DeusDeceptor

In the morning exact numbers of trees are taken before going to work. So you would have (for example) 30 boxes of pine with 21 bundles of 20 trees. So 12600 trees. At the end of the day you do a count of how many bundles remain and work out the difference, then you compare that difference to your planters' reported numbers.

If there is a difference there are a couple of ways to figure out who is doing it. You can shuffle around the crews and see if the problem follows anyone in particular.

This is separate from a related problem where people report accurately how many trees they take out to the block, but instead of planting them, they wait until they are alone and then bury a select amount. To catch people doing this you pretty much have to just spy on people while they work. It can also become apparent if you have planted a piece to a precalculated density with a precalculated number of trees and there is still space unplanted. In this case, someone might be overreporting how much they planted. In my experience those density and area numbers were unreliable, so I'm not sure if that is an effective way to catch people.

I should add that it is usually fairly easy to tell if someone is fudging their numbers. Everyone works together all day long, even if someone might be out of sight for a little bit. You get a sense for how fast everyone works and will know if they all of a sudden are planting more than you without physically planting faster than you out on the block.

edit:

About tree quality. Group managers were responsible for checking quality. So for every block we worked there are a certain amounts of "plots" that needed to be taken. You take a 4 meter cord, stake a point, and then inspect every tree within the radius of that cord from the central point. You check for spacing, species mixture, and individual quality. Then the manager can identify which planter is doing shitty work and go yell at them. I'm not sure what our exact requirements were but I think it was around 95-98 percent had to be acceptable quality trees.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I'm at around 400 thousand. A million in 8 years is very doable.

You plant seedlings. Its basically a baby tree with a hot dog shaped "plug" of the roots and some dirt with nutrients/fertilizers/other stuff.

See here: http://www.evergreenmemories.ca/images/treesonly.jpg

Its all manual, no machine in the world could operate in the kind of terrain you plant trees in. Think 45 degree angle slopes covered in bush/fallen longs/thorn plants/wasp nests. It can be an absolutely brutal job. Or it can be a flat field of basically sand. Just depends on the contract.

The best numbers I put in were 3600 in one day.

Well, yeah. I suppose its all about making that calculation. This can also be a higher level problem. For example, in my last year planting a manager in another part of the company was fired because someone doing survey work found like 1500 trees dumped in a ravine near his work zone. That is SHITTY for the company's reputation.

I was kinda just generalizing about all the work I've done. I worked in north and central BC, around Prince George, Quesnel, Mackenzie, and some other places.