MECABIOFOR

The global area of specific cultures for forest biomass (short rotation coppices, very short rotation coppices and semi-dedicated stands) is strongly increasing because energy companies, agricultural and forestry cooperatives, pulp companies have been setting up new plantations with over 1000 ha per year during these last years. The traditional and manual methods that prevailed until now, from the production of plants in nursery to the biomass harvest, is no longer possible: the costs are too high (especially for planting and harvesting), current techniques are not adapted to high planting density (density of 2 to 10 times greater than conventional forest plantations), furthermore the industry is facing a lack of manual workforce. Finally, the mechanization of these operations and its integration into specific crop management seems a promising way to reduce costs and facilitate the work (ergonomic of workstations), while taking into account the environment preservation (soil, stand ...). The international state of the art and the field trials carried out by forestry cooperatives or FCBA highlight the inadequacy of most existing machines, mainly foreign, whether for planting, weeding and harvesting. Therefore MECABIOFOR aims to create innovative tools to foster the development of lignocellulosic biomass crops (SRC, VSRC, semi-dedicated plantations) by ensuring their economic viability through technological innovations for planting, weeding and harvesting of these stands. The development of appropriate tools, combining both lightness, mechanical strength, accuracy and reduced cost is at each stage a technological challenge. The sum of these improvements represents a significant technological leap for strongly reducing the cost of production of forest biomass in these dedicated cultures. To meet this objective, MECABIOFOR will be carried out over a period of 36 months and includes: - Industrial partners (4 forestry cooperatives grouped under the umbrella of UCFF, Smurfit Kappa Comptoir des Pins, Tembec R & D Kraft), - A public research partner (Cemagref), specialized in research concerning mechanical engineering, - The industrial forest-based sector’s technical center (FCBA), which has over 30 years experience on dedicated and semi-dedicated biomass crops, which will involve outsourcing to an agricultural cooperative (InVivo). In addition to the tasks of project management (task 1) and communication of the results (task 5), tasks 2 and 3 are intended to remove technological barriers from planting to biomass harvest. In this purpose, close collaboration will be conducted among field practitioners, with their experiences and their technical, economic, environmental and ergonomic expectations, and scientists providing scientific expertise. Many trials of existing materials, then design and tests of new machines are planned in these tasks. An economic and environmental synthesis, through a cycle analysis (LCA), will be performed in task 4 that will include the results of the two previous tasks. This task, which involves all the project partners, will provide a global technical vision on the developed machineries and the new biomass crop managements, in order to coordinate the different stages to reach the final economic gain.