The Forestry Forum

property.  The wood buyer used two different prices for sawtimber on the contract...22.00 a ton for sawtimber and 29.00 a ton for "natural" saw timber.  His reasoning being that the local mills are not taking much saw timber unless its natural growth and even then there's not much demand.  I don't understand the reasoning behind that to be honest.  I also thought sawtimber would usually bring 25 to 30% higher than chip and saw.  In this case theres only about 10% difference in the price between the sawtimber coming off the property and the chip and saw.  Just trying to get educated.  This is a small cut and in five to seven years we will likely have a bigger cut so I wanted to get as educated as I can. 

Never heard of that differentiation.

Those prices are about right.  The $29/ton price for the natural wood is the highest stumpage price for pine that I have heard in a while.  Last Fall I got $26/ton for cut-to-length pine sawlogs, 30 year old plantation, but prices have softened a bit since then.  In some areas, the chip-n-saw price is not much higher than pulpwood once you factor in the difference in top diameters.