HarvestTECH News | Issue 32

Welcome to the latest issues of HarvestTECH.News.

First up this month is the release of a new online guide, The Ultimate Guide to Motorised Grapple Carriages for Mechanised Forestry Harvesting by DC Equipment. Dale Ewers and his team have been at the forefront of motorised grapple carriages for quite a few years now. They’ve been designing, producing and promoting the use of these carriages to contractors around the world who’ve been looking to safely extract wood off increasingly steeper slopes. A link to the new guide is contained in the story below.

We’ve built in a very informative video clip of how one NZ forest contracting company is handling the growing issue of drug addiction, enabling affected employees to work on their issues and allowing them to remain on the employer’s books. We also cover a story from one of the industry stalwarts, a 76-year-old log transport driver, who’s recently celebrated with ANC Forestry Group a very special milestone, 60-years driving in the log transport industry.

And in the technology space this month, we’ve built in a story of a Swedish company you’ve probably heard about who’ve been rolling out autonomous trucks. A couple of years ago, they produced their autonomous all-electric logging truck, T-Log. The Pod followed, an all-electric, driverless truck with the first public road testing in Sweden in 2019, followed shortly afterwards by more remote trials on US roads. The company has just unveiled a raft of new products, including a new trailer design along with a system to help optimise transport flows for electric and autonomous shipping fleets. We’ve built in a video clip to a story this month outlining some of these new innovations.

Finally, we’ve had a huge amount of interest being shown in the upcoming Residues2Revenues 2022 event running in Rotorua on 26-27 July 2022 for local forestry companies and wood harvesting contractors. Already, 250 have registered. Its growing by the day – for the in-field chipping workshop, conference and exhibitions. The timing is spot on with many contractors now exploring options for harvesting residues off the forest block or better-utilising wood wastes that typically tend to accumulate on the skid site. How to best handle smaller piece sizes, in forest or off-site processing and transporting these wood residues will also be covered. So, if interested in coming along (or if out of NZ, you can sign up to be involved remotely), check out the event website for more details. Also, best sign up before the sold-out sign goes up.

Check out these stories and much more below. Enjoy this month’s issue.

Remember, please send through any stories or video you want us to pass onto the wider wood harvesting and log transport community.