PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — A new forestry training program at Northern Maine Community College is promising to help older workers adapt, and train a new generation for a new era of logging.
In January, classes start for the mechanized logging operations certificate at NMCC and two other community colleges, where current logging workers and students interested in forestry will be able to train on high-tech harvesting equipment that is becoming the norm in an increasingly automated industry.
The new program “fulfills a great need that exists with our industry at the present time,” said Dana Doran, executive director of the Professional Logging Contractors of Maine, noting that the average age of the state’s logging industry workforce is 55.
The program has been funded with $1 million over two years from the state’s Put Me To Work law and with donated equipment from Milton CAT, including a feller buncher, grapple skidder and stroke delimber, all valued at $1.2 million. Students will learn about forestry management, harvesting best practices and the technology in the classroom, simulate the equipment and then receive live-training. The equipment will rotate between NMCC, Eastern Maine Community College and Washington County Community College.
Even though Maine’s pulp and paper mills are languishing, with two recent closures announced, the forest products industry as a whole should have a bright future in Maine, especially in Aroostook County, said NMCC president Tim Crowley.
“We live in the wood breadbasket of the Northeast,” Crowley said. “Although we’re seeing a downturn in the pulp, long-term the industry is quite strong. Demand for wood pellets and wood chips is growing.”
Lumber is also a robust market, Crowley said, pointing to the J.D. Irving sawmill in Ashland, which last year received a $30 million renovation. The mill produces softwood lumber that’s sold to retail customers across the East Coast, and it’s representative of the new industrial technology that has evolved amid the decline of traditional manufacturing.
“If you look at the new mill in Ashland and see the automated systems, you see some of the most current technology at work in the lumber industry,” Crowley said. “The people that maintain and run those systems have a different skill set than what they might have trained for 10 years ago.” Likewise, the mechanical logging program will train loggers whose work will be much different than in decades past.
The new forestry program is a part of the community college system’s aim to track the changes in the economy with training in new technology, such as precision machining and engineering drafting.
Advanced mechanization of Maine’s forestry industry “is important if we’re going to compete with other parts of the country and other parts of the world,” Crowley argued. “The region has to embrace technology.”
