Forestry machine sharing system in self-employed forestry

ABSTRACT

Self-employed forestry is recognized as forest owner’s participation in harvesting phase in forest management. Self-employed forestry and their collaborative works have gathered attention because of the social ability to initiate others into forest management. A collaborative group of self-employed forest owners in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, developed a forestry machine sharing system to improve productivity in cooperation with local governments. This study aims to clarify the mechanization procedure by a machine sharing system for ground-based harvesting in self-employed forestry. Machines for road construction and timber harvesting were introduced and it was clarified that the production cost of the sharing system was similar to that of the general rental system through the analysis using the account data from 2000 to 2013. The advantage of the sharing system was the ability of money saving in the group after paying the maintenance cost. The pool of remaining balance improved the financial confidence and made the next investment possible. The relationships among machine breakages, the quality of operation and the frequency of maintenance should be investigated. When applying this sharing system, the cooperation with members and local governments is essential concerning the amount of subsidy and the rental cost as well as the machine selection. In the model group, they still needed the subsidy to be economical because of the lower rate of machine utilization. Multi-functional machines will be suitable since they improve the rate. If there were no subsidies, the general rental system would be an alternative.

KEYWORDS:

• Ground-based harvesting system
• machine maintenance cost
• machine rental
• small-scale forestry
• sustainable forest management

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP15H04562. We appreciate the cooperation of the members in H₂O Forestry Group during this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP15H04562].