Brazilian Silviculture Mechanization Index Survey - 2022/2023
This survey conducted by the Cooperative Program on Forest Mechanization and Automation (PCMAF), which is part of the Forest Research Institute (IPEF), continues the original plan from 2015, which was subsequently reformulated in terms of methodology and objectives, resulting in its first publication which contained data collected between 2018/2019, followed by the 2020/2021 edition. This current edition led to the participation of 20 forest-based companies, all associated with IPEF, including 117 people who contributed in some way to collecting and organizing the data.
As of this edition, the report will be published in Portuguese and English to reach more global readers. A new development this year is the inclusion of data collected on forest fire monitoring in response to a request from the participating companies. Additionally, this comparison is related to monitoring and not firefighting, with one quarter done manually with staffed fire towers and the other using autonomous systems capable of identifying fires.
According to this recent publication,
• Brazilian silviculture accounts for about 18,500 employees, with nearly 3,000 employees involved in the operation, such as tractor operators, truck drivers, or staff operating other machinery.
• According to this survey, 45% of the tractor fleet (2,136) belongs to forest companies, indicating the impact of service-providing companies in carrying out these silviculture activities has decreased during the last two years.
• The forest companies have a total of 3,378 implements to carry out silviculture activities, produced by 126 manufacturers. But 50.5% of this total number was produced by only eight manufacturers.
It´s essential to notice the significant difference in the silviculture mechanization index for Eucalypt and Pine plantations in Brazil. The survey further provides mechanisation levels (manual, semi mechanised, and automated) for various silviculture activities such as soil preparation, planting, weed control, and pest control.
Refer to the complete 2022/2023 edition, in Portuguese and English, at the IPEF website: www.ipef.br/publicacoes/
