RTS Forestry’s Dougie Elgar is part of a new crop of young talent rising through the ranks of the industry. Forestry Journal caught up with him on site in Perthshire to learn about his approach to harvesting and his views on the challenges facing the sector.
Blackford Farm Estates in Perthshire is an interesting place to spend a morning.
Go Googling for information on this sprawling 8,000-hectare estate, owned by the wealthy Al Tajir family, and you might turn up stories about its abandoned farm buildings, its premium Wagyu cattle, the luxury ‘ghost’ golf course which has yet to welcome a single player or its springs of fresh, clean water which is bottled and sold as Highland Spring, one of Scotland’s most successful food-and-drink brands. Enlightening stuff.
But Forestry Journal did not come to Blackford to interview publicity-shy billionaire Mahdi Al Tajir about his plans for the area (we suppose that will have to wait for another day). We came to meet Dougie Elgar, harvesting manager for RTS Forestry.
Based in the company’s Crieff office, Dougie is responsible for buying, harvesting and selling timber from Perthshire all the way down to Yorkshire, while colleague Harry Wilson looks after the north-east. Between them they look after a huge number of sites across Scotland and the north of England for the firm’s growing harvesting division.
Blackford is one of RTS’s managed estates and the stand being felled on the day of Forestry Journal’s visit is within the long-term forestry plan.
Comprising around 5,500 tonnes of Sitka and a little Norway spruce, it was being clear-felled by FMC Harvesting, a contractor with whom RTS has enjoyed a long working relationship going back well over 20 years.
It’s a site that has presented a few different challenges.
“Birds are always an issue at Blackford, so we brought ecologists in before we started the job just to make sure we were clear,” said Dougie. “Water is the big concern. We’re in the Highland Spring catchment area, so we have to be really careful with regard to water control and run-off and stopping machines where we need to, to prevent any contamination. Weather like this is great.
"We want to be harvesting in the summer when we’re making the least disturbance, which we seem to be doing, and hopefully it continues.
“Other than that we’re obviously working on steep slopes, which FMC is doing a great job with. It’s amazing what these machines can achieve, going up with the climbing tracks on and then making roads appropriately throughout the woods. It’s going really well.”
Based in Stirling, FMC Harvesting is a family business run by Finlay McMartin. At Blackford, his brother Peter was at the controls of a John Deere 1270G harvester, with their father, Peter Sr, operating a (somewhat vintage) 1410 forwarder to bring the cut timber off the slope. Finlay then used a Case IH 300 tractor with 15-tonne-payload trailer to take the timber the rest of the way down the hill, via the estate road, to where wagons could quickly and conveniently collect it.
The timber was headed for a few different destinations, which explained the variety of lengths.
“Normal logs will be going to the national mills, mainly Windymains (Glennon Brothers). I’ve got 1.9s going down to Forest Garden, I’ve got 2 .5 bar, 2 .5 pallet, 3m pulp, 3m chip and some posts. And the chipwood will go to our yard, which is only 10 miles away. You can’t do much better than that in terms of local timber, can you?”
Are the contractors happy about being asked to cut so many sizes on a steep slope? Not always, but Dougie said they understood that the more products cut for these different markets, the quicker it could leave the site.
“Before I came along, we really only ever cut three sizes,” he explained. “It quickly occurred to me that if we wanted to win jobs, we’d have to cut a myriad of sizes in order to get our final figure above everyone else. So since I’ve been here, whether the guys are happy about it or not, they usually have no less than five sizes on every job. It’s all about playing with the numbers to make it work and get the best return for the client.
“We’re fortunate that the markets have come up from where they were last year and the year before when it was a real struggle to get timber away. Now it’s fairly easy and cutting all these products only helps that.”
Dougie is part of a fresh young crop of talent coming up through the industry’s ranks, encouraged by RTS Forestry as it continues to grow its operations across Scotland. As with many people opting for forestry as a career, his interest was sparked close to home.
“My dad was an estate manager in Yorkshire and always had an interest in forestry,” he said. “He needed some trees taken down on a small clearfell site, so I got involved with the hand cutting.
"This was just as I was leaving school. And I just loved it so much that I carried on with it. So from about 17 to 19 years old I worked as a hand cutter. I had an older chap with me the whole time, teaching me the dos and don’ts of the industry, and that really got me fascinated with it all.
“Then I had a bit of a gap year, went travelling, and when I came back realised forestry was what I wanted to do, so I applied to Cumbria University.”
It was through the forest management course at Cumbria that Dougie first learned about RTS Forestry, one of the leading independent forest management and contracting organisations for Scotland and the north of England, currently celebrating its 40th year in operation.
He joined the company in his placement year, learning under the supervision of then harvesting manager Matt Kelly, now a timber buyer for Bedmax.
“He was very patient with me, more patient than I think I’ll ever be, and taught me a hell of a lot about the industry and how to deal with people,” said Dougie. “It was a really good start. Even though it was just a placement year, I really showed willing and wanted to do well, and I think about five or six months in I went for my first tender and won it, which was great.
“Then, towards the end, Matt went on paternity leave and I was left to run 11 harvesting sites, while still a student. I thought if I could manage that then I could probably come back and do the job. So after going back to uni to finish the course I returned to RTS, doing a couple of days a week as well as some contract hand cutting. Eventually I went full-time at RTS, securing the role of harvesting manager at the Crieff office.”
Trying to sum up the role isn’t easy.
“It involves a myriad of things,” he said. “I buy timber from standing sales, roadside, go for tenders. We have our own estate work. I do farm jobs and I travel all over, going from Fettercairn up in Aberdeenshire, all the way down to sort of Northumberland and Yorkshire, looking for jobs, basically being a hungry timber buyer.
“We move a couple of thousand tonnes a week. I’m quite happy with how we’ve progressed since I’ve been with the company. It’s a lot of work and it’s constant, but talk to any harvesting manager and they’ll say the same. You can’t stop, but if you’re hungry for it, I think it’s a great job.”
As if on cue, Dougie’s phone rang, as it would many times in the course of our visit, and he stepped away to answer it. This provided an opportune moment for a chat with RTS Forestry’s managing director Norman O’Neill, who had popped down to the site to see how we were getting on.
Asked about Dougie’s career path, how he’d found his way into the company, he revealed that it was fairly typical of the new approach RTS is taking to recruitment, which currently presents a major problem for businesses all across the forestry sector.
“Recruitment across the whole industry is a hugely challenging issue for everyone,” Norman said. “We know we’re not getting the same number of people coming through to the colleges and training in forestry. So we have worked very closely with Inverness, Cumbria and now Bangor University, bringing in students for their gap year and then, where possible, encouraging them to come back, once they’ve finished their studies, to join the company.
“We’ve got a few examples like Dougie in the company now and we’re hoping for more in the future. It’s a bit of a ‘grow your own’ approach, develop the students, letting them go back to finish their studies and then join a company, whether that’s our company or another in a different part of the industry. It’s good to encourage as many of them as we can.”
It is, according to Norman, a model that works and an approach which complements the RTS philosophy, whereby employees, from the very earliest stage of their careers, are encouraged to take ownership of their roles.
He said: “We encourage them to be individuals and to develop their special interests within forestry. If that means moving them from one part of the business to another, we certainly encourage that. It’s important for us.”
Dougie expressed no desire to make a move to a different speciality within forestry – at least no time soon – but he echoed Norman’s comments about RTS staff being given a lot of autonomy and how valuable that had been to him.
He said: “Back when I was on the saw, I was self -employed. And what always appealed to me about RTS is that I’m given a lot of responsibility, for good and bad. It’s on me to address any problems and get them sorted. And there are always people there to call on for help, but being me, I want to do it myself.
“I am in charge of my own sites, of the people that work for me and the relationships I form from that. And I’m given that opportunity every step of the way. Another big thing I like about RTS, coming from the hand-cutting and contracting side, is I like the way we look after our contractors, the way our payments work. That’s a big thing for me too.”
That journey, going from self-employed hand cutter to student to contractor to timber harvesting manager, has provided Dougie with a wealth of experience during his short time in the industry, and offered perspective on many of the challenges with which readers will doubtless be familiar.
One of his chief concerns is that many young people coming to forestry through the path of higher education are not being taught the practical skills and knowledge required for the job of forest management.
“What they teach you it’s like at university isn’t always what it’s like in the industry, especially for forest managers,” he said. “There’s a lot more paperwork and dealing with grants and things like that than they prepare you for. They teach you about proper forestry, but not actually what you’ll do day to day.
“It does worry me, especially on the harvesting side. Harvesting is very much about looking at the money side, the finances and the figures, and there’s not a lot of people getting into forestry for that. They get into it to replant and to do management. I think more education about the practicalities of harvesting would be better. I think we’d maybe get more people in that way, more people interested in finance – because that’s a big part of it – and who don’t mind the more high-pressure environment that comes with it.”
Given that he’s from a younger generation and aims to devote his working life to forestry, it’s Dougie and people like him who will help to shape the future of the industry. With that in mind, he already has a number of concerns about the road ahead.
“One positive thing about working for RTS is that I get to go to the Confor meetings,” he said. “All the bigwigs are there, the really important well-known faces, and then there’s me, just a young harvesting manager. And I get to listen in on the conversations being had.
“There’s a lot of talk about recruitment and the education of machine operators. It’s going to be such an issue going forward. All the guys we rely on are getting older and there’s not a lot of young people coming into it. There’s a lot of talk about ways to address that, which is great, but it feels like there’s not a lot of progress.
“It’s really frustrating when everyone can see what the problems are. Give it five years and I think we’ll really be struggling to find operators.
“I would also like to see a change in perceptions around forestry. My personal opinion is that forestry is an industry and should be appreciated as such. People have conflicting goals and there’s lots of different terms thrown about around carbon etc, but from my point of view, we should be looking at the fact we still import a huge amount of timber.
“We should be looking at expanding our timber resource in the country, how we’re harvesting it and the negative views that are coming up against that.
“The benefits of productive forestry far outweigh any negatives I can see. I’d like to see more education on that for the public and for politicians. It’s important that the government accepts and supports the fact we need these plantations. We need commercial forestry and to support the people working within it. Otherwise, in the future, it will just keep declining and we won’t have people to cut the timber.”
As for what the future holds for Dougie and the path his career may take, we’ll just have to check back in further down the line.
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