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Forest Nursery Association of British Columbia Prince George, BC September 18 - 21, 2000 20th Annual Meeting Green Timbers Award September 20, 2000 Ev Van Eerden Mr. Chairman, Nursery and Forestry Colleagues and Friends: It is a wonderful evening and a great experience to be here among friends and colleagues. In talking about my appreciation for receiving the "Green Timbers Award", you’ll get some history, some nostalgia and undoubtedly some emotion. It is a great honour and I feel deeply humbled to be given this recognition by my peers and colleagues in the business. To be honoured for my contribution to reforestation jointly with my mentor and friend, Jim Kinghorn, in this location and at this time, make the award even more special. Jim Kinghorn hired me in the spring of 1968 as a new forestry graduate. After a marathon interview in a coffee shop on the UBC Endowment Lands, numerous cigarettes and cups of coffee, and a gigantic post nicotine and coffee headache, I soon received word that I got the job. I recall that I was quite intimidated by the prospect of going to a Research Laboratory crawling with white-coated scientists staring into microscopes and writing learned papers. Imagine my surprise, when upon reporting for my first day of work, I was told that Jim, oh, he is not here, he is at the Koksilah pilot container nursery in Duncan. Sure enough, I found him there, not in his white lab coat but in his white undershorts, deep in the ground, digging a big hole for a sub-irrigation reservoir. So much for my image of the white-frocked scientist/new boss. I also recall when we were at the first major and International Container Seedling Symposium in Denver, Colorado, in 1974. This was my first, major professional presentation and I was very nervous. Although I had rehearsed my presentation out loud many times (which I still do today for significant presentations), and everything I was going to say out of my presentation was on flash cards, I had a good case of stage fright. I had this huge rock in my stomach, I could hear my knees knocking and sweat was pouring from my every pore. However, as soon as I heard my own voice without the Bill Vander Zalm accent, I realized that I was doing just fine and the presentation went great. Afterwards, and at the first break, Jim came up to me, put his arm on my shoulder and said, " great, well done!" I have never forgotten that and still treasure that encouragement, which we all need when we have just started on the path of our career. As you all know, development of the container seedling program in British Columbia has proven to be very successful. Well, let me explain to you at least one of the reasons. Jim is really quite colour blind, you know. To be truthful, so am I, and ironically, so was the third forester in our group, our colleague and good friend, Jim Arnott. So our collective inability to distinguish dead and red seedlings from live and green ones, explains, I am sure, much of the early (purported) success with container seedling planting in BC. Although he must have been frustrated by our inexperience, lack of scientific rigor, and oversights at times, Jim rarely showed it but kept in front of us the vision of where we were going. Above all, he taught us by example that if you want to go somewhere and get to a certain goal and objective, you have to believe in it and show your enthusiasm; there has to be fire in the belly. Believe we did and we had a lot of fun getting there. Jim and I traveled many highways and byways and backroads, solving the world’s reforestation problems, often till the wee hours of the morning with a pint, or with two pints and two pieces of apple pie. On one occasion I recall, this happened at the village of McLeod Lake, the old HB trading post just past Crooked River Cabins, where I had some field plots. After having eaten an enormous meal, prepared by our hostess at Crooked River Cabins, and nearly bursting at the seams, we looked at each other and both had the same idea: "It would be nice to have a beer". So off we went to the village, 15 miles north of Crooked River Cabins, very full bellies and all. When we got to the McLeod Lake Hotel, we learned that the hotel had lost its pub license for some infraction or other. The place had neither bar service nor off-sales, and you could only have a drink in the restaurant if you had some food. The place was run by three elderly ladies, assisted by some younger waitresses. In desperation, we agreed that we would have apple pie (a la mode, Jim reminded me) with our beer. We were not going to go home without having a beer. Well, the first beer went down pretty well in spite of the pie having to go into pretty full stomachs, and we made eye contact with the waitress, who nodded that she would bring us a second beer. But guess what, the elderly lady was on to our subversive move, and to make a long story short, we had a second piece of apple pie with another beer. After that we rolled home to our cabin at Crooked River. Jim, by hiring, coaching and mentoring me through our container seedling and styroblock project, you set me up for the rest of my career. I am deeply grateful and honoured to share this platform with you. Getting this award here in Prince George is particularly significant because this is where I did my first container seedling field work and established a number of trials with Walters’ bullets, Ontario tubelings, other containers, styro-plugs, bareroot and transplants in the Buckhorn Burn, Cluculz Lake at Bednesti, McLeod Lake, Purden Lake, the Bowron and McGregor. The McGregor site is, I believe, also the location of the first 2+0 container stock in the province. We also did pilot nursery testing at Red Rock. In fact, the first little demonstration container nursery in this Region was located just inside the Red Rock Nursery gate, where the PRT office was located until recently. I remember Rolf Hellenius, then Nursery Manager at Red Rock, and John Revel, then Regional Research Officer working out of Red Rock, leaning over the fence, and hinting in a good natured kind of way, what is he trying to prove, those small seedlings, they’ll never work, but the small seedlings got better and bigger thanks to all of you, and the rest is history. To get this award this year is significant for another reason. This summer, it is 30 years ago since we planted the first 100,000 styro-plug seedlings ever in British Columbia, at a site near McBride Lake close to Houston, BC. They were 211’s, lodgepole pine, seedlot 1427 planted straight from the blocks, which we burned after we were done – you should have seen the smoke (wouldn’t do that today). I almost killed all those seedlings, just prior to the long weekend in May of that year (1970), with two heavy applications of 21-0-0 (ammonium sulfate) in one week in the PFC greenhouse. For a while it looked as if the styroblock program was going to be off to a very bad start. However, after much leaching, they recovered, and grew into fine seedlings with secondary needles (a very brutal and risky way to induce secondary foliage) and developed into a fine plantation, grown in styroblocks with no ribs and no copper, and I bet the roots and root form are just fine. As many of you undoubtedly know, Jim had started out to further develop the Walters’ bullet system. Jack Walters, a Forestry Professor at UBC, had envisaged a planting system in which the seedling contained in a Walters’ bullet and a planting gun were really two integral components of the same planting implement. This was done all in the interest of improving planting productivity and, ultimately and hopefully, mechanized planting. A number of prototype planting machines were in fact developed. However, it became quickly apparent that the forestry community was not very accepting of root systems encased in plastic bullet type clamshells. To address this skepticism, we started to extract some seedlings from their bullets and planted them as bullet plugs. Although the early differences in survival and growth were only slight, there was much greater acceptance of this approach to the planting of seedlings grown in containers. Bullets were not great containers for extracting seedlings from, however. So a new container, the "Styroblock", specifically designed for the production of plugs was developed late in 1969 and the first blocks were molded early in 1970. Some features of the bullet system were retained. Bullets were held in metal racks of 48 bullets each. The first styroblocks "2" or 211 were molded in sections of four quarter blocks with, guess what, 192 cavities (4x 48). Later, the blocks were made longer and held 240 (5 x 48) cavities. The styroblock cavity shape, taper and volume (2.5 cubic inches) were also very similar to the bullet. The shape of the bottom of the styroblock cavity with a gradual taper to the drainage hole and vertically ribbed cavities (introduced in 1973) were unique in the container seedling nursery business at the time, and contributed significantly to the success of the BC/CFS Styroblock Reforestation System. During the first few years, seedlings were sent to the field in quarter (styro)blocks and extracted by the planters (one by one), as they were planting. After some testing, carried out by our then Forest Economist, Alan Vyse, in our Group, extraction, grading and packaging of plugs at the nursery was adopted in 1973. They were exciting and fun times those first ten years. While we had grand plans and dreams, I don’t think that any of us really believed that development of the Styroblock System would ultimately lead to the almost total abandonment of bareroot in BC, which, more recently, has also happened elsewhere in Canada. In fact, to appease the bareroot fraternity, which became quite defensive at times, we would euphemistically talk only about supplementing the existing methods and went through the phase of a large plug transplant program. However, deep down we believed and knew that we were developing a new method of growing seedlings in BC that would ultimately replace most, if not all, of the seedling production system that was in use at the time. The success of the BC container seedling system is attributable to many factors, including: a unique combination of the right personalities of quite a number of people on both the federal and provincial side; we started in the best climate in the country, Victoria, and were able to grow seedlings that were larger and of better quality than they were growing anywhere else in the country; we did not try to grow multiple crops in the same facility in the same year; I also believe that our very limited budgets stimulated creativity and innovation. For example, my early budgets, to spend a good part of 4 to 5 months in Prince George doing season of planting studies and assessments, and which included travel costs for locally hired labour, assistants from our lab in Victoria and myself, and materials was, as I recall, about $3,000. However, that was when the Canadian dollar was still a dollar and not a dollarette, as it is today. Notwithstanding the success and the satisfaction and the fun, the time had come in 1977 to get more directly involved with the application in MOF nurseries of what we had learned in the first ten years of our testing and development work. My new employer promptly gave me responsibility to carry on with the organizing work of the International Root Form Symposium that Jim and I had undertaken just prior to my departure from the CFS. The Symposium, to look at and discuss root form of container and bareroot after planting was held in 1977 with proceedings published in 1978. After proposing a workshop on Botrytis, which was a very major problem in container seedling culture in those days, we eventually had a Nursery Pest Management workshop at the Mesachie Lake Research Station at Cowichan Lake. Subsequently, and reflecting the contents of that workshop, Jack Sutherland and I co-authored the first BC Nursery Pest Handbook. The workshop also provided me with my first introduction to Wayne Gates, who was one of my invited speakers at the workshop, and who became a career-long friend and colleague. I still recall that Jack Long, a highly respected BC nursery manager – now probably about 90 years old, stood up at the end of that workshop and said: "if bareroot had had as much support and research as container stock, it would have been just as successful". And, although I, as an ardent believer and promoter of container seedling production and planting don’t really believe that, who knows – there is always a chance (albeit very small) that he may have been right. As a result of Royal Forestry Commissioner Peter Pearse’s recommendation that the Government should consider allowing private nurseries to participate in forest seedling production, the future of nurseries in the province and my career took dramatic turns. The private nursery program really set the stage for the tremendous expansion of the planting program that took place in the eighties. Fortified with contracts, private nurseries could readily secure funds to build greenhouses and undertake expansion, which was difficult to do for the MOF in the face of budget limitations. So it was in all the stakeholders’ interests to pave the way for a private nursery program that would be successful. That was certainly my belief and that of my superiors in the MOF, including my immediate supervisors and Deputy Minister, Mike Apsey. The program had to be successful if reforestation was to expand, and it was successful because of the collective effort and good will of everybody involved, the nursery managers and their employees in both the public and private sectors, the Nursery Admin Officers, the Scientists and the Pest Clinic at the CFS, the Silviculture Branch staff, MOF Regional staff and the more senior levels in the Ministry, and last but not least, the forest companies, who were and are the recipients of the stock produced under that program. Although my colleagues in PRT occasionally chide me in a good-natured way when they ask, "Why did you award our competitors all those contracts?", I am very grateful to all of you for having been able to build the private nursery program together with you. It was a great experience. As seedling production expanded and more players became involved, it was clear that the forest nursery sector would benefit from the formation of a Nursery Association that would provide a forum for the exchange of technical information. As a founding member of the FNABC, I am therefore very pleased to be given the Green Timbers Award at this, our 20th Annual Meeting. The last and most recent chapter in my career, saw me enter the private nursery sector in 1988, and become a businessman at a relatively late age, when Charlie Johnson got the idea to form a private employee-owned company, PRT, and buy six nurseries from the Government. To have witnessed the effort and commitment of a group of former Government and other employees to make their company a success has been a rare privilege. Through the course of our company’s relatively short history, we have benefited tremendously not only from the major contribution of those employees who came with us at the outset, but also from the effort and experience of those who joined us later from the outside, including John Kitchen, PRT’s Vice President and General Manager, several of our Nursery Managers, many other employees, and external advisors. PRT is now a mature, accomplished and public company with 13 locations throughout Canada. It has been an incredible ride. I am grateful to Charlie for inviting me to join PRT in 1988 and to the PRT employees for making the dream come true. Having had the opportunity to travel extensively, I am firmly convinced that the Styroblock System and the forest nursery industry in BC and western Canada are the best anywhere. Let’s challenge ourselves to become even better and believe that we can be world leaders in this field. As President Reagan once said, "there is no telling what you can accomplish when you are willing to give others the credit". So I thank especially my wife Audrey for giving me my space to pursue my career and my professional dreams and aspirations and putting up with my many absences from home. I thank all of you for supporting me and working with me over the years and thereby enabling me to receive this award. Thank you.