Why Plant Trees in Western Canada? If you're considering a summer job as a tree planter, think again.

I've been involved in the reforestation business for quite a few years. I run a full camp of tree planters (about fifty employees each summer) and this website certainly helps inform potential employees about tree planting, and probably convinces a lot of people that is is a smart career move. However, although I've recommended the job to certain people for many years, I feel that developments in the industry in the past few years have been negative for planters. At this point in time, in the fall of 2011, I can no longer recommend this job to people. Let me explain why.

Tree planting is one of the few jobs where you get paid according to your performance. People get paid per tree (usually), so if you work hard, you are rewarded by getting a bigger paycheque. In the past, tree planting has been glamourized because it is often possible for a good planter with several years of experience to make as much as $300 or more per day. That number probably caught your attention. But the problem is, that kind of earning potential has become extremely rare in the past few years.

The global economic problems known as The Great Recession, which started in the fall of 2008, signalled the beginning of the end of good earnings for tree planters in BC and Alberta. Up to that point, tree planting WAS a pretty lucrative job. I'll explain below that it was tough for first-year planters, but it was still an acceptable job for your first season, and was quite good for subsequent seasons as you learned to plant faster.

Starting with bids for the summer of 2009, prices began to plummet. Many contractors would never bid under thirty cents per tree for large government or private industry jobs. Consider that the average contractor probably pays around 40% of the bid price to the planter, and this meant that prices usually weren't much under twelve cents per tree. But because of the economic conditions, a lot of mills simply went out of business. Other mills that survived managed to do so by cutting costs drastically. One cost-saving that was frequently seen was the temporary reduction or elimination of planting programs. The western Canada reforestation industry saw volumes drop extremely significantly. Contractors who were used to planting millions of trees were faced with huge reductions in their volume of work. Some of them accepted that limitation, and downsized. Other contractors dropped bid prices significantly in an effort to maintain their volumes. Planter prices dropped. In the last three years, there has been an industry-wide reduction in prices of probably close to twenty percent (my estimates, not a scientific number).

During this time, consumer inflation has been significant. Fuel prices are up significantly, which affects everything from consumer goods to food to housing, indirectly. It may only amount to a few percentage points per year, but over the space of three years or so, that means that the cost of living is up by about 10%. In theory, wages should be rising to match that. Certainly, minimum wage is climbing rapidly in many provinces. And in theory, that helps planters, because if you can't plant enough trees to make minimum wage, a company is legally required to pay you minimum wage anyway. But let's ignore that issue for the moment, because if your goal for planting trees is to make minimum wage, you are RETARDED.

So let's think about this. In the past three years or so, prices have dropped by about 20%. Inflation has risen by about 10%. That means that in order for prices to "recover" to previous levels, they would have to increase by about 30% right now. Is that going to happen? Probably not. Looking at "generally easy provincial planting contracts" in BC, the contractor bid prices used to generally be around thirty cents several years ago. During the past few rough years, bids were often won with prices down around 25 cents or slightly less. So in order for prices to recover to historically decent levels, bids for 2012 should be back up in the thirty-cent range. However, the first bid results from a BCTS contract in Vanderhoof were released on September 22nd, 2011, and a company called Summit was the successful low bidder at only 20.1 cents per tree. When a company is getting a contract for a really low price, the planters will also get paid poorly.

If you are going into your first year as a tree planter, you need to significantly temper your expectations. I know, if you're seriously considering this job, then you think you're going to be good at it. In fact, you think you'll be one of the best tree planters out there, because you need the money and you'll work really hard. And planting can't be that difficult, can it? Well, it is. In my experience, experienced planters with at least two previous seasons in BC/Alberta, who are planting easy ground, probably have gross earnings of $12,000 to $14,000 in a sixty-day season. Note that this is before camp costs and living expenses and gear and all those other things that reduce your net earnings. But if you already have a couple years of experience, you know all this. If you've already got a few years of experience as a planter, then the decision to plant in 2012 is not so difficult, since you've "put in your time" and know whether or not it is worthwhile to plant again. But the decreasing prices are still a problem.

However, if you're a new potential planter, every odd is stacked against you. About fifty percent of new planters quit before they finish their first season. And this isn't based on hiring random sight-unseen people off the street. At least in my own camp, we interview planters pretty diligently, and only about one tenth of applicants (at best) are offered jobs. So those ten percent are obviously people whom we think are not going to quit - people with outdoors camping/tripping experience, people in good physical conditions such as varsity athletes, people who show that they have obviously put a lot of research into the job and talked to people about how hard planting is, etc. And yes, despite that filtering during the interview process, many will change their mind before the season starts, and then half of the ones who arrive to begin training will quit before the end of the summer.

Let's assume that you make it through your first season without quitting. You'll probably plant about 60,000 to 100,000 trees in about sixty work-days from the start of May until the end of July. Let's go with an average of seventy thousand, to be safe. And let's assume that prices average out at ten cents per tree. Your gross earnings therefore are about seven thousand dollars. Holy smoke, seven thousand dollars! That seems like a lot. That seems FAR better than working at a minimum wage job in the city! But wait, there's a catch. That's the gross earnings. You need to make a lot of deductions. Let's take away five hundred dollars for travel from your home to the company's main office at the start of the season, and back home at the end. Let's take away a thousand dollars for your planting equipment (you have to buy it yourself) and for camping gear and for general necessities like work clothes and rain gear and toiletries. Let's take away camp costs - your company will charge you $25 per day (or perhaps slightly more in Alberta) to help cover the costs of the food that you eat in camp. So there goes another fifteen hundred dollars from your gross earnings. And finally, take away normal deductions like EI and CPP. Another five hundred gone. So your seven thousand gross earnings is down to less than half that amount. And that's BEFORE you pay for your own living expenses outside of camp all summer. You get a day off every four or five days, and usually end up with a few days in a row of downtime between contracts when your camp is moving, which happens every couple weeks. That's why in ninety calendar days between the start of May and end of July, you might only have about sixty work days. On all those other days, you have to pay for motels and for your own food. Even if you pile five people into a cheap room, your motels and food on days off adds up pretty quickly. And then you'll also need money for other expenses like laundry, beer, etc.

Chances are high that in your first season of planting, you will NOT bank any appreciable amount of money. Out of every hundred people given job offers as planters, I'd estimate that no more than half a dozen make it through their first season without quitting AND save more than two thousand dollars of their earnings. And why are you working? To put yourself through school? How are you going to pay room and board and tuition with that kind of banked savings? Essentially, your first summer of planting, even if you're "successful," will probably mean that you have to skip a year of school and work instead.

So why do people do it? Well, I'll admit that the money can be pretty good in subsequent seasons. You'll already know how to plant decently, so you'll be putting in more than 100,000 trees. And hopefully you've already got all your planting and camping gear saved from your rookie season, so you don't have to spend that money again. And you're smart enough to realize that you can't go out partying hard in bars on the days off, because that sucks your bank account dry. So even though I am currently stating that I do NOT recommend tree planting anymore for inexperienced planters, there is an argument to be made for coming back after you've already gotten experience. But even that is getting to be a tough call.

Where do we stand now? 2012 was supposed to be the year that prices were going to start recovering. Experienced planters who have suffered through several tough seasons should be expecting to see prices rising for 2012, since volumes are rising. In BC alone, indications show that there will be about forty million more trees planted than in 2011, based upon existing nursery orders. This is a big increase on top of the approximate two hundred million trees planted in 2011. So in theory, contractors should be bidding higher, knowing that there is a lot of work to go around and they don't need to fight for bids. So why did a company just bid only twenty cents per tree for a job in 2012? It just doesn't make any sense at all.

Unless something significant happens in the bidding over the month of October of 2011, with contractors coming to their senses and collectively securing much higher prices for next summer, then my recommendation stands that potential new planters look for work in other industries.

- Jonathan Clark
October 2nd, 2011