Shift in process gives edge in industry.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Special Report: Aboriginal Business - Ontario Metis and Aboriginal Association Development Corp

To Henry Wetelainen, value-added forestry begins in the bush at the harvesting site.

The president of the Ontario Metis and Aboriginal Association Development Corp. (OMAA) believes a gradual shift is taking place in the North American forest industry in adopting cut-to-length logging.

With business opportunities for Aboriginal loggers limited and the North's wood basket shrinking, the organization has made its own inroads over the last few years by championing this new method, used extensively in Europe, parts of the U.S., Quebec and eastern Canada.

Wetelainen says the Ontario forest industry processes about six million cords of wood annually, but only processes one per cent according to cut-to-length methods.

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Worldwide, he says, cut-to-length runs about 100 per cent participation in Finland and the Nordic countries, about 60 per cent in Germany, 85 per cent in Michigan and Wisconsin, and almost 40 per cent in Minnesota.

"But in Northern Ontario, we do very little" choosing instead to use full-length tree chipping, a less-than-efficient method of sorting out value, he says.

OMAA Development Corp. began as a lending agency for Metis entrepreneurs. They veered into the Aboriginal logging business by inheriting some bankrupt businesses.

In investigating ways to run more efficient operations, their travels took them to logging operations in Europe where cut-to-length is a widely used method.

Cut-to-length involves cutting and processing the entire tree in the bush, using highly maneuverable and lightweight equipment, such as harvesters and bunchers, to handle trees and logs with far less damage to the forest than traditional methods.

With most available land allocated to large forest companies. Wetelainen says the only way for OMAA to make any headway was to offer extra value by sorting value on-site.

Adopting cut-to-length represented a sizable chunk of investment for OMAA--about $400,000 apiece for their two high-tech processor machines and two forwarders, that Wetelainen calls "the machinery of...