USFS Timber Sales Increases—Will They Help?
- Hannah Hammond
- May 2
- 5 min read
By Steve Courtney & John Kelley, The Beck Group Consulting
Service Spotlight: Fiber Supply and Demand, Strategic Planning, Capital Project Planning.
The question on the industry’s lips is whether the current administration’s directive—to increase logging on Federal lands—will help.
In the opinion of The Beck Group (BECK), the short answer is not much for most mills, and not in a vacuum. Here’s why.
First, while it’s true that all such increases help the industry, the planned increase is greatly insufficient in the context of acres needing treatment to reduce wildfire risk and insect/disease threats. Our National Forests are far behind the needed level of thinning treatment that would make a major impact on what have become National Thickets.
In terms of overall national output, the increase would amount to about 700MMBF from all products and 400 MMBF of sawlogs, based on fiscal year 2024 harvest levels. The decline in Oregon and Washington timber availability due to the 2020 fires and policy changes was greater than that. And due to mortality from insects and fire, many National Forests actually emit more carbon than they are sequestering.
Consider this harvesting timeline going back to the days when the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet still rode proudly at anchor in Pearl Harbor:
As you can see, the terminal decline began in 1988; by 2000, the industry was down to a shadow of its former self. Most of the old facilities are long gone, either rusting in place or auctioned off to whoever wanted their chains and saws and kilns and stock. Their ex-employees and associated families moved away to the big city, where there were opportunities to start new careers. Now, a quarter century on, there are many areas of the West that very much need some judicious harvesting but have few or no facilities to consume the biomass.
To have a timber industry, one must have:
A market for the products into which the logs can be made. A thriving construction industry would qualify.
An assured consumer of those logs, namely a facility willing to make those products.
An assured timber supply source that will keep logging outfits in business.
Qualified people willing to perform all the work tasks: driving trucks, feeding planers, felling trees, and so on.
Because of our four-year political cycles, a simple pronouncement of near-term promises doesn’t help much. Without long-term commitments, Joe isn’t going to hire a crew and start up Joe’s Logging. Sandra isn’t going to park her capital in a new venture called Sandy’s Posts & Poles. In BECK’s view, a minimum 20-year horizon is essential to attract the needed capital investment—and longer would be better. The increase in supply must be more than 25% of recent harvest levels, with guarantees in writing and compensatory provisions for premature cancellation.
We’d rather not have to say it, but the main reason for the lack of trust in Federal timber programs is a combination of past performance and political windstorms. We are also confident that, whether or not they feel comfortable saying it openly, our many experienced, helpful USFS contacts see exactly what we see. If it were up to them, we have no doubt that the outcomes would be better. They understand quite well that governmental forest management has a symbiotic relationship with the timber industry, and that forests work better when the two groups are fully aligned. They do all that is in their power to facilitate that process, but their powers have limits.
As for the 25% increase, while current environmental review processes can facilitate this, significant changes in harvest levels will require the environmental analysis to be much more efficient than today’s process. BECK is not sure how quickly an increase might proceed, given that any expansion of harvest is likely to face opposition in the form of lawsuits. The general public and especially the environmentally concerned portion of that populace might not be aware that about the same amount of acres burn each year as would be harvested under this initiative. Concerns about the 25% increase being devastating to forests seem to miss this reality.
The difficult sell will likely be the idea that we can save more timber by harvesting it, but that happens to be true thanks to the vulnerability of dense thickets to insect, disease, and wildfire mortality. When the trees die, they become potential fuel that can take the living trees with them and damage the ground for future replanting. That must surely concern the environmentally conscious public as much as it concerns the industry—which depends upon forest regrowth and recovery.
It's not all futility. In the Inland West, where timberlands are primarily owned by the Federal government, many wood products manufacturers have been teetering on the brink of collapse. These mills have the most to gain by an increase in supply. It could go farther, and that would be better; doubling current harvest levels would be a more meaningful improvement than the planned 25% expansion now being forecast and would have the potential to improve forest health across a much larger proportion of Federal lands.
In any case, minimal domestic production increases related to Federal harvesting expansion will happen without increases in the full supply chain. Offering timber for sale will not help unless someone wants to buy and cut it—and that means people with the skills and equipment to cut and haul it. After that, the need is for facilities to buy it and mill it; that too entails having people who know how to file saws, drive forklifts, and operate kilns. If there is insufficient market demand, such as a lack of new construction, the revenue these facilities receive won’t be enough to keep them operational. And if regulations make trucking problematic, none of it will work at all because removing trucks (maintained and operated by qualified people) from any part of the equation will bring the entire process to a standstill.
We don’t have to like that reality, but we must navigate it.
So the 25% increase represents a good idea for current facilities, but it’s not enough simply to proclaim an offer of more timber and imagine droves of loggers and mill owners elbowing their way to the front of the auction crowd. They moved on or retired, with no one to replace them. There will have to be new ones, and government will have to do more to attract and facilitate the development process than simply announcing that there’s more timber on offer.
When your forest products operation wants to plan for increases in the timber supply, we’ll be here to help. Call us at (503)684-3406, or email info@beckgroupconsulting.com, and we’ll get you to real people ready to help you address real concerns and navigate the policy fluctuations.
The Beck Group, Inc.
Forest Products Planning and Consulting Services
Telephone (503) 684-3406
Email: info@beckgroupconsulting.com