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Every few years I get a Forester in and we walk the woodlot. I didn't have time to walk a lot of it yesterday, but we covered about 300 acres and overall he gave my woodlot a clean bill of health. This was surprising because a forest pathologist had written off some of my Hackmatack Tree plantations as being over run by a bark beetle infestation. It seems this was contained to only 3 acres of a 12 acre plantation. Another acre will have to be removed but of 12 acres, 2/3 of it seems very healthy and growing vigorously.
I actually got him on-farm because I need to expand for my sheep and I was leery at putting the saw to some very big Spruce in this one area of the woodlot. The trees are massive, 100 years old or so, but the overstory has shaded out the soil and very little regeneration has started. In other words its nice wood,. but old and not growing or reseeding. After reviewing everything he felt it was better to harvest that acreage and use for pasture then to cut the tree plantations. From a logistics point of view such as access and fencing, this was great news.
But the majority of what we talked about was marketing and this a lot of Mainers will relate to even if you don't have a few acres of your own. The market here on forest land has tanked, and in a 20 mile ride from my house I know 10 farmers that are clear-cutting and putting in bigger fields. The problem is the papermills have closed up, and the few that remain are taking hardwood pulp. My woodlot is mostly softwood.
Softwood made for really good newsprint...but with online newspapers, paper newspapers are a thing of the past. Last year I harvested 12 cords of softwood pulp and got 880 bucks for the load. This Spring I got 400 dollars for 12 cords of softwood pulp. My last two loads of wood (12 cord a piece) got me 210 bucks and 213 bucks for 12 cords of wood...and I was darn lucky to get rid of it. Spruce logs tumbled from 400 per thousand to 200 per thousand and I have TONS of that. Hemlock is not much better, but it is holding its value only because it was so low to start with it did not have far to fall.
But Hardwood is downright scary. Both the forester and I see a very dire outlook for Hardwood Logs destined to make lumber. Here the papermills have figured out how to make paper with hardwood and they are buying it up at higher rates then firewood or the sawlogs. At the same time the wood coming from abroad is bigger, cheaper to harvest and transport, and is flooding the market.
The wife just bought 2 end tables that were made of solid wood, well made, no funny fasteners and look darn good...for $30 bucks. It is made of monkey wood, but closely resembles cherry...I could not buy the finish for that...much less buy domestic hardwood to make it. Where are the domestic hardwoods going to go in a few years? We have already lost the turning industry that turned White Birch, Yellow Birch and Beech into spools and whatnot. They are all used to make paper now. With the demand for that so high...landowners will start low grading which is harvesting their wood on shorter cycles and not letting their trees get big. Why should they if the hardwood market is lost and hardwood pulp is paying so much? The days of 30-40 year harvesting cycles are over and I am seeing lots harvested as short as every 15 years now.
But there is an even bigger threat looming on the horizon. Maine is 90% forested and oil is expensive. Biomass is growing and more and more trees are being chipped and burned. With wood chippers able to take 3 foot trees at once, more and more logging outfits are simply chipping the wood. The price is low but it is faster and easier to blow a tree into a chipper then it is to sort it out into logs and get marginally better prices for it. As that price erodes more and hardwood logs lose their value...more hardwood lumber is going to be blown into the back of a chip van and burned to make electricity for the grid. Quite sad indeed.
Overall despite the gloomy outlook on Maine's forests, the day was encouraging. He liked the way I have harvested wood over the last 20 years and overall the forest is very healthy and productive. More importantly it has a nice mix of big, small and medium diamters with good diversity between the species of trees. That means for the moment it is better to maintain the woodlot as a woodlot and limit the conversion back to farmland to a few small areas. The key word there is "for the moment". Him and I both agreed that there needs to be a new market for the long fibered softwood trees that blanket my farm and most of Maine. Newsprint had a 100 year run, but that is over. We need a new demand for softwood with so much growing in the state in my opinion.
Every few years I get a Forester in and we walk the woodlot. I didn't have time to walk a lot of it yesterday, but we covered about 300 acres and overall he gave my woodlot a clean bill of health. ..... We need a new demand for softwood with so much growing in the state in my opinion.
A tragic story. The value of your land lost most of its value based on what you have said about the value of your saw logs in the market. And the decline in land value will likely continue.
But I suspect that we will see no new softwood demand materialize for some time, at least not in the "traditional" sense of using saw logs for use by paper manufacturers. What is needed is for someone to develop an entirely new use for the wood that we grow in Maine. In order for that to happen, there will need to be an entirely new industry develop that will create an entire new product line that will use soft wood. This new industry will need to be so powerful and the demand for its products so great that the cost of harvesting and transporting of the wood will be relatively insignificant compared to the value of the end product.
One potential product is insulation. If and when the US joins most of the rest of the civilized world and signs the Kyoto Accords, there will then develop an entirley new kind of demand for modern insulation for all forms of construction. The old "pink stuff" on the shelves at Home Depot will be relegated to an also ran because its marginal performance in providing high grade insulation will be replaced by the potential for some new advanced cellulose. That demand for cellulose could spark a renewed valuation in high grade wood land. And the cellulose wouldn't have to go very far, as manufacture of new insulation products could be done right here in those factories that used to produce paper in the by gone era.
Of course in order for any of this to happen, it will be necessary for us as a nation to realize that not everyone is destined to be either a computer chip scientist, a mega medical quack, or a rocket fuel designer. Someone will need to find the strength to tell the American people that there is dignity in working with ones hands in a factory producing a high value and highly valuable product.
The value of wood and wood products will likely climb when we as a nation relize that there is equal opportunity for not only the young person who can and wants to spend eight or nine years in college but also for the person who wants to do more than flip hamburgers or put stickers on cheap junk from China at Walmart.
Bio-mass is where our soft wood is going.
You are lucky to get $75 dollars for 30 ton. Wagner, which manages Meade's old lots, have brought back only a fraction of the outfits that were cutting their land and the ones they kept, have the $1 million chippers and are strictly mechanical choppers. This has put a lot of my friends out of business.
Ethan Allen is closing at the end of August and is the only outlet around these parts for hardwood logs-mostly white maple and some birch.
Our saw mill in Bethel, which supplies dimensional lumber for Lowes from Pennsylvania north, is giving out very few tickets and the Irving in Dixfield, which saws for Home Depot, is not taking many loads.
I sold 10 loads of pine last December and quit when the prices tanked.
Wood lots used to be worth a lot more than cut-over lots and now I wonder.
It's a sad, sad market.........
Last edited by 7th generation; 07-01-2009 at 05:47 PM..
Softwood makes good hot burning wood pellets, and from what I have heard the pellet mills here in Maine are going to have to start chipping whole logs in order to keep up with demand.
hopefully that market will start growing.
Softwood makes good hot burning wood pellets, and from what I have heard the pellet mills here in Maine are going to have to start chipping whole logs in order to keep up with demand.
hopefully that market will start growing.
bill
I was pretty disappointed with the whole pellet industry as a whole. That one in Corinth started up and said they were going to use waste wood and whatnot to make pellets and they made it sound like they would provide a lot of jobs. Instead they grabbed sawdust from the existing mills, drove the price up of sawdust for the farmer so high that it tripled in price.
It really did not add to the loggers jobs, and certainly did not clean up any waste wood as that wood was already destined for the biomass boilers at the mill.
They are not a bad thing...we just were fed a bit of a line to get them here and just now they are starting to get to the level they said they would start out at. As a farmer, bedding tripling in costs really hurt us fiscally...at the same time mid-west corn for ethanol went through the roof and milk prices tumbled. Its settling out now, but it hurt last winter for sure.
The environmental industry has severely reduced the long term productivity of our forests to the point that every single paper industry company has sold off all of its land in Maine. The term, "paper company land" no longer exists in Maine except as a fond memory. Now the environmental industry is screaming about all the "uncontrolled" land transfers of large land parcels and they are the ones who caused it! It is a Josef Goebbels tactic deservedly applied to the environazis.
Readers of the Boston Globe believe that Maine is losing its forests. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 1940 we had 6 1/4 million acres of pasture and cultivated ground. Today we have just over a million acres of pasture and cultivated ground. In my lifetime we have gained an average of 77,000 acres of forest. That is more than three townships a year for 77 years. There are mature forests where I saw hay mowed when I was a kid. The environmental industry tells us we are losing our forests. They lie.
The environmental industry has severely reduced the long term productivity of our forests to the point that every single paper industry company has sold off all of its land in Maine. The term, "paper company land" no longer exists in Maine except as a fond memory. Now the environmental industry is screaming about all the "uncontrolled" land transfers of large land parcels and they are the ones who caused it! It is a Josef Goebbels tactic deservedly applied to the environazis.
Readers of the Boston Globe believe that Maine is losing its forests. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 1940 we had 6 1/4 million acres of pasture and cultivated ground. Today we have just over a million acres of pasture and cultivated ground. In my lifetime we have gained an average of 77,000 acres of forest. That is more than three townships a year for 77 years. There are mature forests where I saw hay mowed when I was a kid. The environmental industry tells us we are losing our forests. They lie.
It's the same all over the country. The sky is falling, we're losing our forests. They even believe it's old growth being cut in states like VT and ME. But it's not (our forests are mostly young). In fact, we're gaining forest. Vermont used to be mostly cleared for farming, now it's mostly forest (lots of VT farms went under or stopped farming and the land has returned to forest). Maine used to have less forest than it does now as well (many farms have likewise in ME stopped farming and land has returned to forest). In virtually every state that is heavily forested this is true. Our industry and agriculture is dying. And between free trade destroying our own industry (can't compete with the dirt cheap 3rd world country supplied products) and the rich environmentalists waging a war on rural America (that is truly what it is, they won't be happy till we're all removed from the land so they have their big playgrounds free of people), our country is killing itself. How stupid can we be? But we are, as a country, stupid enough to destroy ourselves. We need to rise up and stop this, throw the politicians who allowed it into the streets, get the environmental groups under control...or before long it will truly be too late. We can't allow them to get away with this.
It seems that more and more folks are making the mills. But I do not get any warm-fuzzy feelings that they really 'know' much about making pellets.
Well, a thought.
Someone came in here not that long ago planning a pellet mill, promising all kinds of jobs, a use for local wood, etc....he couldn't fill the pre-orders from anyone (they lost their money and had to find pellets elsewhere during the winter), he got sued by some company he had been trying to make deals with, he was a regular con artist...
I agree mostly with what you said, but agriculture in Maine is not dying...it's actually growing. Granted it is coming from a very low point, but Maine does have the highest number of start up farms in the nation and it also has the youngest farmers (55 years old on average...other states are much, much worse).
The funny thing is, I am clearing wood land and making room for more fields and I am not alone. On a 20 minute ride from my house to Belfast, I can count 12 other landowners that are also clearing fields.
Will the trend continue?
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