By ADAM GIFFORD
Forestry services company Harvest Planning NZ and software house Management and Technology Systems (MTS) have developed a new-generation program to help companies find the most economic way of logging difficult terrain.
Harvest Planning managing director Zane Cleaver said CYANZ Cable Yarder identified the best place for haulers and cables before on-site work began, by creating a 3-D model of the forest using data from digital or paper maps.
Cleaver said the Windows-based software would replace earlier DOS-based products like the widely used Logger PC, which was developed at the University of Oregon in the 1980s, and which was now outdated.
Harvest Planning, based in Rotorua, got $90,000 seed funding from Technology New Zealand and spent twice that again getting the software developed and preparing it for market.
Harvest Planning provides independent engineering services to forest harvesters. It also offers management services, and stumpage sales for independent clients.
Although its biggest contract is with Carter Holt Harvey Forests, it also works extensively with small woodlot owners and farm foresters, many of whom grow trees on steep, remote and inaccessible land.
"With the amount of wood coming on stream due to double in the next few years, with the bulk outside the corporates, it is important we have the tools to make extracting this timber economically viable," Cleaver said.
"You have to be careful about the amount of infrastructure you put in because in some areas the returns are marginal."
CYANZ Cable Yarder can also be used to put together consent applications.
Cleaver said that although it intended to sell the software direct in New Zealand for about $7000 a licence - about as much as a day's cable yarding - the real market opportunity was in North America.
MTS managing director Alan Somerville said CYANZ Cable Yarder incorporated code used in other MTS products, including the GIS (geographic information systems) engine used in its flagship Tumonz Ultimate Map of New Zealand CD and its Forest Vision forest management system.
Harvest Planning NZ
Management and Technology Systems
Loggers helped over inaccessible terrain
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