Thank you.
My name is Jerome Pelletier. I'm vice-president of the sawmills division with J.D. Irving, Limited. With me today is Mark Mosher, who is the vice-president of our pulp and paper division.
We have a presentation today. We'd like to cover three main items. We'd like to explain who we are, J.D. Irving, and we'd like to talk about the integrated forest product value chain. Finally, we'd like to propose some strategies to expand the forest products sector in Canada.
J.D. Irving was founded in 1882 in New Brunswick. Our head office is located in Saint John, New Brunswick. We currently employ 15,000 people. We are very diverse. We have operations in agriculture, construction, and equipment. We have large operations in consumer products producing facial tissue, hygiene paper, and diaper manufacturing in eastern Canada.
We are also very active in the food sector, producing frozen vegetables and french fries. Of course we have operations in forestry and forestry products. In retail and distribution, we operate 50 hardware box stores in the Maritimes, similar to Home Depot, under the Kent banner. We also have shipbuilding operations, transportation, and logistics. We're the fifth-largest trucking company in Canada, and we have our own rail line and offshore supply vessels as well.
Focusing on forestry now, we're in the top five of the largest landowners in North America, with 3.2 million acres of freehold land. We own about 2 million acres in Canada, and 1.2 million acres in the state of Maine. We've planted 960 million trees since 1957—that's a national record—that we own here at J.D. Irving. We have SFI and SFC certification, and we also have internationally recognized research and patents around our tree improvement program.
In terms of economic impact, J.D. Irving creates around 9,400 jobs overall in Canada in the forestry sector. That's direct and indirect, and they contribute $620 million in direct and indirect Canadian wages annually. Over the last five years, we've invested $664 million in different capital projects, pulp and paper, and sawmills, and annually we purchase $700 million from different Canadian industries.
These are all the different products that we manufacture. We will go into a little more detail in a second in terms of how it's all integrated together.
In our lumber operation, we have 10 sawmills in operation with 1,600 employees. Our sawmill division is divided into four different subdivisions, specialized in transforming or manufacturing specific species. We have an eastern white pine division. We have a hardwood lumber division. We have a cedar division as well as our spruce division. Overall we're producing just over one billion board feet, and in 2016, by increasing bioenergy, we were able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17%. Currently 17% of our energy is renewable energy.
In terms of value added, we've been more and more active in decor programs. We have the live edge hardwood slabs that we have developed. We also developed a pine barnboard decor program. We're active in kitchen cabinet components, and we are also manufacturing cedar fencing here in New Brunswick.
Now I'll turn it over to Mark.