It was the worry of a father rather than that of a businessman that took the front seat of Adam Ripley’s mind on Thursday.
Friday is his eldest daughter’s 16th birthday and that means she gets her driver’s licence.
The other worry has too many moving parts for the 45-year-old to wrestle down and grasp guaranteed outcomes.
What he knows is that far from his River Phillip, Cumberland County, woodlot decisions are coming soon that will affect the small forestry business he runs with his father, Mark, and brother, Ryan.
“Pulpwood is the lowest value stuff we sell but the mills that buy our high value saw logs are saying they’re really worried, which means I should be worried,” said Ripley.
Living off the forest
The Ripley family makes a living managing their 800-hectare woodlot and a few neighboring properties.
A dozen hectares of blueberries helps Adam round out the summer.
Since the family came down from Partridge Hill, a few kilometres up the road, four generations ago they have made their living off the forest in River Phillip.
And there still is a forest to make a living off because they are a prime example of the ecological forestry model advocated by William Lahey in his report on the province’s woods industry.
Adam waited for Wednesday night’s cold snap before he began hauling out logs with his 23-year-old tractor that’s been modified to act as a porter. With the ground frozen he’d have less impact on the roots of the trees he left to seed in the small patch cut.
On his way with a load he passes standing dead poplars left as a home for the insect prey of woodpeckers and a potential house for an owl.
The large white pines were also left to drop their seeds and help repopulate the patch of forest cut.
With their small cuts they rely upon the standing trees to provide seed and don’t resort to herbicides to keep hardwoods at bay.
For them, everything is product.
Chipping away at business
Nearer to Highway 271, which runs between Springhill and Oxford, he separated his logs into piles. A pile of smallish diameter spruce was headed for the Ledwidge Lumber studwood mill in Enfield.
Larger diameter softwood was going to Taylor Lumber in Middle Musquodoboit.
Good quality poplar logs were headed to E & M Burgess Enterprises in Newport Station to be turned into baskets for export.
Maple and birch was piled for the family to process into split firewood.
And then the lowest quality softwood went in a pile destined for Northern Pulp.
Between ten and twenty per cent of what the Ripleys cut goes to kraft pulp mill in Pictou County.
In itself, the loss of that market wouldn’t be catastrophic.
But the sawmills paying a premium to buy his logs sell their woodchips, created as a byproduct, to Northern Pulp. Their owners have been warning the public they can’t survive without that market for a million tonnes of woodchips annually.
Then there’s the 50 hectares the Ripley’s had thinned this year – a silviculture treatment done by a spacing saw crew that opens up room for trees to grow larger by dropping less desirous ones to rot and rebuild the soil.
The treatment will pay dividends in a few decades by ensuring more high value sawlogs and less pulpwood.
The largest contributor to the silviculture fund that pays for this treatment is Northern Pulp.
“The margins for us already aren’t great,” said Ripley.
“And that’s when things are going good, which they had been for the last couple years.”
Those margins may be about to get a lot worse if Northern Pulp shuts, setting off a domino effect of closures amongst sawmills and harvesting contractors in this highly intertwined industry.
A factory job in nearby Amherst has never appealed to him.
So he plans on surviving in the woods as generations of Ripleys before him have.
He’s just not sure how.
In the meantime he has a daughter that’s about to get her driver’s license to think about.
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