drop from 2013 to 2015, while the average bid goes up.

Pandion

Contractor's fuel costs are about 3.5% of their total cost. If fuel costs go down by 30%, that's an overall saving to the contractor of 1% of grosse. On a 35 cent bid that's just over 1/3 of a cent per tree savings. It works out to a savings of about $5.00 per planter per day. Some costs go up and ...

Pandion

So with fuel costs likely to remain low until at least the spring season, I would expect planting companies to be saving significant $$$. What do you think the chances of those savings trickling down to planters in terms of higher prices are? Anyway, it's something to think about when you're on a br...

Pandion

I don't necessarily agree with this statement. I too use to think that paying planters more would improve safety. The idea was to slow down production slightly (thereby improving safety by reducing a few states of mind that lead to injuries, like rushing, and frustration) while maintaining their re...

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