Three Seasons, One Ledger: Gel Cost Against the Replant Bill

Five thousand tubed seedlings, a dry spring, and a foreman who priced the gel quote at €2.20 per kilo and called it expensive. Three years later his own ledger settled the argument, and the numbers are worth copying because they fit on one page: 50 g of gel per tree at €2.20 comes to €0.11 per tree, or €550 across the whole planting. The first-year replant rate on his previous, gel-free contract of the same design had been 18 percent. On the gelled contract it came in at 6 percent.

Do the replant arithmetic on those two figures. Each failed tree costs more than the original plant, because by the time the gap is found, the tube or guard has to be pulled, a new seedling carried in, the hole re-cut, and the watering done out of sequence. At €3.50 all-in per replacement, the 12-point survival improvement is worth 600 trees multiplied by €3.50, about €2,100. The gel line cost €550. That is the whole business case, and it ignores the second-season advantage entirely, where the gelled survivors are bigger and need less carry-over care.

What the ledger hides until year two

The counter-intuitive line item is labour. The foreman had counted the gel as a materials cost and nothing more, and expected an extra hour per thousand trees for handling. In practice the crew reported the opposite on dry sites: fewer return visits with the water bowser in the first summer, because each watering-in lasted longer. Over three visits per site instead of five, the bowser hours saved covered the extra application time twice over. On wet sites none of this holds, and the ledger correctly shows gel as a cost with little return, which is why the decision belongs to the site’s rainfall record, not to habit.

The honest version of the ledger also shows where gel does not save replants. Deer browse took 4 percent of the second contract’s trees, and no polymer fixes that. A ledger that credits gel only with the drought-driven gap closes cleanly; one that lumps every loss into it will overstate the case and eventually be disbelieved.

Building the ledger so it survives scrutiny

• Cost line: kilograms of gel per hectare times delivered price, plus measured application minutes per hundred trees.
• Survival line: count gaps at the end of season one, not at planting, and split losses by cause where anyone can tell.
• Replant line: true all-in cost per replacement, including labour, guards, and the second watering.
• Carry-over line: height and condition of survivors at the start of year three, which is where gel sites pull ahead.

Presenting the ledger to the next tender board

A ledger only changes decisions if it survives the meeting, and the version that does is the one built from records, not recollection. Keep the gel invoice, the actual kilograms drawn from the store per contract, and the gap counts from the survival walk signed by the foreman who walked it. A tender board that sees documents will accept a survival claim that a slide of assertions never would.

Present the result in the form the foreman used: cost per tree of the gel line, cost per tree of the gaps avoided, and one honest paragraph on what gel did not fix. Contracts won on a ledger that admits deer and winter wash do the presenting for you, because the reader assumes the rest of the numbers are as carefully separated as the ones that argue against the product.

Run the same table on the next contract regardless of whether gel is used, because a comparison with no control strip convinces nobody, including the person writing it. Even one hectare planted without gel on the same soil and the same week gives the numbers a spine.

The arithmetic above is deliberately conservative; it takes no credit for reduced watering, only for trees that lived. Where a supplier’s grade holds up under local water and the crew’s scoop is calibrated, that €0.11 per tree is among the cheapest insurance in the planting budget. The grade and dose tables that feed the ledger sit in the water retention user guide, and a supplier’s technical sheet should always be checked against the site’s actual soil before the figures go into the tender.