A forest owner recently asked me, "Let me get this straight, the logger and the trucker both get more money for their work than I get for my cordwood ??"  I had to respond, with the current market prices, this was true.  For the few minutes the logger and trucker deal with an aspen or oak tree for pulpwood and sawbolts, they make more money than the forest owner does for decades of  owning land and paying property taxes and growing the trees.  And the owner can only guess what profit the big mill will make from his wood.

A few minutes ago I discussed this with a timber buyer.  The current price for pine pulpwood delivered to the mill is $65/cord.  The harvester charges $30/cord, and the trucker will charge $25/cord, leaving $10/cord for the buyer and landowner to split.

When selling low grade products, particularly cordwood, the market price is so low that very few forest owners can see timber as a profitable crop.  Yet we all see that every step of the way, during logging, trucking, and manufacturing, the industry certainly is making a profit for the wood harvested on our lands.  And the higher the level of production, the higher the profit that is evident.  Individual forest owners see the big timber industry giants with all their Forestry PR campaigns, and wonder how stumpage prices could be so low and discouraging to actually practicing sustainable forestry on private land.

In the timber industry, mills won't do anything that doesn't eventually make a profit - this is business.  I've heard it thousands of times from buyers and loggers when asked to do something extra:  "I can't make enough money doing that!"  Yet at the ground level, prices paid for trees are so low that most forest owners  have not seen timber management as a money making business.  Timber income has been taken as an occasional windfall, take what money you can when possible, and be thankful basis. 

Government incentive programs and industry sponsored assistance have failed to bring about wide scale management on private land (they both signal to a forest owner that growing trees is not a profitable business, so we must subsidize management to get forest owners to grow trees).  After decades of well intentioned efforts and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, less that 10% of our private forests a re being actively managed by it's owners (and only a fraction of those see their forest as a profitable business).

To complicate this further is the treatment many individual forest owners have received from selfish, short sighted, and unscrupulous timber buyers and loggers, who have left the owners feeling cheated and taken advantage of.  Every bad experience is multiplied as people tell their neighbors what 'that logger' did. 

Today, the timber industry is working to correct these problems on private land with logger training, massive PR campaigns and actively  setting a good example (like the Sustainable Forestry Initiative).  All this effort is good, as long as you deal with the real issues that face the individual forest owner:  Fair treatment from timber buyers and loggers (these are the timber industry representatives that have the most impact on private forestry), and higher stumpage prices (to make forest management a profitable business).  Don't expect anything else to get widespread results if this is ignored.

Timber buyers need to always pay the full market value to the forest owner. When bids on a timber sale vary hundreds of percent among big mills, a forest owner clearly sees that timber buyers are playing games with them instead of offering a fair market value..  The practice of trying to maximize the personal profit of the timber buyer at the expense of the forest owner, discourages forest management more than any other factor. 

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