Post: Montigny’s dual-purpose Buffalo is an effective and productive forestry machine

August 23, 2024

Montigny’s dual-purpose Buffalo is an effective and productive forestry machine

Montigny, the largest privately owned and integrated timber company in Southern Africa, has augmented its in-house harvesting team by adding a Ponsse Ergo harvester and a dual-purpose Buffalo forwarder-skidder.

Montigny Investments Limited is a timber company in Eswatini. Andrew le Roux, CEO of Montigny, comments on Meta, “What makes us stand out from our competitors primarily is how we add value to every part of the tree. We can extract and utilise up to 95% of the tree’s value because of the breadth of our markets”.

The company’s Usutu Forest Products owns over 55,000 hectares of plantations with an Montigny’s dual-purpose Buffalo is an effective and productive forestry machine annual softwood timber supply of approximately 800,000 tonnes.

Montigny’s Operations Manager at Usutu, Jonathan Gower, says their single softwood thinning application combines line and selective harvesting at 12 to 13,5 years. The softwood thinning’s annual volume comprises roughly 150,000 tonnes, of which about 80% is mechanised cut-to-length (CTL) operations.

Felling is done with various machines, mostly feller-bunchers or excavator-mounted harvesters. In steeper areas, motor-manual felling is still predominant.

While Montigny employs harvesting contractors, it strategically decided to have some thinning operations volume in-house. Gower explains that the general advantages of in-house operations include benchmarking operational standards and costs, maintaining a good level of operational skill within the staff, and directly managing operations.

The mechanisation drive for safety and improved efficiencies led them to Chris Odendaal and his company, MTS Parts, in Mbombela in the neighbouring South African province of Mpumalanga. MTS Parts is the principal accredited Ponsse dealer for Southern Africa.

Ordering the Ponsse Ergo harvester was straightforward. “The Ponsse Ergo is one of our best-selling machines,” says Odendaal. “It is a dependable option for thinning and regeneration harvesting in Eucalyptus and Pine plantations. The Ergo is renowned for performing well in difficult and steeper working areas”.

However, Gower says they faced a dilemma when it came to extraction. They needed a forwarder for their softwood CTL regime and a skidder for tree-length harvesting and thinning operations.

“We discussed our needs with Chris and decided the ideal solution was the Ponsse Buffalo forwarder with standard timber bunks and a clam bunk attachment”, says Gower.

“The clam-bunk attachment gives the unit additional flexibility. It was strategically selected to balance the system volume where the forwarder could extract other commodities, and it has also been applied in eucalyptus tree-length extraction. The conversion of the forwarder bunk attachments can be done in roughly an hour”.