2024 Season in Review
At the end of the 2023 season, Leader Silviculture started a tradition of reflecting on our previous season. Now, as the 2024 season comes to a close, we thought it was time to keep the tradition going and provide our thoughts on the season.
2024 was Leader’s largest season to date. We had our largest team so far, planted the most trees we ever have, and started providing new services that will allow us to continue extending our season further. In this article, we’ll break down some of the numbers we saw this year, provide our thoughts on the season, and provide you with some goals for the 2025 season.
The Numbers:
2024 was our biggest season to date by several metrics. In total, we planted roughly 6.5M trees, which was a significant jump from our 2023 record of four million. This doesn’t even include our fall plant, where we will plant another 225k trees. We worked on six projects, which was fewer than the 19 we did in 2023. This year’s projects were larger, however, with one job spreading over four locations. In total, our team covered nearly 6000 hectares of land, which is another record of ours.
In total, we hired roughly 130 people for the 2024 season, up nearly 40 people from 2023. On average, our employees made 5-10% more per day than in previous years. More importantly, however, this year was longer than 2023, with planters working from Mid-March to Mid-July this year. Adding another three weeks for our fall plant, our planting season alone was nearly five months long.
2024’s brushing season has been strong, but slightly smaller than previous years. We began in mid-August and will likely continue until mid-October, with our team of 15-20 brushing roughly 325 hectares.
Our Thoughts on 2024:
In 2024, We were lucky to have favourable conditions for most of the season. Almost all of our trees were planted in the ideal window, resulting in a very high survival rate for our trees this year. We had a few minor hiccups in our early season due to staffing issues, a problem that the planting industry as whole was facing this year. Unfortunately, in this line of work, a slow week or two can create ripple effects that impact the entire rest of the season, however, our crew bosses and planters did a great job of getting our jobs and timelines back on track, which we are very thankful for. Feedback from our employees and our clients has echoed our thoughts on the season, which has been that it was a great year for us. Ultimately, these are the only two things that matter, and we are excited to continue that into the 2025 season.
Unfortunately, the favourable conditions for planting were not extended to brushing. The lumber market has slowed considerably over the last few years, which has resulted in budget cuts, especially for brushing. This was combined with forest fire risk delaying our start date, leading to a smaller season than we’re used to. Still, we’ve made the most of the season and consider the work we’ve done to be a success.
To fill in some of the gaps that our brushing season left, we began a new venture that we’re quite excited about: Pole Wrapping. Pole Wrapping is the art of fireproofing electrical poles to prevent damage during fires. This is a new practice that we’re lucky to have gotten in early on, and so far we’re very fond of it. It will allow us to extend the season by quite a bit, with 6-10 people working until November.
Our Outlook for 2025
It’s unclear what next year’s brushing season will look like, but we are feeling optimistic. It will ultimately come down to forest fires and whether the housing market starts ramping up, taking the lumber industry with it. As always, we plan to do as much brushwork as we can, but only time will tell how much is available.
We’re very excited to continue our pole-wrapping work. This is an area that we believe shows promise over the next several years, and has the added benefit of not relying on weather conditions, like brushing.
2024 was one of our best years for maintaining high-quality work throughout the entire season. With the highly technical nature of our planting work, however, we will always strive to improve quality measures, season after season. Although we do our best to make it clear how stringent our standards are to our team each year, there are always a few planters who it’s their first years with us, that don’t quite understand the extent that we mean. In 2025, we plan to do a better job of ensuring that everyone fully understands our quality standards prior to their first day, through better team communication in the early season and more detailed training measures. With that said, we are overall proud of our quality this year and hope to continue this momentum into future seasons.
So far for 2025, we’ve secured close to 5 Million trees, and are continuing to bid on additional work in the early and late season. We will send an official invite to apply in October when we have a better idea of what will be in store for the season, so stay tuned for more details.
