Indagine sull'impiego del trattore nelle utilizzazioni forestali attuate nelle Alpi centro-orientali

A survey was carried out in the Central-east Alps to investigate on the features and on the use of the tractor in forestry. A total of 156 tractors belonging to 96 forest enterprises were checked. Only one forest tractor was found, the other were all agricultural tractors, more or less adapted for forest operations. One third of the tractors is utilised in different activities: a part from the forest operations, they are used in agricultural operations, in road maintenance, mainly during winter time, and in transportation of goods. Two third of the tractors are used basically for forest operations and they belong to enterprises each of them owns more than one tractor. In this context crawler tractors are used too. These tractors perform only forest job and for these reason they can be considered as monovalent machinery. However all the tractors but one are adapted agricultural tractors. The main reason is connected to the cost of the agricultural tractor, that is cheaper than a forest one, and to the performance that is not so different under Alpine working conditions. Taking into an account the information from the survey it seems convenient to address the research efforts toward the adaptation of the existing tractors, emphasising especially the ergonomic and safety features. In such a way it could be possible to manage the machinery cost, maintaining or at least reducing its incidence on the total cost of forest operations.