culture (under which the Forest Service operates) announced a national initiative to make wood a primary building material in “green building” projects. Citing a Forest Service study, Science Supporting the Economic and Environmental Benefits of Using Wood and Wood Products in Green Building Construction, Secretary Vilsack said, “This study confirms what many environmental scientists have been saying for years. Wood should be a major component of American building and energy design.”
How the Forest Products Industry Will Change Due to Forest Service Initiatives
The national shift to utilizing family forests for wood products will drive significant change in the industry. An increasingly large portion of the nation’s timber resource will be in the hands of family forest owners who control smaller parcels and are uninterested in clear cutting. More emphasis is likely to be placed on removal of damaged trees (insect, storm, etc.), uneven age cuts, and thinning. Greater demand for forest products and greater awareness of the need to actively manage land for forest health and improved habitat will mean more wood products will come from small acreage stands actively managed to achieve goals not necessarily related to optimizing timber production.
A paper released by the University of Minnesota’s College of Natural Resources and Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station pointed to the issues raised by small-scale harvest saying, “The likelihood that an increasing share of the nation’s timber supply will be obtained from relatively small tracts or uneven-aged, mixed-species stands poses a number of challenges to harvesting technology. Cost-effective and flexible harvesting systems must simultaneously meet evolving criteria for safety and minimal site/stand impact.” The paper concludes that small-scale equipment “… that can help minimize the capital and operating costs associated with partial harvests or when operating on smaller tracts,” will see increasing importance in coming years.
On the processing end, small-scale sawmilling has been a rapidly growing, albeit under-the-radar, technology for some years. Portable sawmills and fixed-in-place very thin kerf band industrial sawmills that process a few million board feet per year have been growth industries even during the recession. The growth is because small mills thrive on milling material and dimensions that are typically of no interest to larger, conventional mills.
Recent research from Auburn University points to both the fiscal and enhanced management potential smaller sawmills provide. Portable mills, Auburn researchers say, provide an important management tool for small parcel forestry as “…the availability of this new technology provided a tool to profitably turn previously ‘useless and worthless’ trees into valuable lumber with an initial investment less than the cost of a small tractor.”
New U.S. Forest Service approaches promise considerable opportunity to the owner of small-scale family forests throughout the United States. Through approaches — including providing advice, building markets for forest products, and assisting land owners in developing management plans — the Service appears to be well along the road to helping individual land owners achieve both personal and community goals for family forest holdings by promoting management actions that are potentially financially rewarding.
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