A Low-Investment Fully Mechanized Operation for Pure Selection Thinning of Pine Plantations

Nacrtak Over the last decades many Mediterranean sites were planted with conifers, which offered fast growth, good fibre quality and the capacity to grow on poor soils. If not thinned, these stands cannot develop strong and healthy trees and they become vulnerable to stress agents. The authors designed a complete operation for the thinning of conifer plantations under favourable terrain conditions by a feller-buncher, a farm tractor equipped with a skidding grapple, mounted on the three-point hitch and a trailer-mounted drum chipper. The whole investment in mechanical equipment was very limited, in the order of 338,000, including the truck and a tractor to move the chipper. Felling and extraction were quite balanced, with an average productivity around 40 trees hour–1. A spreadsheet was developed in order to determine the effect of tract size on biomass delivered cost, a crucial issue in Non Industrial Private Forests (NIPF) where the problems inherent to the generally small tract size are compounded by the limited quantity and value of the harvest.