Sawmills across North America looked toward the end of summer last week, as lumber prices continued to rise but sales volumes were unsteady. Lumber producers in the US and Canada considered this current market strength as temporary, and were already making plans for seasonal slow-downs when summer draws to a close. Softwood lumber producers consequently pushed up their asking prices and extended sawmill order files into mid- to late-June, according to Madison’s Lumber Reporter.( madisonsreport.com/)

Prices were nudged up every day as sawmills sold out of stock with ease, and at higher levels. Customers throughout the market were very underbought, and field inventories remained low even as many buyers abandoned their caution and tried to secure volume. Sawmill order files were into the weeks of June 15th and 22nd. Bread-and-butter sizes continued to garner consistently strong demand, while sales of 2×8 and 2×10 were also really hot. As construction in Texas was roaring, 2×4 R/L #3/Utility sold particularly well.

For the week ending May 22, 2020, the price of Western SPF 2×4 kept rising, this time up +$12, or +3%, to US372 mfbm compared to the previous week when it was US$360. Prices for this benchmark construction framing dimension softwood lumber item were up +$36, or +11% from one month ago. Compared to the same week in 2019 when it was US$310, this price is up +$38, or +13%.

Looking at structural framing softwood lumber, Western-Spruce-Pine-Fir studs continued to be massively undersupplied as pandemic restrictions were lifted and building activity in North America came to life. According to producers in British Columbia, the price of 2×4-8’ studs jumped up $22 to US$392 mfbm. Supply was gone in a flash. Demand for all other trims was feverish also; aside from 2×6-8’s, which remained at $268 and just couldn’t get any sales traction. Even as many stud mills began to ramp up their production levels following periods of curtailment, overall production could only cover a fraction of rapidly-mounting demand.

After taking major tumbles in April, last week’s Western S-P-F 2×4 price dropped by smaller amounts, this time down by -$5, or -1%, relative to the 1-year rolling average price of US$377 mfbm and was down -$33, or -18%, relative to the 2-year rolling average price of US$405 mfbm.

The table (photo) is a comparison of recent highs, in June 2018, and current May 2020 benchmark dimension softwood lumber 2×4 prices compared to historical highs of 2004/05 and compared to recent lows of September 2015.

£10m available from the Woodland Carbon Guarantee’s £50m pot for farmers and land managers to create new woodlands to help tackle the effects of climate change.

Applicants must apply by 5 June to qualify for the next auction starting on 8 June. Given the current situation, the deadline to apply will be kept under review.

Scheme gives land managers the option to sell Woodland Carbon Units to the government at a guaranteed price which is protected against inflation.

The Forestry Commission announced (Tuesday 14 April) that £10m will be available in the second auction of the Woodland Carbon Guarantee. Land managers across England are encouraged to sign up to the scheme by 5 June, ahead of the next auction which will take place online from 8 to 19 June.

Launched in November 2019, the Woodland Carbon Guarantee is a £50 million scheme that aims to help accelerate woodland planting rates and permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Successful participants will be offered the option to sell Woodland Carbon Units to the government over 35 years at a guaranteed price set by auction, providing new income for land managers who help businesses compensate for their carbon emissions.

This announcement follows the success of the first auction which closed in February 2020 and saw 18 contracts offered by the Forestry Commission to help stimulate the creation of 182 hectares of new woodland, specifically to help combat climate change.

Sir William Worsley, Chair of the Forestry Commission, said:
“The Woodland Carbon Guarantee is the first scheme of its kind to provide land managers with long-term certainty of a guaranteed payment rate for carbon, which their trees lock up and store.

“I’m excited to announce that the first auction has successfully encouraged projects in parts of the country where new planting has been lower in recent years, and across a good range of woodland types.

“There is no reason to delay applying and to plant trees now – I strongly encourage all land managers thinking about planting to sign up ahead of the second auction in June.”

The outcome of the first exploratory auction in February paves the way for larger scale projects to secure funding in forthcoming auctions. A series of auctions will take place every six months for up to five years.

Speaking of the benefits of the Guarantee, Forestry Minister Lord Goldsmith said: “Trees are a precious natural asset and, as a natural carbon sink, are a vital part of the fight against climate change.

“In addition to providing long-term income support to land managers for creating new woodland, it is our hope that this Guarantee will play an important role in developing the domestic carbon market.”

Greg Beeton, Divisional Partner & Agricultural Business Consultant from project developer Brown & Co, said: “We have a long standing involvement in woodland creation so it was great that we were able to help identify landowner clients of ours which could benefit from the Woodland Carbon Guarantee.

“We were excited to see that a number of our clients were successful in the first auction and will now be able to capitalise on the support that the scheme provides, by planting woodland to replace areas of unproductive farming land for example.

“I would certainly encourage landowners to consider the many benefits of the Guarantee. The support provided by the Forestry Commission was fantastic and the scheme could potentially provide new longer term income streams for landowners that can complement more traditional farming incomes.”

The government manifesto commits to increase planting across the UK to 30,000 hectares per year by 2025. This spring, a new English Tree Strategy will be consulted on, looking at policies to expand, support and increase public engagement with woodlands.

While the Woodland Carbon Guarantee is only available in England there are opportunities to secure Woodland Carbon income for projects in Scotland and Wales as well. One of our carbon project developers can help you through the registration process and may also be able to group your project with other landowners to save money on validation and verification costs. Get in touch using the form below or call:
England: Simon Marrington 07825193278
Scotland: Calum Murray 07887630600
Wales: Iwan Parry 07774255595

Canfor Corporation, further to its announcement on November 9, 2018, completed the purchase of Elliott Sawmilling Company Inc. on May 31, 2020. Elliott adds over 210 million board feet of production capacity.

Canfor is a leading integrated forest products company based in Vancouver, British Columbia (“BC”) with interests in BC, Alberta, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Arkansas, as well as in Sweden with its majority acquisition of Vida Group. Canfor produces primarily softwood lumber and also owns a 54.8% interest in Canfor Pulp Products Inc., which is one of the largest global producers of market Northern Bleached Softwood Kraft Pulp and a leading producer of high performance kraft paper. Canfor shares are traded on The Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol CFP.

For more information:
Media Contact:
Michelle Ward Senior Director
Communications & Government Relations
(604) 661-5225

communications@canfor.com

Investor Contact: Pat Elliott VP,
Corporate Finance and Strategy
(604) 661-5441

Patrick.Elliott@canfor.com

Södra has re-elected Lena Ek as Chair of its Board of Directors. Kristina Alsér and Magnus Hall were elected to the Board. The Meeting also resolved to elect Kristina Alsér and Magnus Hall as new members of the Board. The number of elected Board members is nine, all with a term of one year.

Södra’s Annual General Meeting resolved to adopt the Board’s proposal to distribute profit of SEK 1,068 million ($115,086), corresponding to 43% of profit before tax. Operating profit for 2019 totalled SEK 2,582 million ($278,232). The Board had previously decided not to apply for government funding for the furlough schemes introduced by Södra during the spring.

“Södra stands strong even in unsettled times and during the pandemic, we have continued to deliver essential products and services. As an economic association, the economy of the forest estate is always central and it is important that members can share the processing profits from last year’s deliveries to our mills. It is therefore gratifying that the AGM has resolved to pay a dividend,” said Lena Ek, Chair of Södra.

The profit distribution comprises a dividend of 10% (SEK 530 million ($57.1 million) on wood deliveries, a dividend of 8% (SEK 371 million ($40 million) on contributed capital and a bonus issue of 10% (SEK 167 million ($18 million).

Founded in 1938, Södra is Sweden’s largest forest-owner association, with 52,000 forest owners as its members.

Photo: Lena Ek

Timbeter and the government of Costa Rica kicked-off a project with the goal to support the digitization of forest management, and increase competitiveness of the local forestry sector.

The Estonian Environmental Investment Center (KIK in Estonian) is funding the project to bring Timbeter’s technology to Costa Rica, and integrate their technology with the digital solutions developed by the government of the Central American nation to oversight the forestry sector, facilitate sustainable forest management, and fight illegal logging in the country.

The government of Costa Rica, through their Ministry of Environment and Energy, will explore opportunities to integrate Timbeter’s Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and cloud technology to support their efforts and investments in monitoring and controlling the forestry sector. By simplifying data exchange between the government and companies, the target is to reduce administrative burden and bring more efficiency and transparency to sustainable forest management.

In a call to kickstart the project, the Vice Minister of the Environment and Energy, Pamela Castillo, said that the project comes in an opportune time since Costa Rica is planning to reactivate its economy after the COVID-19 emergency by promoting goods and services that are nature based. Costa Rica is known for its efforts on sustainable natural resources management and as a green pioneer in a region of the world that is highly vulnerable to climate change. Timbeter will help to facilitate the data exchange between the companies and government, reduce administrative burden of companies and increase their operational efficiency.

“The timber industry has an important role in providing renewable material and fighting illegal logging”, Anna-Greta Tsahkna, CEO of Timbeter said. “We need to make sure that forests are managed sustainably. Digital solutions like Timbeter help companies to be more efficient and transparent and also easily provide needed data for the government that will help to fight the illegal logging.  And now, we are happy that we can work together with the Costa Rica government and the forestry private sector in the country”.

Rafael Monge Vargas, Director of the National Center of Geoenvironmental Information and local counterpart of the project in Costa Rica, highlighted that “with this cooperation we aim to strengthen the Costa Rican Forest Resources Information System (SIREFOR), through the incorporation of state of the art digital tools, that facilitate the work carried out by the Costa Rican authorities for the control and monitoring of forest harvesting activities”.

Timbeter has already brought important results in forestry operations, creating a safer working environment for collaborators, and reducing the use of hazardous materials like paint. But Timbeter also brings affordable digital transformation to medium and smaller companies and private forest owners, and creates conditions for more fair and transparent trade transactions, enabling local farmers, and communities that depend on the forest for their livelihood to get better access to the market, and the right price for their legally sourced timber.

Timbeter is an Estonian startup that has built the world’s largest database of photometric measurements of roundwood, which allows real-time tracking of timber assets down to individual shipments and piles throughout the forestry value chain. Timbeter is working with state forests in Poland and the Netherlands, and other countries of the world, and its clients include some of the largest companies in the sector such as CMPC (Chile), International Paper (Brazil), Faber-Castell (Brazil), Siam Forestry Group (Thailand), Mekong Timber Plantations (Laos), Port Blakely (USA), SEQH (Australia)  and many others.

Timbeter’s technology brings transparency to the forestry sector through the use of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, GPS and cloud computing. Through geotagging, it is possible to know the origin of the measurements done through Timbeter’s solutions, the information is available throughout the supply chain.

Click here for Timbeter.

Carlos Fonseca
Press contact information
+372 5394 1866

On land north of Toronto that previously burned in a wildfire, drones are hovering over fields and firing seed pods into the ground, planting native pine and spruce trees to help restore habitat for birds. Flash Forest, the Canadian start-up behind the project, plans to use its technology to plant 40,000 trees in the area this month. By the end of the year, as it expands to other regions, it will plant hundreds of thousands of trees. By 2028, the start-up aims to have planted a full 1 billion trees.

The company, along with a number of other companies employing tree planting drones (and already working with local companies on in-field trials) such as DroneSeed and AirSeed Technologies, believes that technology can help the world reach ambitious goals to restore forests to stem biodiversity loss and fight climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that it’s necessary to plant 1 billion hectares of trees—a forest roughly the size of the entire United States—to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Existing forests need to be protected while new trees are planted; right now, that isn’t working well. “There are a lot of different attempts to tackle reforestation,” says Flash Forest cofounder and chief strategy officer Angelique Ahlstrom. “But despite all of them, they’re still failing, with a net loss of 7 billion trees every year.”

Drones don’t address deforestation, which is arguably an even more critical issue than planting trees, since older trees can store much more carbon. But to restore forests that have already been lost, the drones can work more quickly and cheaply than humans planting with shovels. Flash Forest’s tech can currently plant 10,000 to 20,000 seed pods a day; as the technology advances, a pair of pilots will be able to plant 100,000 trees in a day (by hand, someone might typically be able to plant around 1,500 trees in a day, Ahlstrom says). The company aims to bring the cost down to 50 cents per tree, or around a fourth of the cost of some other tree restoration efforts.

When it begins work at a site, the start-up first sends mapping drones to survey the area, using software to identify the best places to plant based on the soil and existing plants. Next, a swarm of drones begins precisely dropping seed pods, packed in a proprietary mix that the company says encourages the seeds to germinate weeks before they otherwise would have. The seed pods are also designed to store moisture, so the seedlings can survive even with months of drought. In some areas, such as hilly terrain or in mangrove forests, the drones use a pneumatic firing device that shoots seed pods deeper into the soil. “It allows you to get into trickier areas that human planters can’t,” Ahlstrom says.

Barko Hydraulics (Barko) has announced the addition of Heavy Machines, Inc. (Heavy Machines) as the new Barko forestry equipment dealer for Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

As a diversified equipment distributor serving several regions throughout the United States, Heavy Machines has two branch locations in Maine, located in Portland and Skowhegan, to serve customers in the northeastern United States. Heavy Machines will provide sales and product support for Barko’s Merchandising Loader, Stationary Electric Loader, Utility Loader, Grapple, Tracked Harvester, Feller Buncher, and Processor product lines.

“New England has a rich history in the logging industry, and we’re very excited to be partnering with Heavy Machines to strengthen Barko’s position in this region,” said Joel Larsen, Barko President. “Heavy Machines puts their customers first and we’re proud to add Barko to their impressive product lineup.”

The company Heavy Machines, Inc. began as a specialty line dealer and has been serving the forest products industry since 1972. They have grown into a high-quality equipment distributor with nine branches in five states who are matched to serve the construction, mining, scrap, waste, and forest products industries in the regions they serve.

“We have supported the industry’s top equipment brands since our founding, and we’re looking forward to working with Barko,” said Steve Northcross, Senior VP of Sales and Marketing for Heavy Machines. “Today, our northeast operations have the people skills and support mechanisms to support Barko product lines for all current and future customers. We are proud to be a key part of Barko’s new legacy in this business.”

The addition of PONSSE Parts Online to PONSSE Manager makes the daily activities of forest machine entrepreneurs easier. Customers can order spare parts, browse spare parts manuals and instruction manuals, and monitor machine-specific notes behind one single user ID. Spare parts can be ordered directly from any PONSSE service centre, round the clock.

PONSSE Manager is a data management system with continuously developing features. With PONSSE Manager, entrepreneurs can monitor the progress of stands, print measuring certificates, plan and control machine transportation, and monitor machine production per assortment. What is more, PONSSE Manager reports total working hours, effective working hours, breaks, productivity and fuel consumption for completed shifts. PONSSE Manager displays engine hours, reports service notes registered by operators and supports the planning of machine maintenance by calculating the engine hours remaining until next maintenance.

To support their daily operations, forest machine entrepreneurs and productive forest machines need a reliable partner that can offer solutions that support the business operations of its customer. Ponsse has been a forerunner in forest machines and their telecommunications solutions for decades. Ponsse introduced the first computers on its forest machines in 1992, at which point it was already possible to transfer data between the machine and the office over the NMT network. In 1997, machines were for the first time connected to the Internet, which was a revolutionary innovation in the field.

Read more: www.ponsse.com/services/online-services

Starting from 2 June 2020, Ponsse’s retailer in South Africa will be M.T.S. Parts CC. The company will start as Ponsse’s official retailer, being responsible for the sale and maintenance of PONSSE forest machines, as well as spare parts services in South Africa. Green Projects, Ponsse’s current service provider in South Africa, will continue as Ponsse’s retailer until 1 June 2020.

This change aims to strengthen Ponsse’s after-sales services in South Africa. M.T.S. Parts CC. offers comprehensive maintenance services and has solid experience in PONSSE forest machines and cooperation with forestry companies. M.T.S. Parts has operated as Ponsse’s service partner in the Mpumalanga Province since 2014.

“M.T.S. Parts CC. was chosen to represent Ponsse because of its reputation as a reliable company and its customer-driven approach. It can provide PONSSE customers with strong support both in sales and maintenance services. Strong customer support has always been of primary importance to Ponsse, and it has also been the key to the success of M.T.S. In addition to service centres, the company uses well-equipped service vehicles to bring maintenance services close to customers”, comments area director Janne Tarvainen who´s in charge of the cooperation between Ponsse Plc and M.T.S.

M.T.S. Parts CC. offers a broad service range to forestry, agricultural and mining companies of all sizes, as well as to municipal operators. The company is based in Nelspruit, Mpumalanga.

“Our main goal has always been the prosperity of our customers, and we want to offer the best possible service for them. Together with Ponsse, we are determined to be the most reliable partner in the business and to live up to our promise to be “A Logger’s Best Friend”. Based on these principles, we have achieved a solid market position in our operating areas.  M.T.S. was founded in 2005, and we have supported diverse brands, such as Dezzi Equipment, Matriarch Equipment and Bell Equipment. Now, we will be working with the best forest machine manufacturer in the world”, says director Chris Odendaal from M.T.S. Parts CC.

FURTHER INFORMATION
Janne Tarvainen, Ponsse Plc
Area Director (South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal)
Contact information: tel. +358 40 1830 914, janne.tarvainen@ponsse.com

Chris Odendaal, Director, M.T.S. Parts CC
Contact information: tel. +27 137 524 571, mob. +27 825 757 447
chris@mtsparts.co.za
Address: 9 Suikerriet St, Nelspruit, 1201, South Africa