Getting British Columbia or Canada the Guiness Record for most trees in a day?

[Mike]

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/wor ... cations%29

British Columbia puts in at least 2.3 million per day in June. Using this Tyee Article as a source (http://thetyee.ca/News/2015/05/08/BC-Tree-Planting/ ) 4400 workers in BC. We can assume most are working either 3&1 or 4&1, which means 20-25% of the workforce is not working on any given day. 3300-3520. It's also reasonable to assume that 1 in 10 are support staff - so 3000-3150 planters. Possibly more. Even if you round down to 2500 planters at a meager 1000 trees a piece, that's 2.5 million a day. The Tyee article estimates a planter average around 2000, though --- which is 5 million trees per day. These are country records (Philippines, Ecuador), though, and we're not even counting provinces other than BC, which probably increase that substantially. Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes between them probably add another 5 million.


So, maybe with the WSCA's help, e-mail all the planting companies in BC, get them to send in a numbers list for a random day near the start of June (presumably the time with the most people are working hardest)? Wouldn't need prices, number of planters, anything like that, just the total number of trees.

Edit: Actually, looking at the guidelines, actually doing this would be a major pain in the ass.

[Scooter]

One in ten are support staff? In my own camp, we have five foremen, one supervisor, two checkers, and two cooks for 48 planters. That's 1 in 4. At the last coastal company that I worked at in the spring, we had one owner and three full-time foremen (and sometimes myself doing special missions) compared 20 planters. So that's a 1 in 5 ratio. I can't imagine that there are many companies, in the full spectrum from rookie mill to coastal, where there is as low as even eight support staff for each planter.

[Mike]

Yeah, fair enough. It's a moot point, actually -- I asked them and they said all the trees have to be planted in a single hour of a single day, which I think would be outside Canadian forestry's capacity.

[RPF]

Listening to CBC Radio's early news from Victoria this morning they announced that between 10 and 11 am yesterday (May 20 - during the Guiness Record one hour contest period) that 28 planters put in 7,125 trees with a few individuals pounding in 400+ in that hour. Sorry I don't recall the company's name where those planters were from and I may have the totals wrong (I was listening before my first cup of coffee), but the 400 trees per hour planted was the one number that stuck with me.

This to me seems unrealistically high so I'm throwing a few questions out there:
Does this number make sense to anyone?
And if so, what type of ground and stock type are we talking about here?
And if not, why not?

One thing not mentioned in the news report was the QUALITY of those seedlings planted in that hour. So I'm wondering how many of those seedlings were just "slutted" in purely for the sake of getting some high numbers?

Or maybe this is legit and the trees were quality planted, in which case all I can say is WOW!

[evanodell]

That'd be an average of 255 trees per person in that hour, which is completely reasonable if this was done in the northern interior, it's probably not that different from the average pace of an average planter on average ground at the last company I worked for. Even 400 trees in an hour is not particularly extraordinary by the standards of some of the land I've planted in the north of BC, even accounting for quality standards. If you're planting 311s on ground that is soft, flat and mostly free from slash, and want to go as fast as you can without much regard for quality I imagine most experienced planters could put in a lot more than 400 trees in an hour.

[sghyselincks]

A fast planter can plant 1000+ in an hour in good trenches in BC. I've seen it done, with perfect quality.

[Scooter]

One tree every five seconds in really easy trenches is twelve trees per minute or 720 per hour.

In land like that, it's bagging up that's the killer.

[PlantinTaders]

One in ten are support staff? In my own camp, we have five foremen, one supervisor, two checkers, and two cooks for 48 planters. That's 1 in 4. At the last coastal company that I worked at in the spring, we had one owner and three full-time foremen (and sometimes myself doing special missions) compared 20 planters. So that's a 1 in 5 ratio. I can't imagine that there are many companies, in the full spectrum from rookie mill to coastal, where there is as low as even eight support staff for each planter.

I'm pretty sure I've seen 1 in 9. Maybe 1 in 8 with the one or two office guys for the entire company.