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Biosecurity is very important

Wink Sutton's Blog
Friday, February 27, 2015

During my Canadian secondment from 1992 to 1994, I attended a meeting addressed by the then Chief of the USDA Forest Service who talked about the major biological threats to North American forests. Below are listed some of the major introduced biological threats, now updated, together with a brief description.

  • Gypsy moth Lymantria dispar – This was introduced in 1868 for its silk spinning caterpillars but escaped soon afterwards. Now it is one of the most destructive insects in the eastern United States defoliating about 400,000 hectares of hardwoods each year.
  • Kudzu Pueraria lobata – It is known as the vine that ate the south. It was introduced from Japan in 1876 to stabilise road cuttings and later promoted as a landscape vine. It smothers trees and kills them and can grow at a rate of a 30 cms a day. Now it covers three million hectares in south eastern United States.
  • Chestnut blight – This is caused by a pathogenic fungus Cryphonectria parasitica which was accidentally introduced around 1900 possibly on imported Japanese chestnut nursery stock. By 1940 almost all mature eastern American chestnut trees had been killed, estimated to be four billion trees. The once common chestnut was praised for its fruit and its beautiful, decay-resistant wood.
  • White pine blister rust Cronartium ribicola – A fungal disease which kills five-needle pines also called white pines. It was accidentally introduced from Europe in 1909 and alternative hosts are currants and gooseberries. Although white pines Pinus stobus and P. monticoli are often fast growing, there are few mature white pines left alive in the United States and Canada.
  • Dutch elm disease – This is a vascular wilt fungus Ophiostoma ulmi spread by elm bark beetles. It was accidentally introduced from Europe in 1928. Avenues of handsome elms which were once common in many cities are no more.
  • Emerald ash borer Agrilus planipennis – A native of Asia and eastern Russia it was unintentionally introduced in 2002 probably in ash wood used to stabilise crates during shipping. It has greatly reduced or even eliminated the ash timber industry in eastern United States, once estimated as being a $25 billion a year industry. There are now fears that the borer will attack fringe plants of the same ash family such as forsythia and lilac.

Our relative isolation combined with our very strict border biosecurity has meant that New Zealand has generally escaped devastating introductions in forestry, agriculture and horticulture. I compare our strict biosecurity controls to vaccinations against such devastating diseases as diphtheria, tetanus and polio. When almost no-one suffers from such devastating diseases for decades, the public can become apathetic and complacent about the need for vaccinations. We may be sometimes inconvenienced by our strict biosecurity checks but the United States forestry examples convincingly show what could happen if imports are not subject to close inspection.

On a recent visit to Chile I was horrified to find some radiata stands there unhealthy and defoliated. The cause was Phytophtheria pinifolia. We want to ensure that pathogen is never introduced into New Zealand. Every visitor to Chilean pine plantations should declare their footwear on arrival in New Zealand and have their clothes dry cleaned as soon as possible after arrival.

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Arriving in New Zealand 1962

John Purey-Cust Ponders
Monday, February 09, 2015

I came from Great Britain to New Zealand, to a job in the NZ Forest Service, in January 1962. I left a densely populated country where the original forests were gone but wood was still king and I came to a country where one kind of forest, complicated and ancient, was still the enemy and being replaced by a more simple, more understandable one for which there was as yet little market.

My previous boss (in East Anglia) had told me “We live within 50 miles of 10 million people – we can sell anything”, and we could – oak for historic buildings damaged in the war and new motorway fencing, lime for beer barrel bungs, poplar for truck decks, fruit baskets, and brewery shovels, larch for fence posts and fishing boat hulls, Spanish chestnut as ‘oak’, elm for coffins, sycamore, beech and walnut for the furniture trade, and so on – I don’t recall a species that we failed to uncover an existing market for.

Apart from specimen trees conifers were left to the UK Forestry Commission or imported from Scandanavia, and a matter of general public contempt. There was little concept of ‘native’ tree species (only three native conifers, Scots pine, yew and juniper) and a long and vigorous history of introductions, going back at least two thousand years to the Romans.

The prime object of management of private woodland was pheasant shooting, an occupation closely tied to social status. Pheasants are a woodland bird.

I arrived at a time when New Zealand’s exotic plantation cut was just rising to equal the cut from native forest, helped by the government demonstration mills at Conical Hill and Rotorua. The demand was domestic and the market heavily restricted by bureaucratic methods of sale. Farm forestry was just beginning but the general attitude still saw timber sales as a minor part of farm development.

I was fortunate in my early postings to places where there were State plantations covering the range of New Zealand’s forestry history - first year in Canterbury at radiata-only Balmoral (a riverside boulder bank expressing the then rural attitude to the limitless bounds of lands fit for farming) and Hanmer, an older plantation. I lived in the Hanmer Forest camp (where one night the sky turned green, the atmospheric effects of an H bomb test). Hanmer had large blocks of Corsican and a poor strain of ponderosa pine, larch and some Douglas fir and radiata pine.

Balmoral had suffered a major fire some years before and management was dominated by fears of another. The priority at Hanmer was to provide work for seasonally unemployed freezing workers, mostly by poisoning (girdling by axe and ammonium sulphamate or ‘ammate’ in the cuts) stands of ponderosa pine prior to under planting with Douglas fir and poison thinning densely stocked Corsican pine.

I moved on to a year in the mill at Conical Hill followed by four years in the Tapanui District. The local plantations went back to the 1890s which was why Conical Hill mill had been built there just after WWII. From memory it cut mostly unpruned radiata and some Corsican pine.

There was also a new private CCA pressure treatment plant for fencing material attached to a neighbouring private sawmill. The prevailing fence post of the time was concrete so the new wooden posts (mostly Corsican) were greeted with enthusiasm, with the peculiar exception of the local Forest Service District Ranger. To him the market definitely didn’t rule; fence posts were concrete and ever more should be so. His office and mine shared a common chimney so I shared all the discussions between him, the local mill owner and the Conservator, called in to adjudicate. Eventually the treatment plant won.

The big issues of the time were grading rules for sawn plantation timber, silvicultural regimes for pruning and thinning, and the start of the log export market down here in the mid1960s.

The grading rules required endless mill studies at Conical Hill and elsewhere and later on became tied in with the development of the silvicultural regimes needed to produce the desired grades. These heralded the end for Corsican and ponderosa pine and larch which disappeared from planting, defined Douglas fir as a structural timber which didn’t need pruning, and radiata pine as the future jack of all trades.

Ponderosa at first ranked highly under the new rules because of its predominance of tight green knots. It lost that grading reputation on the green chain – sawn timber breaking at the knot under its own weight.

The weight of forestry history fell rather differently on the rest of Otago. It had one ‘old’ plantation forest, Naseby, and a growing area of post war planting nearer the coast. Part of the NZFS Southland Conservancy, the Otago ranger district’s peculiarity was to have an extremely aggressive and capable university trained forester as its district ranger – Keith W Prior.

That broke the rules of the hierarchy as rangers usually rose through field experience or had ‘sub-professional’ departmental training, and traditionally occupied territorially responsible positions up to the rank of conservator of forests. So Keith’s position aroused resentment, added to by the fact that while he had primary and tertiary qualifications he had no secondary ones, having left school early to take up an apprenticeship with the Auckland tramways department and pursuing a rehab forestry degree after the war.

From time to time he would allow the Otago Daily Times to misinterpret his position as the Conservator of Forests, Otago, causing eruptions in Invercargill. He once told me that an Auckland tram contained the wood of 40 different species of tree, and that if any special tools were required for the job it was up to the tradesman to make them. We owe much of Otago’s plantation forest estate to Keith.

Disclaimer: Personal views expressed in this blog are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent those of the NZ Farm Forestry Association.

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