Santa’s reindeer are not the only deer in the northern woods of North America. John Deere customer Sylvain Provost and his partner Jean Pierre Theberge, owners of PTR Enterprise in Fort Nelson, British Columbia, work an area extending from the northern part of that province to the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. And they have their own herd of Deere.

Sylvain and Jean Pierre have been John Deere customers since they first took to the woods in 1996. Today they prepare wood with two 2554 Processors, a 2554 Log Loader, and a 2054 Log Loader. They also own a couple of John Deere construction machines for road building.

“The yard is John Deere,” Sylvain says, and he explains why: “This equipment works really well and has been trouble free. And the service that we have up here from our dealer, Brandt Tractor, is good.”

Being so far up north, PTR is no stranger to working in the cold weather. Their company will grow to more than 70 people during the busy winter months, compared to about 10 or 12 employees and subcontractors in the summer.

“We deal with cold weather all the time,” Sylvain says coolly of the northern climate, where daylight is short-lived and temperatures typically stay below freezing for several months at a time. The average temperature from November through February is –4 degrees Fahrenheit (–20 degrees C). And wind chill will make those temperatures feel several degrees colder still.

“It used to be worse a few years ago,” Sylvain continues. “I think the weather has gotten better, but we still deal with all kinds of conditions.” He adds that the John Deere equipment has warm cabs and no problems running in the cold weather. For PTR, the efficiency of the John Deere machinery has really paid off.

PTR works mainly with spruce and aspen, with some trees measuring up to 36 inches in diameter. Using HTH624 Waratah processing heads, they have been able to maintain very precise lengths of wood and deliver high-quality products to the mills. Sylvain reports that for each of the last several years, the quality and accuracy of PTR’s wood lengths have been 98 percent or better.

“You need a fairly big machine to go through these aspen, which are heavy and big. The machinery is very accurate. You can really depend on these machines.”

Santa isn’t the only one who needs reliable deer to deliver. Working with John Deere equipment for more than a decade, PTR Enterprise has been able to deliver, too.

Sylvain concludes, “We’ve dealt with John Deere for so many years, and look at how many pieces of John Deere that we’ve got here in the yard. That says everything.”

PTR Enterprise is serviced by Brandt Tractor in Fort Nelson, British Columbia.

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