Rance Timber

The Harvesting operations are motor manual and very labour intensive, where felling of trees, chocking of logs and log making is done manually. Chainsaw operators fell, de-branch and present trees infield ready for extraction to roadside. Extraction of the trees from infield is done using cables skidders, skylines and tractors. Once on roadside the... trees are manually made into logs and stacked according to diameter and length by bell loggers. Once stacked according to specifications the logs are then ready for collection, which is done using logging trucks. The trucks are loaded using a combination of bell loggers and self-loading cranes. The logs are transported to the sawmills where they are offloaded onto the logdecks to be mechanically debarked and processed through the sawmills. The Harvesting and transport operations take place in challenging terrain areas and almost all operations take place on narrow gravel roads. As a result weather and accessibility to both logs and sawmills is challenging for the operation. To overcome these challenges Rance Timber and AFC owns and operates its own road making and maintenance team to maintain and service all of the 1250km of forestry roads within the AFC estate to make the accessibility of logs possible as required for the saw milling operations. The Technical Support function to this whole operation is done by the company's in house workshop. Rance Timber is a vertically integrated business allowing for maximum flexibility to give its customers valued service and quality. AMATHOLE FORESTRY COMPANYRead More