At the heart of the province’s forest nursery

(Berthierville and Saint-Modeste) Mohamed Hamroud enters a cold room. It is here, in this small room, that part of the future of our forests is being prepared: six billion tree seeds are piled up in plastic bins, ready to be sent to a network of nurseries across Quebec.

The head of operations at the Berthier nursery and forest seed centre shows us around this room, which contains seeds of black spruce, pine, larch and several other species that will one day be delivered to a network of six public and 13 private nurseries. “It’s not very big,” he says with a laugh, “but it’s enough to store a quantity of seeds worth nearly $100 million.

This reserve, accumulated over time, may however be tested in the coming years.

With the historic forest fires of summer 2023, 1.1 million hectares of forest burned in intensive protection zones, where the forestry industry comes to harvest wood to make building materials or paper.

Part of this territory is simply inaccessible, and in any case, the province does not have the manpower to replant all of this gigantic territory. Quebec is studying the option of seeding this territory with drones, a technique that nevertheless requires a large quantity of seeds.

A regeneration accident is when a forest does not grow back naturally, for example when a fire burns a young forest that is not mature enough to produce seeds. The territory then risks turning into a forest heath, populated with flowering shrubs and lichens, with only a few trees. For the forestry industry, this is a lost cutting territory. Seeding with a drone could counter this phenomenon.

“It’s better to do some seeding than nothing at all,” explains Sébastien Lefebvre, head of the General Directorate for the Production of Forest Seeds and Plants at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forests.

“No seeds, no plants”

Pressure on the seed bank is also increasing because of the increase in seedling production. After the fires, Quebec increased its budget for reforestation, and aims to plant 40 million more seedlings over five years. But this is only the beginning, because with the spruce budworm epidemic that is raging in almost all regions of Quebec, and the need to plant more trees with Justin Trudeau’s promise of two billion trees, this production will have to continue to grow.

And this is where Sébastien Lefebvre’s team comes in. “No seeds, no plants,” he sums up simply.

The building we are in is old. The Berthierville nursery is celebrating its 115th anniversary.^e anniversary. Before having a public education system and free health services, the province produced and planted its trees. Currently, this sector delivers nearly 140 million seedlings per year. “The forest is part of us, of our history,” emphasizes Mr. Lefebvre.

The chain begins with workers picking pinecones, “like apples,” in nearly 150 seed orchards located in all regions of Quebec. Some of these orchards, called second-generation, offer improved seeds: through crossbreeding, government scientists have selected more vigorous trees. The pinecones are sent to the Berthierville plant, where they are processed.

When we visited, horticultural worker Michael Bailey Rizzi dropped a load of jack pine cones into a giant dryer. “The only way to get them to open is heat,” says Rizzi.^me Colas. Jack pine is a “post-fire” species, and in nature, its pine cones only open after a forest fire. This is what this machine reproduces.

Once the seeds are collected, they are analyzed and subjected to germination tests. The goal: to avoid losses and ensure that each seed planted by a nurseryman turns into a plant. The seed center will, however, have to adapt to climate change. It mainly produces spruce and pine seeds, but will have to turn more and more to hardwoods such as hybrid poplar.

Ensure productivity

In Saint-Modeste, in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region, 225 employees work hard, during peak production, to germinate seeds and produce seedlings that will be collected by planters. The province’s largest public nursery took off in the 1980s, when the Quebec government stepped up to produce nearly 300 million seedlings per year. The reforestation objective was dictated in particular by a severe spruce budworm epidemic.

Here too, climate change is forcing Quebec to adapt. The freeze-thaw cycles during the winter wreak havoc, and the plants grow outdoors. In 2023, Radio-Canada reported that 9% of the trees that were to be planted in Quebec that year, or 11.5 million plants, had been destroyed due to extreme weather events.

When passing from The Pressworkers like Yvettes Michaud were sorting the young plants. Those whose roots have frozen are sent to compost. The evaluation is based on several criteria, such as the chances of survival when it is planted in the forest, but especially performance: the forestry industry will not know what to do with a crooked tree or one with several heads, for example. Because the objective of this large chain is above all to ensure the productivity of the Quebec forest, and these trees are destined to be cut down in several decades.