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Graduate students Frédéric Lavoie and Luc D’Amours, registered in the Bioresource Engineering Ph.D. program at McGill under the supervision of Dr. Mark Lefsrud, went to Florida and Georgia to harvest forest understory biomass between December 10 and 18, 2007. The willow and brushy biomass harvester was developed by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) under the leadership of Dr. Philippe Savoie.

The machine was already described in the previous issue of Perspective (fall 2007) when it was used in Saskatchewan and Alberta to harvest willow and natural brushes. This time, the machine was operated in a natural forest, Osceola National Forest in Florida, and in a commercial pine plantation near Valdosta, Georgia.

Forest management in the Southern Unites States requires regular control of brushy crops. The goal is to minimize the accumulation of woody residues which can become a dangerous fuel for intensive forest fires. The current practice is to do prescribed burning of understory vegetation once every 3 to 5 years. However, more and more of the forest area is close to highways and new housing developments where smoke and heat can be a nuisance and even a danger. Mechanical harvest of this biomass therefore becomes an important tool in forest management. Present commercial machines require at least two passes (cutting and collection) and sometimes considerable labour (hand operation of chain saws, transport of branches). The woody crop harvester developed by AAFC cuts and packages the woody crop in a single passage. During experiments in Florida and Georgia, the prototype was able to harvest 4 to 5 bales weighing 500 kg each per hour in the natural forest and as many as 10 to 15 bales per hour in the plantations with alleys between the trees.

Source: http://www.bioeng.ca/pdfs/newsletters/Winter08/PNLWinter08.pdf