About us
Cawdor Forestry Limited, established in 2002, provides professional forest management services to a wide range of forest owners, covering over 20,000ha of forests in north east Scotland.
Our traditional estate background and client base allows us to understand the need to balance an often wide variety of objectives, explore all options and keep clients informed.
Local & Experienced
We are based locally which allows us to manage and supervise operations intensively.
We have a team of 9 experienced professional staff and very low staff turnover, this helps ensure continuity and an in depth understanding of individual client’s needs.
Transparent Charging & No Conflict of Interest
Our management & supervision costs are transparent; importantly, we are not contractors or timber merchants, and therefore avoid the conflict of interest that this can create.
Effective Forest Planning
We have an excellent track record of achieving Forest Plan & grant scheme approvals, focused on the owner’s objectives. This is due to:
• Effectively identifying (and not avoiding) issues at the outset, exploring options and evolving pragmatic, robust solutions.
• A good relationship with consultees and FCS.
• High quality and concise final presentation of text & maps.
We keep clients abreast of the implications of any changes to the planned scheme, to avoid ‘mission creep’, which potentially moves away from the original budgets and objectives.
Optimising Timber Prices
We are confident that our standing sales achieve the highest prices in the area, because we:
• Competitively tender timber sales, with reliable information, preventing surprises for merchants.
• Deal with site issues before they become a problem.
• Have a close working relationship with merchants, and they know the standards we insist on and supply their better contactors.
Reliable Contractor & Professional Work
We have a close working relationship with a wide range of reliable, quality contractors, and work with a range of other professionals, calling on specialist skills where needed.
Innovative
We take an innovative approach to forest management and strive to incorporate current best practice and developments into our management, including:
• GIS. We were one of the first to utilise desktop GIS into day to day forest management. All forest managers are GIS literate and we employ a full time GIS manager. We have actively evolved our systems and have just introduced the latest version of our forest management GIS/database – at the heart of our detailed management planning.
• Weevil control. Over the years we have utilised a variety of techniques to ensure effective crop re-establishment and cost savings.
• Ground preparation. We use a range of techniques matched to site & conditions, to reduce the extent, where possible, of the industry standard excavator mounding required with it’s high cost & future site access issues.
• Residue recovery. To allow a range of ground preparation and maximise revenue we have been successfully pushing harvesting residue and solid biomass recovery from harvesting.
• Site Monitoring. We have simple but comprehensive methodology to monitor operations allowing issues to be flagged up early and action taken. We are evolving this to utilise data collected by harvesting machines.
• Forest Certification. We were one of the first to achieve forest certification for the estates that we manage, and ensure that the requirements are met efficiently and properly.