  Digital Image © 1998 John Mahoney Forest slash to spuds CHARLES BURY
COOKSHIRE, QUEBEC | A local potato farmer will soon find out if the chopped up branches of trees will help his garden grow.
The Quebec Agriculture Ministry wants to find a use for the tips of small branches left behind by industrial loggers, pruners and ice storms. Jean-Paul Dionne & Sons of La Légumerie Groupe Dionne, on Learned Plain Road, has volunteered to help.
Most of a tree - the wood itself and the outer bark - is finished growing and basically dead. The roots, inner bark, branchlets and leaves are where the action is. The buds and other growth at the small ends of branches are sort of an ideal breakfast food for plants - "chock full of vitamins and shot through and through with goodness," as Captain Crunch used to say.
The buds especially contain all kinds of minerals essential to the health of trees. These micro-nutrients, along with healthy doses of more basic plant foods, persist in the soil after the branches fall from the tree and decay. From there they are taken up and digested by the root system of the tree they fell from and its neighbours as part of nature's own recycling plan.
Foresters have long known that a healthier forest results when the unused branches, called 'slash', are left on the ground to rot and return to the soil rather than being burned or taken away. But sometimes circumstances don't allow this, and the "bois raméaux,"; or "bois rom*eacute;o" to use its colloquial name, is left in piles or thrown in dumps.
Laval University professor Gilles Lemieux has been studying logging slash for decades, and finding commercial uses for this valuable resource. But no one has listened - until now.
At a conference in Cookshire last week government agronomes, botanists, technicians and farmers heard Professor Lemieux describe his findings and explain how he was ignored for 20 years, until the massive ice storms of last January left tonnes and tonnes of broken branches strewn all over the southern Quebec countryside. Suddenly "le verglas" has brought slash into the spotlight, Lemieux said.
One group paying more attention was Agriculture Quebec, says agro-technician Charles-Eugene Bergeron, who organized the Cookshire conference. Another was potato grower Dionne.
"Mr. Dionne is going to devote 30 acres of his potato fields to a three year experiment," Bergeron said in an interview. "This will be the first time we have a chance to test this bud-wood in the field."
The branches will be chipped fine and applied in half the field according to tight specifications, he said, then turned under like any other fertilizer. For comparison, the other half of Dionne's experimental plot will be treated exactly the same but without the bud-wood.
Dionne uses a three year potato-potato-clover rotation. Bergeron says if things are going well after three years, the experiment will be extended to five years - potato-potato-clover-potato-potato. The yields will then be weighed and compared and the results analyzed. If it succeeds, the bud-wood technology will be developed and tried on other crops.
I told Bergeron my worry - that if this catches on, farmers will start systematically removing the cut and fallen branches from their woods, taking this nourishment away and spreading it in the fields instead. That would soon weaken the trees, making the forest more susceptible to the insect and fungus infestations that are their deadliest enemy except for man.
And that would turn the woods into an ugly, useless mess.
"Weakening the forest is the last thing we want to do," he replied. "What we want to do is strictly to use branches that are not being returned to the forest floor."
Bergeron said the first example was the thousands of tonnes left over from the ice storms. And he said when that's gone, "Domtar, for example, collects the branches in big piles beside their logging yards. It's just left there. We could buy it cheap, shred it up and use it in the fields."
From slash to mashed. Potatoes, that is. Get it? I'm still not convinced.
With hundreds and hundreds of square miles of woodlands to its name, Domtar is by far the largest landowner in the Eastern Townships. But the forest-products giant is by far not the most conscientious landowner around. And now as ever, what's good for Domtar is not necessarily what's good for the woods. 
Copyright © 1998 Charles Bury/Log Cabin Chronicles/9.98 |