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Australian Forest Industry Innovator

Ken Padgett overcomes adversity and consistently reinvents with innovative thinking, hard work and a life-long passion for the industry.

— Paul Iarocci

Ken Padgett
Ken Padgett’s logging operations are centred around the picturesque village of Myrtleford in northeastern Victoria. The landscape is characterized by broad valleys and steep slopes – textbook yarding and cable assist country. Ken is a second-generation industry veteran. He and his two sons, Oliver and Kenneth operate logging, site prep, cartage, and waste fibre processing businesses in Victoria and Tasmania under Padgett Group Pty Ltd.

Ken grew up in the industry and started out on his own 44 years ago in his mid-twenties. His father Andy, who passed in 2013, was an outsize figure in the Tasmanian timber industry. He was a strong advocate of Tasmania’s hardwood industry and a champion for sustainable forest management. Andy was well respected inside and outside of the industry, and on both sides of the debate and turmoil surrounding Tasmania’s native hardwood logging in decades past. He has been formally recognized many times for his extensive contributions to logging and forest management. He received the Australia Day Tasmania Award in 1987. He was the first recipient of the World Forestry Day Award in 1995, for outstanding and innovative contributions to Tasmania’s forest industry. Andy was also awarded the prestigious Australian Medal, the country’s highest civilian honour in 1997, for service to the forestry industry, sustainable forest management, and the promotion of innovations in environmentally sound harvesting, transport and replanting techniques.

TO THIS DAY THERE’S AN AREA UP ON MOUNT BARROW THAT IS DEDICATED TO DAD. THERE’S A FOREST INTERPRETATION CENTRE AND IT’S ALL AROUND THE INDUSTRY AND ITS HISTORY, AND WHAT DAD DID IN THE INDUSTRY.


— Ken Padgett

Andy moved to Tasmania in 1946. An enduring legacy and three generations of successful business operations hinged on happenstance and poor weather. “He was a sheep shearer,” Ken explains. “He went down to Tassie when he was twenty years old and literally couldn’t get a job because it was wet. They couldn’t shear the sheep because they couldn’t get them dry so he went into a sawmill and said, ‘I want a job,’ and the mill boss said, ‘Look there’s no jobs here but I got a job up on the mountain stoning roads to get the trucks in and out.’ That literally started his life in the timber industry. Over the next few years he started doing some contracting work, building wooden railways for locomotives that were bringing logs out of the bush to the sawmill.”
The mountain was Mount Barrow, a place that Andy loved and where he developed his skills and knowledge as a timber industry professional. Decades later, he would help to develop an interpretive centre. “To this day there’s an area up on Mount Barrow that is dedicated to Dad. There’s a forest interpretation centre and it’s all around the industry and its history, and what Dad did in the industry,” Ken relates proudly.

Building businesses

Ken’s first business was as an owner-hauler. “I had a truck and started in a small partnership with my brother-in-law,” he says. One year into the venture, Ken bought the business outright. “Very quickly I was working in Tasmania in the hardwood industry, and Dad was a significant contractor down there in those times.”

Early into the venture, Andy was injured on the job, leaving his crew a man down. “That left me in a precarious position because I used to cart the logs off Dad’s job. I decided that I’d go and take his position and put someone else in the truck.” Ken carried on for six years, and in the process grew the business fourfold. With the hardwood logging running well, Ken’s next move was to refocus his efforts on the trucking business, expanding his fleet to eight trucks, and hauling Radiata pine in addition to hardwood. As Ken gained more exposure to Radiata pine operations in Tasmania, an opportunity arose to run a cable logging job at Scottsdale in the northeast of the island. “I really had a passion for cable logging. I was trained by an American guy by the name of Dave Tyler who had been brought out to Australia. I spent twelve months running with him and he taught me a lot.”
The late Andy Padgett
Ken’s father Andy, who passed in 2013, was an outsize figure in the Tasmanian timber industry – a strong advocate of Tasmania’s hardwood industry and a champion of sustainable forest management.
Concurrent to this, Ken was developing designs for folding skel trailers with Graeme Elphinstone. “It was a pretty interesting time. I formed a business with two other guys called Tamarack Transport. We won a contract to cart 400 000 tonnes of logs a year to the newsprint mill in Boyer, Tasmania. One minute we had eight trucks and the next minute I think we had 23 trucks between the two operations. We expanded our business with folding skel trailers because we needed to get into some tricky situations and weather conditions and these trailers enabled us to do that.”

In 1996 Ken started his third venture in northeastern Victoria with Colin McCulloch, based around a Thunderbird TSY 155 swing yarder and TY 40 pole yarder. At the same time, he and his partner were running a large hardwood yarding operation in Tasmania plus a couple of conventional operations in the northeast of the state. From there the partners expanded into hardwood thinning. “It was a courageous thing to do,” says Ken. “And it was the right thing to do. We learned a lot.” Then came the Tasmania pulp market crash in 2009.

Resiliency

“I was going along really well until the pulp mill debacle in Tasmania. And that cost a lot of contractors their existence and their livelihood. We were committed heavily into this and we went from heroes to zeroes pretty quickly. We tried valiantly to continue but there was no market for the wood. I knew that we had no way of continuing the hardwood business.”

Down but not out, Ken had a couple of things going for him. He still had a viable cartage business in Tasmania. And he still had the Victoria contract. “We had a lot of people here that I was pretty keen to keep going. I was able to call on every friend I had and every acquaintance I’d met to keep me going. We went through some pretty tough times. At one stage, I was probably within one pay of going under, I reckon.”
L822D Tigercat on yarding operation
A typical yarding site in northeastern Victoria. The high rotation wrist provides precisely angled tree placement for the yarder with much less track travel required.
Ken negotiated with Hancock (HVP Plantations) for a new three-year contract. It went well and at the end of the three years he successfully negotiated a fixed ten-year contract which allowed him to upgrade some aging equipment, including replacing the old Thunderbird yarder with a new 124 Madill in 2016. Ken relocated to Wodonga and then Myrtleford, running the 78 000 cubic metre operation while his two sons, Oliver and Kenneth managed the cartage business in Tasmania. “Oliver and Kenneth are extremely capable managers,” says Ken. Together, he and his sons own Padgett Group Pty Ltd as a family business.

Prior to 2016, Ken had never owned a Tigercat machine and it was at this time that he purchased his first, an L830 model equipped with a 2000 series shear and a 340 degree wrist. “It was brilliant. We did some really tough work with that machine because it was on the job well before winches,” Ken explains. The terrain continued to get steeper and steeper. Three years later, Ken made the decision to winch assist a buncher for the first time.

I’M VERY HAPPY THAT WE HAVE THE ASSOCIATION WITH TIGERCAT AND GLAD WE CHOSE TO GO THAT WAY. I THINK IT’S BEEN A VERY GOOD PRODUCT FOR US. WE LOOK AFTER IT, BUT IT LOOKS AFTER US.


The benefits that came with the winch assist technology were primarily focused around safety and reduced environmental impact. “Ground disturbance is zero and there was an unbelievable leap in terms of safety,” Ken explains. “It means we’re going to more difficult areas. But you’re taking guys off the ground that used to hand fall. We used to hand fall probably 5% of what we did. Now everything is cut with the bunchers.”

By this time, Ken was running the clear fall yarding operation, and a conventional steep slope thinning operation that utilized bunchers, skidders, and processors at roadside. He purchased another Tigercat buncher – this time an L822D – for the thinning operation, and soon followed that up with an LH822D mated to a Tigercat 575 to process logs on the yarding job. “That has just been an unbelievable machine. Four years in now and it’s still a front-line machine."

Winch assist thinning

At the end of the thinning contract, HVP decided it wanted to leave the branches and tops in the stand. Ken explains that the contract extension turned into a tender process. He had some new ideas and figured he could process at the stump with winches. “So we did some trials because we already had a ten tonne winch machine. We put the harvester on a winch and we knew pretty quickly what that would do. Then we put the forwarder on a winch to see how that went. We did some trials up and down steep hills. We pretty quickly worked out a potential package. So, we put it to Hancock to change to a fully winched assisted harvesting and forwarding operation.”

Ken won the tender and then went about specifying the right harvester configuration for the job. “I just thought 822, it’s going to be an 822. We also spoke with Onetrak salesman, Shane Ricardo about the possibility of getting a narrow track frame. I thought an 822 with a narrow track frame and an extension boom would be a very smart thing, running the 425 Waratah head. The machine arrangement has turned out to be very successful, and along with the 18-tonne forwarder and the T-Winches, it makes for a very well-balanced system.” The extra boom length allows the operator to reach deep into the stand on either side of the row, allowing up to 20 metre out row spacing.
LH822D with telescopic boom reaching into timber stand
An LH822D harvester working unassisted on a steep slope row thinning operation. Normally the machines are cable assisted.
Ken’s next move was to look at replacing some of the aging equipment on the clear fell operation. “With a cable operation, everything has to be reliable. Once you have one machine down, you’re affecting six or seven other machines. The downhill spiral is very quick.” Ken bought the L822D that is running currently on the yarder operation, equipped with a 2000 series shear and 340 degree wrist. Ken deploys his older Tigercat bunchers on silviculture and fire salvage jobs.

Although Ken prefers not to rely on high hour machines for his primary operations, he takes some comfort in the stories about 40,000- hour Tigercats. “It gives you a nice feeling to know that you’ve got something that’s going to last. Onetrak gives us great service down here. The machines are so reliable. It’s filters, and more filters, and more filters, and occasional updates. We’re not replacing massive componentry in them.”

Shearing saw timber

From a North American perspective, one of the unique aspects of Ken’s clear fall operation is the use of a shear head in mature radiata pine saw timber. He says the shear can handle up to a 50 cm (20 in) tree with a single cut without difficulty. “When you’re falling on 30 to 40 degree slopes with a hot saw, the saw is living in the dirt. So unless you’re cutting a stump that is a foot high at the back, and that makes it 18 inches at the front, you are continuously cutting dirt and rocks. By cutting the trees at ground level, not only is the fibre recovery higher, it makes the successive tasks easier. When you’re cabling them out, for instance, you’re not tangled up in stumps because they are cut reasonably low all the time.”
L822D with 2000 series Tigercat shear on a hillside.
Cable assisted L822D equipped with a Tigercat 2000 series shear. “When you’re falling on 30 to 40 degree slopes with a hot saw, the saw is living in the dirt,” says Ken. The shear cuts at ground level without creating excessive wear from sand and rock. The result is greatly increased fibre recovery and lower maintenance compared with a disc saw.
Ken estimates that the processor cuts off somewhere between 50 and 75 mm (under 3 in maximum) from the butt of each stem. HVP is quite strict on the amount of butt trim and the logs are going to a veneer mill. “I’m not the only one using a shear in this forest. Everyone that has a buncher is using a shear. There’s plenty of damage that seems to go into the stump, but there’s not much damage passing up into the log. It might be particular to radiata, I don’t know.” Ken says that the shears have been reliable, with low maintenance and no structural issues.

The high rotation wrist provides a lot of flexibility on steep slopes in tree placement for the yarder with much less track travel required. The operator can work more quickly and efficiently with the ability to precisely place the stems parallel to the tracks or at whatever angle is required for the yarder setup.

IT GIVES YOU A NICE FEELING TO KNOW THAT YOU’VE GOT SOMETHING THAT’S GOING TO LAST. ONETRAK GIVES US GREAT SERVICE DOWN HERE. THE MACHINES ARE SO RELIABLE. IT’S FILTERS, AND MORE FILTERS, AND MORE FILTERS.


“I’m very happy that we have the association with Tigercat and glad we chose to go that way. I think it’s been a very good product for us. We look after it, but it looks after us. I met Ken [MacDonald] about seven years ago and was pretty impressed with him as a person. And, you know, he’s had these battles, just like all of us, so I guess I related to that a bit. I love his energy and his commitment to what he does. I think I have a similar commitment.”

During the past eight years, Padgett Group Pty Ltd has tripled in size. The company employs about 90 people across the two states. In Tasmania, the company has a long-term relationship with Timberlands Pacific, hauling 1,5 million tonnes of logs and chips annually, and in addition providing extensive site preparation services. “So that’s a big part of our business, but we also take all the wood waste from the sawmill that we cart to. We take the sawdust, the dry shavings, the pine bark, every piece of waste that we can get our hands on, and we convert that into garden mulches, cattle bedding and chicken bedding. It’s come a long way from an owner-driver at 24 years old.”

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