The uprooter, a boom-mounted device fitted to a harvester, uproots seedlings from the ground.
"Mechanical uprooting means removing coppice with the roots," said Jyri Schildt, chief of forest management at UPM Forest.
"It will reduce the number of new shoots, meaning that it often will no longer be necessary to make any pre-commercial thinning. At many sites, you may get straight from uprooting to first commercial thinning."
It allows UPM to carry out mechanical uprooting when the ground is not frozen.
The uprooter’s working period from May to October is longer than the manual cleaning period between midsummer and late August, lightening the workload during the busy midsummer forestry season.
Mechanical uprooting has been developed and tested in North Karelia, the home of Pentin Paja, the company that manufactures the uprooters.
Next summer, UPM will use three machines equipped with an uprooter in North Savonia, as well as around a dozen machines across the whole of Finland. The number of uprooters is expected to increase rapidly over the next few years.
