Christopher le Roux and Andrew Flavell are business partners in the contract timber harvesting company, Dendotron Contracting (Pty) Ltd. The seeds for Christopher’s career in forestry and timber were almost literally sown by his father, Bruce, when the latter worked in silviculture for a multi-national wood processing group while his son was still at school.
“I learnt a lot from my dad, for which I’m grateful. I started off in silviculture in the Greytown area in 2009 and when a silviculture contract ended, I was approached to do contract timber harvesting, which seemed almost like a natural progression,” he says. “I started off conservatively, working with one Bell 225A Logger and an agricultural tractor and trailer combination, which hauled cut timber from a gum clear-felling operation to roadside depots.”
Through hard work and dedication, Christopher added two more Bell Loggers to his fleet along with more agricultural tractor-trailer combinations. Meeting and exceeding his production targets soon got noticed and the awarding of a thinnings contract in the Giant’s Castle area near the Drakensberg in 2020, led to a partnership with the name of Dendotron Contracting (Pty) Ltd.
“The naming of our company Dendotron happened through us buying a shelf-company of that name and the irony is that ‘Dendo’, in Latin, pertains to an evergreen tree of the Ebony family,” Christopher tells us. “The thinnings contract in the Giant’s Castle area is done on a motor-manual basis with felling and crosscutting by hand and extraction, stacking and loading done mechanically.
“From the outset, we put our trust in Bell 225A Loggers as the industry-standard for this type of timber-handling machine. Not only are they durable with their simple design and quality in build, but they, almost equally importantly, hold their value for a very long time and fetch good prices when sold on.”
Being energetic and ambitious by nature, Christopher and Andrew cast their contract harvesting net beyond South Africa’s borders and landed a thinnings contract in 2024 for the largest timber processing company in neighbouring Eswatini. This contract evolved into a clear-felling contract with the thinnings contract being fully mechanised and the clear-felling contract, motor-manual.
“We had, by this stage, expanded our fleet of mechanised equipment to include excavators with harvesting heads, grapple skidders, forwarders and newer Bell 225F Loggers, although we’re actually using our original Bell 225A Loggers at the thinning contracts in Eswatini,” Christopher says.
“This left us somewhat depleted mechanically at the Giant’s Castle operation, but an efficient solution was soon found.”
Working with Bell Equipment Sales Representative, Keith Milne, from the company’s Customer Service Centre in Pietermaritzburg, Christopher and Andrew enquired about the Bell Skogger as a viable solution to Dendotron’s extraction challenges in their local thinnings operation.
“With Keith’s extensive product knowledge and talking to other Skogger owners, we knew that this was the machine best suited for extraction and indexing at our thinnings operation in KwaZulu-Natal, and we took delivery of such a machine in September 2024,” Christopher recalls.
“Our present Skogger operator comes with skidder experience, and he took to the Bell Skogger smoothly. He is further aided by the client’s harvesting manager, who hails from Mbombela, where he learnt firsthand how to achieve best production figures with this innovative machine.”
“The Bell Skogger is super-efficient and easily bunches small, felled trees that it then extracts effortlessly. When you consider that purpose-built forestry equipment is traditionally very expensive, especially when small volumes of such machines are sold, the Skogger, at less than half the price of a traditional skidder, certainly breaks this mould. The same goes for its fuel consumption at between eight and nine litres an hour and services, which are far more reasonably priced. With all these positives considered, a second Bell Skogger would really see us moving swiftly ahead.”
At Dendotron Contracting’s two operations in Eswatini, the combination of thinnings and clear-felling helps the company to fulfill its production targets. When we visited the clear-felling operation, the need for more mechanisation was soon evident by the sheer volume of gum timber that had been felled and needed to be indexed, stacked and loaded into trucks for transport to the mill.
“We soon realised that we needed a larger and more efficient loading and stacking tool at the Eswatini clear-felling operation and here we approached Bell Swaziland, which is so ably led by Charlie Boucher and his team,” he explains. “Again, we relied on Bell Equipment’s excellent product knowledge and experience, with Charlie recommending a Kobelco SK220XD Excavator carrier with the Bell forestry conversion and a Bell MT601 grab, which offers 0,6 square metres of capacity in the 20-ton class.”Since its delivery in early January 2025, the Kobelco SK220XD-based timber machine works on the landing where it lays timber, stacks, and indexes it, and then loads it onto trucks. It has proved itself to be the only machine that can effectively work in the wet and, with the long reach its boom offers when slewing, it rarely has to move on its tracks, making for stable and safe operation.
“This machine is so new we haven’t yet calculated its precise fuel consumption, but all indications show that it fits the business plan perfectly with room to spare,” Christopher says. “We’re also putting in extra effort in getting local Eswatini operators trained so that we fulfill our company’s undertaking of upliftment through skills transfer to leave a lasting legacy.
“We’ve enjoyed the sales experience when acquiring new machines from Bell Equipment in both South Africa and Eswatini and the service we receive from the company’s maintenance teams in both these places is probably the best in the industry.
“Looking ahead we see full mechanisation as the way to go as we can be really competitive both in price and performance. When doing that, Bell Equipment is sure to be our first port of call.”
