SNB Wood Co-operative Ltd. & SNB Forest Products Marketing Board

Arnold Alward is SNB's 2010 Woodlot Owner of the Year

Arnold Alward, is clearly pleased and honoured to be awarded Woodlot Owner of the Year for 2010 by the Southern New Brunswick Forest Products Marketing Board.

The path to Woodlot Owner of the Year became well established in the mid 1980’s after the mining, manufacturing and transport arms of the Alward’s family business; Havelock Lime, were sold.

Since it was established in the 1930’s Havelock Lime had purchased some 4000 acres of land in the vicinity of their quarry operation, and the new owners had no interest in owning a large parcel of land. Arnold turned his passion for the outdoors toward intensively managing the woodland.

Since a good portion of the land was cutover and abandoned farmland reverting to bushes, Arnold initially focused on salvage harvesting, scarification and tree planting. Over the years more than one million (one thousand acres) have been put into plantation, and an additional 250,000 seedlings fill planted in natural stands and small harvested or under stocked areas throughout the woodlots.

The woodland has also benefited with hundreds of acres of pre-commercial thinning on naturally regenerated stands.

A good road and trail system is a critical requirement to effective woodlot management, and Arnold has brought his experience with heavy equipment and construction to great benefit in creating an enviable road network.

“Our basic approach to building roads is to use an excavator to ditch the road and piling the good material in the roadway and burying stumps and big rocks. The following summer we use a dozer to level the road. We use a lot of culverts to move the water, and we even use some crushed stone to finish the travel surface in some places,” explained Arnold.

As with every Woodlot Owner of the Year award winner, Arnold is quick to share that the award was the result of a team effort. Arnold points to his wife Janice and his son Eric for their tireless and committed support for their woodlot. Arnold also gives a lot of credit to Brian West, a forest technician who has worked for the Alward’s for nearly twenty years.

Arnold says he relies on Brian’s technical knowledge, but also relates that he and Brian have for many years been a special harvest team, with chainsaws and a thirty horsepower farm tractor, particularly focused on selection and patch harvesting and commercial thinning. The result is a very healthy and vibrant woodlot, with little evidence of poor quality and declining trees.

In receiving the Woodlot owner of the Year award, Arnold thanked the SNB organizations and specifically to their forest technicians for the support and knowledge they gave to his woodlot management ambitions.

The Alward’s have created a very attractive and productive woodlot and enjoy a using a very well appointed hunting lodge, situated on an eight acre, stocked fish pond. While the woodlands near the Lodge at posted no hunting, the Alward’s allow game hunting on most of their woodland.

The Alward’s enjoy a wide variety of wildlife on their woodlot. They also have some special projects including food plots for white tail deer, a Christmas tree plot, and experiments to grow red oak and chestnut trees.

While Arnold is delighted by the Woodlot Owner of the Year Award, he shares his concern about the current downturn in the forest industry and the economic difficulties that all woodlot owners face with lack of markets and depressed pricing for wood products.

“We generally hire local contractors to harvest every year, but because wood prices have been so poor, we have not had any cut for a few years which is very hard on those contractors and their businesses. In normal years, Brian and I will harvest six or eight loads through the year, just cleaning up blow downs and poor quality trees.

Fortunately for Arnold, his past practices of keeping the woodlots healthy and vigorous will minimize the impacts of reduced harvests as the markets recover. The SNB organizations would once again like to congratulate Arnold for his commitment to stewardship of the land.