Alright I'm gonna open the can of worms. Who has the best prices in the North East Pa area. I'm looking for new buyers. Before I go with the big names like Wagner Or DeerPark and get screwed on Fuel Driving there, who's paying good? Logger bonuses? Grade bonuses? spit it out here. It'll keep the mills competeive.
I have no idea if you've been listening to other loggers in your area. If anything like a few around here,walk away from the BS. They talk about how much they make by hauling the logs to another mill,because the mill you're selling too does not give a bonus or their mill pays more per BF. Have to remember some of those other mills are harder on scale too and if you are traveling another 60 miles one way,who is cutting in the woods,if you are working alone? Your fuel and time is worth alot.The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. By the way,how much are you cutting in a week? All one species? Mills like it fresh,not sitting around for 2 months.
Quote from: jerryatric on May 01, 2011, 12:10:36 AM
Alright I'm gonna open the can of worms. Who has the best prices in the North East Pa area. I'm looking for new buyers. Before I go with the big names like Wagner Or DeerPark and get screwed on Fuel Driving there, who's paying good? Logger bonuses? Grade bonuses? spit it out here. It'll keep the mills competeive.
Sorry, but the mills set the prices, we don't.
I cut and skid on average a load a day.(7-1:30) weather permiting(35-3800 ft) I'm just one man. I'm new to this Forum not Logging. It's all I've done with my life. Not "one" mill sets the Price though. My Current buyer is a broker. Sit's behind a Desk In Effn Calif. while I work here in pa. A log truck show's up I get scaled on the landing and a check and slip are handed to me. His prices are better than the local mills but that's my Question. He's making a profit or else what's the point. I want to know the "Mills" he's selling to.
I've never heard of a logger selling through a broker. Loggers don't make money logging, they make it by finding their own markets, separating the logs, and selling to those markets. Those markets change as the years go on. It only reflects the markets of the mills you are selling to.
Oak markets have been on the skids. Even the veneer markets have tightened up on their scale. We sell our veneer to many different markets and we load container trailers. Most guys won't do that. I suspect your broker does have a concentration yard and he sells the logs out in trailerload lots by grade. That's where he's making his money.
We have a concentration yard where we take the logs. We sort by grade, but we also do primary breakdown of some of the products. We saw our middle and low grade logs. We produce firewood on a year round basis. We sell pulpwood to a paper company and we sell some soft pulpwood to a poultry shavings plant. We also truck logs if we have to.
I'm not about to reveal the markets we sell to. We did all the work developing the contacts and addressing the markets. It would be like asking you for a list of all the timber prospects you have in your area. You're not about to share that with anyone.
Quote from: jerryatric on May 01, 2011, 10:43:21 PM
I cut and skid on average a load a day.(7-1:30) weather permiting(35-3800 ft) I'm just one man. I'm new to this Forum not Logging. It's all I've done with my life. Not "one" mill sets the Price though. My Current buyer is a broker. Sit's behind a Desk In Effn Calif. while I work here in pa. A log truck show's up I get scaled on the landing and a check and slip are handed to me. His prices are better than the local mills but that's my Question. He's making a profit or else what's the point. I want to know the "Mills" he's selling to.
My point was that you are not setting the price you receive for your logs, the people buying them do.
Bid your logs out and see what you get. Not that uncommon of a practice here in the central part of the state. Pretty much all comes out in the wash though. Mills with great prices have a short stick, honest scale little less money. A few mills pay really good the first couple loads as a teaser and then get it back the next 3 or four, or offer good prices but then take a huge chunk out for trucking. Some mills price sheets don't look that hot but they are lenient on grade. Cutting trees is the easy part I'm afraid, its the marketing your material part that takes time. I have good markets but I put a lot of miles on the pickup, a lot of time on the phone, and have bought my share of coffee for foresters and log buyers to get them. On top of all that, Im pretty sure there are anti-trust laws that make it a big no-no to publicly discuss dollars and cents pricing like you seem to be looking for.
You might not be able to set your price, but you can sure help yourself. Start talking to the mills and log buyers. Find out what they want. See if you can find smaller specialty mills looking for something a little out of the ordinary, long logs, etc. Some mills like to cut a specific species and maybe a specific grade of that species. Look for smaller mills that have trouble getting logs from the big loggers. They might be willing to pay a bit more. If you have veneer logs from time to time, you will need a veneer buyer. You will need a buyer for low grade logs. If you don't have a truck, you will need to find a trucker for some of those mills. Marketing takes time. Its worth it, but it doesn't just happen.
Here are a couple of sites to go to for information about log prices.
http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/econ/data/prices/index_b.htm
http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0%2C1607%2C7-153-10368_22594-81536--%2C00.html
http://extension.psu.edu/timber-market-report
The first is from the US Dept. of Agriculture, giving logging reports from a large number of states. The second is a pretty detailed report from Michigan, and the last covers timber reports from Pennsylvania.
Quote from: PAFaller on May 02, 2011, 10:30:14 PM
On top of all that, Im pretty sure there are anti-trust laws that make it a big no-no to publicly discuss dollars and cents pricing like you seem to be looking for.
Unless there is some sort of collusion between you and the mill, then 2 or more loggers discussing which mill has the best price for logs will not get you in trouble. However, 2 or more mills, or other entities, conspiring to keep prices artificially low or in some way colluding to fix prices will be frowned upon.
I guess that is what it boiled down too, I just remember when I was a member of a fledgling logger organization here we had to sign paperwork saying we would not discuss pricing. The problem is no two loggers get the same pricing anyway, regardless of the mill. Price sheets are like guidelines, but I never really pay much attention to them. I know my buyers well enough that they work with me on pricing, and I try to get them what they want. Can you imagine if every logger on the forum chimed in with what they were averaging for red oak delivered to the mill! Every logger here would take the highest price they saw here and be chewing out their log buyer tomorrow for being a crook and a thief and a cheapskate! Its all about knowing the mill you sell too and what they want. On top of that even independent guys have loyalty to only a few mills. If I sell 90% of the wood I cut to one mill, and make logs they way they want them, I will get a better price than someone they have never worked with before. I doubt any large mill owner here would argue that. Loggers want to sell logs for more money, mills want to buy them for less, its the way its always been, and the way it always will be
I get the bid price of all species from the U of mass at Amherst, and first quarter 2020 the prices have gone up. It's not a lot $25. to $50. Some a little more, s maple $225. to 310. cherry $100. to $275. So maybe things are looking up some.
I started sawing the big r. o. I saved for Wagner. Even had some hard maple to sweeten the load, thats all on sticks now. I hate doing maple. Far as I know they are only picking up from their strong suppliers. When business goes sour you cut off your best loggers last.
I enjoy chatting about log prices but my approach may not be helpful. First, cut what the market wants. Second cut good-great timber and nothing else. If you can concentrate loads of good logs you should. On no account use 1 buyer for everything. You need to have several veneer and specialty buyers. For general sawlogs the exporters are paying the best from what I have seen. We average just under $2/ bdft for white oak but that requires 4 buyers. You need to spend as much time on the phone or meeting buyers as you do on bucking. I am not a big fan of the loyalty thing as that only helps you sell good logs for ok prices when the market is bad. I like very good prices for good logs😂. If market is slow I suggest not cutting.
What are you cutting?
I work with a broker / buyer, for what's involved and the money tied up the 10-15% isnt worth it.
Theres 4 places to sell wood here, 3 of the 4 prices are always just about the same, not going to win.
That's the latest "Wagner" sheet for here, might want to be sitting down first.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/34634/IMG_090928129.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1588645441)
See that Wagner price list, only 2 species over $500/mbf for #1. That's kind of my breakeven point. We have oak fence board markets here that are $500/mbf international for anything oak, straight, and 12" small end at 16.5'. Straight through pricing from that same mill on WO is $1/bdft to 12". Too far from you to be useful. RO is still not back to snuff but if you have nice RO it seems they can still pay $ for veneer, I've heard Rolling Ridge and other veneer brokers paying $1500+ for PA/NY RO. I've heard up to $1750..but that is doyle. Rolling Ridge is typical of the sort of buyer you need for mid range veneer, lots of others- they mostly stuff containers to send to the ports.
We haven't cut a RO veneer in a year so I have not sold any just what I hear.
Scales really matter. That 12" oak fence board is:
95 BDFT FOR Intl, 80 for scribner, and 64 on doyle.
You get slaughtered on doyle for small logs.
Look around for specialty buyers of things like long oak for bridge timbers (paying $0.60-80/bdft intl here in va). For 0 side clear logs that is a pretty good price and is actually about the same as the Wagner price for prime sawlogs.
Wagner's price on veneer WO is a low it seems to me. I can have 3 buyers into eric's backyard with checkbooks if he'd cut some nice WO, they'd pay him 50% more and truck. I guess this means he does not have much WO and if that is the case it might not be good.
Look at that Wagner price list and it will tell you a few things. First, Cherry is gone..no veneer price?? on cherry? Don't cut any.
Hickory pricing is crazy... veneer is much much higher than sawlogs. This means there is a large export order, or domestic maybe, order for some hickory veneer and the order was not filled this winter. I have export hickory, lots of it but can't get there for another month and then it is hot and hickory stains; I guess I could treat it on the landing but that's a pain. But I've made note of that price and will come back to that in October. If I cut that hickory I'll have to do something with the rest of the log and I have 4 months to find a good market.
The Ash pricing for Wagner seems good to me, but he has been cutting great ash, mine is not that nice.
The pricing for things like Yellow Poplar, Black Oak, Soft Maple...crazy. I can't go to work for those prices and the exporters are paying so much more. Soft maple is actually doing well right now, not sure why that is so low.
Just got an e-mail from our biggest mill-buyer this morning. They are opening the yard back up next Monday. The price list is only $50. to $100 more than Wagner's price list, still not good enough for the logger's around western Ma, Southern Vt-N.H. I sent a tri-x and a 1/2 of H-maple in Feb to a smaller mill that was still taking logs and got $1800. for the log run.
If you look at lumber pricing in the HMR then the Wagner prices don't leave much room for sawing. Grass is always greener. Looks like a great opportunity for a savvy log broker ::)
my log prices have gone up , only thing not great is hard maple sciler veneer but its still selling , RO is doing pretty good as is white oak
I know of a couple WO behind the school, it just doesnt grow here, have to go 15 miles north, all red oak here, crap rock oak just off the mountain.
Guys are either shutting down or getting out, just talked to my pulpman and he said he knows of a couple guys who have already thrown the towel in.
At 500 average it's not bad, really where you have to be to make anything on private stumpage. I still see guys cutting wood, cry about the price and they are cutting their own throat, little pulpwood and firewood for me, I will just park everything.
Barge the only thing saving our butt up here is mainly the color of the wood , we are on real light color sand so our wood is white , once you hit the clay the color changes, the wo just south of me in PA looks nothing like our wo.
So we have heard of massive movement in stumpage rates. Someone paying $1.50 for white stumpage. :o.
Otherwise I'm still looking for better walnut buyers.
White oak that is.
Walnut bush sold here last week at $4/ft standing on ontario log rule scale and only about 1000 feet of veneer and not big trees . That is just plan crazy
walnut pays $2/ft delivered to mill here and there is hardly any to be found unless you steal it from an occasional front yard. so you can see that those economics are pretty "methed up."
Quote from: ehp on February 03, 2021, 12:09:31 PM
Walnut bush sold here last week at $4/ft standing on ontario log rule scale and only about 1000 feet of veneer and not big trees . That is just plan crazy
Wow...just wow, 2 years ago we sold 60k total stump age and averaged 4-5 but it was mostly big veneer but had worm/peck issues. A lot of volume per tree so lots of saw logs. 4 for non veneer ... wow
well thats in the high $2's if you correct for the inflation since your sale wyatt.
we all better get on that economic treadmill and ..
running-doggy
:D
I've been told that sugar maple veneer is approaching an all time high...
Here $4 to $5 a foot is pretty normal for hard maple . I have not heard any $8 a ft like before but maybe
And I only gotten that price when cutting in one area . Where I am right now not a chance . But walnut is better color here and red oak and white oak
what is good big tulip selling for ? I cannot find a veneer market here yet for some but I'm still looking . It's about a month yet before I start cutting it
How white is sapwood ring is the question. The veneer market is deep for YP and it is in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, really should not be hard for you to get that. It is maybe the largest veneer market actually (by volume). It is at $1.50/bdft but could be less with trucking, we can get $1.20 picked up but they are going on a 300 mile ride. Doyle just like our other veneers.
Good prime sawlogs in 16' lengths are bringing 625 international, min 16" top diameter.
Boom or bust cycle. Logs like anything else are worth "exactly what someone else is willing to pay". Stupid prices(high or low) will affect availability. The very second the perception that the quantity of available logs does not appear to be in balance you will see panic buying or selling thanks to the JIT inventory discipline. Factor in some mother nature and season with dash of political trade games and you have todays boom which will bust in a few short months dues to "unpredictable" demand shifts that most second graders could predict.
Of course now that somebody somewhere paid $1.50 for oak stumpage; you are now a crook if you are not paying that even for stumpage you bought a year ago and from this point forward even if you can't give an oak log away next year. Good times for all.
Yeah the movement on stumpage has been a bit bizarre, moved up all last fall but now..wow. Glad we almost only do long term gigs.
I honestly feel walnut is getting near its end on the huge money , I know enough 3 jobs in the last 2 months that the timber buyer came up quite short compared to what they paid for the standing trees . The forester is marking the tulip now so I cannot say what I'm going to get but most of the trees are in the 40 to 48 inch range and 40 plus feet before the first mark on trunk
Quote from: ehp on February 04, 2021, 07:22:14 AM
what is good big tulip selling for ? I cannot find a veneer market here yet for some but I'm still looking . It's about a month yet before I start cutting it
I didn't know tulip grew that far north. Is it good quality? What's the heartwood size average compared to overall diameter? Much in the way to color variation - like dark purple streaks or pinkish on the growth rings?
Nice trees Ed. Many people don't realize just how magnificent they can be, a trip to Joyce Kilmer Memorial forest is an awakening. If you are curious google up some pics of that forest, just inspiring. They can live a very very long time, maybe the longest of the broadleaf trees.
Sounds like 1-2 trees per truck sort of stuff. We only have a few like this on the job, they get so big they are hard to handle actually.
Quote from: nativewolf on February 04, 2021, 07:35:41 AM
How white is sapwood ring is the question. The veneer market is deep for YP and it is in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, really should not be hard for you to get that. It is maybe the largest veneer market actually (by volume). It is at $1.50/bdft but could be less with trucking, we can get $1.20 picked up but they are going on a 300 mile ride. Doyle just like our other veneers.
Good prime sawlogs in 16' lengths are bringing 625 international, min 16" top diameter.
Veneer yellow poplar is used to make Microllam and Parallam by Weyerhaeuser in West Virginia. They process 3,500 logs a day. I'm sure that it effects the market in the entire region
Here's an article with a video describing the process.
https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/products/how-its-made-laminated-veneer-lumber-and-parallel-strand-lumber_o (https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/products/how-its-made-laminated-veneer-lumber-and-parallel-strand-lumber_o)
Hardwood veneer mills have limited capacity for large diameter logs. It would take a big lathe to cut a 48" diameter block. Bigger lathes are in the west, but generally for softwood (construction plywood veneer). Hardwood lathes normally max out around 36" diameter.
What stavebuyer said.
Anytime china is a major player in a market, boom bust is inevitable. They do it on purpose so watch yourself.
White oak boom is domestic Mike. None of ours is shipped except low grade veneer.
In a one click global trading world i dont think theres very much of anything thats truly limited to local effects anymore at all. Everything is so intertwined and fast changing.
The price of a part on the other side of the world affects what i will pay for one across town today. Markets no longer have isolation, secrecy or a barrier wall for arbitrageurs (sp?)
Soybeans grown in Dinwiddie and sold to Smithfield 45 minutes away are priced based on how the crop did in Brazil, 6 months earlier. Unless you are selling to the absolute end consumer it's all connected.
china and other countries over in that area are buying lots around here
If export log buying plummets -regardless of why- the rates paid by domestic-only log buyers will plummet too. No one pays more than they have to in order to maintain their resource inputs. Thus foreign actions dramatically impact domestic markets. Prior to "free trade" this wasnt so acute.
The wo, wal lumber frenzy in the east this fall was started by a Chinese interest. Everyone else got on board to play catch up. Wo and walnut lumber is now taking out the low end of the wo and wal veneer markets. What a whiplash from last summer. I basically gave up on upper midwest walnut 2 years ago. Now PA wal and wo is just as crazy. Stave buyers all of a sudden not in drivers seat. Hang on. WV lost big estsblished log exporter early in fall. PA had a big one announce closure this week. NW hdwd going forward as they shed 270 million in debt to bankruptcy this year.
NW Hardwoods sells a lot of export veneer to other buyers.
Someone shoot me if i ever rack up a quarter billion in debt. Talk about going off the rails.
I gained $500/1000 more on my white oak better grade sawlogs the last couple weeks , I'm no where near NW prices but its better than it was , those logs all go for a boat ride
More pricing updates for yellow poplar (liriodendron tulipifera): Scale Intl; Prime logs up to $700 up from $600 (4s clear, min 18" diameter), to $350 for 1 side clear logs (up from $250) The key movement was in the bottom quality logs where they moved up very nicely.
Tie logs in demand too, lots of offers at $0.45/bdft international to $0.40 international. Which strikes me as pretty good for a black gum at 12".
I don't think this is the exact thread that I was looking for, but it will do.
Red oak took I big hit this week here, they're saying they can't sell and 2&3a for 3 months now. They're not wanting to buy red oak now, and for good reason. Everything else is down some, but holding for now.
I guess all hardwood loggers seeing the same thing?
its all up here compared to a year ago , Most of the lower grade stuff has come up the most , stuff like popular, red pine which is low grade for here is up , Top grades of good logs is up as well but not near the % that the low grade gained . Its been months sense I cut any red oak so do not know on it but have a few reds to cut this week
Everything still up compared to a year ago and really up compared to 3 years ago. Except RO which was stronger a year ago but we couldn't move it 3-4 years ago. We'd cut RO for bridge timbers or tie logs which is just insane so we tried, if possible to leave it. 2 Years ago we did ok on RO, sold veneers at a good price.
Alternative use on the RO are bridge timbers. That price might be dropping fast too though? Not sure. How are RO tie logs holding up down there?
Oak tie logs are down to .55 from .65
Sawn ties are still at $42 but the RR's and treating plants subscribe to the HMR too.
Flooring drives the market; and when housing drops there isn't much need or alternative for low grade oak.
There are a large number of headlines regarding housing and banking issues in China unrelated to Covid. When domestic Red Oak crashed in 2005, China was the answer.
War in Europe, inflation in the US, and Ponzi mortgage finance unravelling in China the only buyers may be speculators for cheap.
So for low grade RO the price is still a lot better than 3 years ago but not great nonetheless.
Mortgage that I paid in 1996 was 8% I think, first home after returning from overseas. In 2018 the rates in July/August were like 4.5%. Now 5.3%. They only seem expensive to people because they got so crazy low 2 years ago. I can't believe people would make a decision on something like a mortgage based on histories lowest interest rates- but then people often surprise me.
I'm hopeful that inflation bottoms out quickly just due to demand destruction, commodities are down all over.
problem is the cost of logging has gone up far more in % than the price of logs has and so has everything else in the cost of living AND everything is going to come to a halt and it will. Mortgage rates are going way up cause they have to to lower inflation . They told us maybe 5% here 3 months ago, now there talking 12% and our biggest bank is saying hold our beer cause its going higher than that . They now say it will be higher than the 88 to 92 time period which was 18% to 21% . It's quite simple , the gov't cannot send money at the rate they are without hurting the country and it is bad . People were spending money that they donot have at a crazy rate as well .
What's going on it China is also going to hurt over here as well as everything from that country is going to cost alot more if we can even get what product at the store we want . In that time period of 88 to 92 it was almost impossible to sell any logs here , hard maple veneer was being cut into firewood as that was the only thing selling , firewood
2 of the largest flooring manufacturers in the state have paused buying oak flooring lumber. The ride down is always faster than the slow climb up.
on lumbermen online I see two flooring manufactures up for auction.
Dont know about log prices here but Im about to find out.
I do get a stumpage price report published twice a year by the NYDEC.
Son Mark and I are in the process of harvesting the vestiges of my ash which has finally been hit by the EAB.
Small timber so the price wont be great, but better than for firewood.
Will probably log it out and sell on the landing.
I have a local log buyer that I trust
Ash(whats left of it) is still selling very well.
We are are in the middle of an ash harvest at the present time in our woods along with a scheduled basal reduction. Almost 50% of the harvest trees are ash. Pretty sure that none of our ash have borers. I have been searching and have found none. Our sale was bid over a year ago and am not sure if the price has moved up or down. The loggers and the haulers that I have talked to say that uninfected ash is still in demand, not sure about infected trees. I don't think there is any demand for standing totally dead ash.
Here are a few pictures of some of the harvest.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10129/IMG_5735.JPG?easyrotate_cache=1659494715)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10129/IMG_5735.JPG?easyrotate_cache=1659494715)
No sign of ash borers
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10129/IMG_5749.JPG?easyrotate_cache=1659496143)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10129/IMG_5750.JPG?easyrotate_cache=1659496462)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10129/IMG_5752.JPG?easyrotate_cache=1659496790)
Couple of loads
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10129/IMG_5766.JPG?easyrotate_cache=1659499001)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10129/IMG_5769.JPG?easyrotate_cache=1659499078)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10129/IMG_5775.JPG?easyrotate_cache=1659499137)
FWIW, The US government "official" just cut the tariffs on Canadian SPF in half. I suppose that will have an effect on log prices here soon.
Red Oak 2&3 has been selling at 100mbf under the already weak HMR price IF You were well connected and could get a PO. Now you if saw it you will be putting it on sticks. Thats going to pass through to logs. Kinda like 2010.
The species that have been moving will be affected because Red Oak is so abundant and when the big boys switch to minor species they can sell it won't take long to overwhelm the system.
Yes RO being in the toilet is no good. What's your market on that nice hickory from the other pics (the short truck)? I don't know how to sell it as well as I should. We have some lovely hickory that I've left growing, waiting til I feel I have a better understanding. Exporters have been the best buyers but never over $1/bdft on the very best export logs.
Some good news, in our area YP prime logs have held at 700. Our YP peeler market is still pretty darn strong so if it doesn't make a prime log off it goes.
Our QS buyer never changed his price last year and hasn't changed it this year either.
We have some orders for real YP veneer but we've moved into a stand that is old and very little sapwood so it is not making the grade. Domestic YP fell back a bit, from 1.5-1.75. Still a nice price.
Anyone hear any news on walnut?
The Hickory container logs go for $.90-$1.00. In winter domestic slicers will do a little better. Most goes into ties $.55-$.60.
Quote from: Hogdaddy on August 24, 2022, 11:14:23 PM
Anyone hear any news on walnut?
My buyer says it will be about the same for veneer but that sawlogs pulled back $0.50. Two ways to look at that...it is much lower than last fall, it is much higher than almost anytime in the past. :-\
Quote from: stavebuyer on August 25, 2022, 04:21:08 AM
The Hickory container logs go for $.90-$1.00. In winter domestic slicers will do a little better. Most goes into ties $.55-$.60.
Gotcha. Ok, well I guess that's about what it is. I don't know if I've ever sold a domestic slicer.
Seeing many prices the same or very close to what I was getting this winter. Lower grade hard maple dropped a bit, buyers asking for tulip poplar which I have never seen except while traveling :D
It has been HOT and dry (for here, not bad for you sun dwellers). Went down south for a week and it was no different than here temp wise. Most of the state in some form of elevated for risk, may have changed due to severe rain storms for a few days. Some nice hard maple down from the storms, good to see prime prices not in the gutter 👍 lower grades to the woodmizer
If you are cutting softwood here right now you got the world by the short and curlys compared to the past, unprecedented. Gman seeing it quite a ways away with his back to back record spf prices at the yard
Got our first ro veneer request of the fall season. $1.75-1.250 . Sawlogs at $0.75 so that is an ok bump but nothing too special.
Orders I can't fill til we move- ro veneer, yp veneer, wo qs, wo veneer
Quote from: ehp on July 30, 2022, 08:27:52 AM
What's going on it China is also going to hurt over here as well as everything from that country is going to cost alot more if we can even get what product at the store we want . In that time period of 88 to 92 it was almost impossible to sell any logs here , hard maple veneer was being cut into firewood as that was the only thing selling , firewood
I remember Tembec in Huntsville not taking any maple unless the heart was smaller than a loonie.
My Qtr saw White Oak log market just took a $.40bd/ft hit. Overdue but still hurts.
Quarter saw white oak dropped here too this week and red oak too. Twice this week on red oak actually. White oak and walnut still good price but not like it was. Like stave said over due but still bites. That's the first time I remember QS white oak dropping in a LONG time. I Don't have a lot bought thank God. PAllet is ok for now. Sell red oak butt logs and pallet the rest of the tree. It's a shame. New this day was comin just wish I had ALL of my jobs cut. 😆
Our QS guy never raised his prices so he didn't cut them either but he's a unique operation.
RO..veneer and butt logs but like OH Logger says...what to do with the rest? Terrible.
YP has stayed ok. Peelers still very strong a couple a dollar a ton reduction but it's ok. Compared to 2018 pricing is all good.
I'm gambling a bit on projects trying to cut some funky but big WO and so so walnut thinnings for the next few months. We'll see. I'd like to be out of the prime YP till I see better veneer and export prices.
Quote from: stavebuyer on September 15, 2022, 07:40:58 PM
My Qtr saw White Oak log market just took a $.40bd/ft hit. Overdue but still hurts.
out of curiosity how hot had it gotten over there? I didn't sell a single QS WO log last winter as the *DanG fraudster banker screwed up our entire winter harvesting plan (bank fired him but had to do an investigation and then rushed completion of our loan and 20 others) so we just cut walnut all winter which was ok but not what we had planned. Before then I'd have said that WO QS was maybe 2.00 or a bit more then down to 1.5 for 2 sided logs? But I'd have to dig to find out exactly what it was.
We were averaging $2.30 with the top grade bringing $2.80 Three clear sides and 18" was the log needed for top grade. Just about all the White Oak or Chestnut Oak 18"+ went into the sort. It was a good run.
Quote from: stavebuyer on September 16, 2022, 03:31:41 AM
We were averaging $2.30 with the top grade bringing $2.80 Three clear sides and 18" was the log needed for top grade. Just about all the White Oak or Chestnut Oak 18"+ went into the sort. It was a good run.
Oh $2.80 wow...That would have been nice. I missed that entire bump (I mean we had small walnut stands to cut so I should not complain as a blessing is a blessing) . I think we're still going to be just above 2 for the top logs (3 sided). Our veneer buyers do pretty well on 3 sided veneer $3.5-4 depending on size so the really nice 3 sided go to veneer. CO at $2.80. That would have been nice!
My Ash is averaging .65 pr bd ft on the landing, but as I posted earlier it is small stuff.
The buyer got some guff from his boss for buying the small stuff, but he is still taking it,
Buyer has rejected 2 dead trees so far as they were both stained.
We left one more dead one in the woods.
Slow going for us as it is scattered over 60 acres and small .
We are about 2/3 done now, hope to finish up by the end of net week.
Anyone between NC & GA that has any info? A neighbor around the corner is going to start clearing for his build and it looks like mostly WP, tulip poplar, turkey foot oak, a couple walnut, some maple and one cherry I've seen so far. This is just going to be a driveway clearout and ~1/2acre for the house, a little grass and somewhere to put the septic field. I know what my time is worth to fell them but then to hack 'em up and haul 'em off (luckily only 1/4 mile) I'm struggling with anything more than throwing a $$/hr. price to him. Still trying to figure out what to do with the slash but I know he's not opposed to torching it all.
I don't pay market prices for that kind of stuff. If the land clearer wants to fell it, limb it, and buck it for grade I'll pay them market price on the landing or delivered to my yard. Invariably that stuff is poorly bucked, dirty, etc. If you're going to do the work for him, bid that out seperate. He can pay you for all of the work of putting the wood up the way it's supposed to be, then you can just buy the wood that was put up to your specs. He doesn't like that tell him to cut it and bring it to a mill and see how that works out.
I'll keep that in mind, it does make sense I could offer him less than market as the logistics of getting them to a mill to maybe get market would still cost quite a bit more. The biggest advantage to me is cutting them to my spec and putting them on a small trailer I can weave through the stumps to winch them on. The logs I want can be laid down on smaller trees so they never see the dirt at all. I need to walk it again to figure out how long this will take me and what his time frame is to come up with a price for felling & limbing.
I always did lot clearings by the acre or by the hour, and i got the wood.
Has anyone heard anything new about log prices? (hardwood) Nothing really new here, everything is about the same as was a month ago. Mills are saying hardwood lumber is still on a downward slope, they just don't have much inventory for the winter, therefore not any drop in log prices. No one wants red oak at all, still give .60-.70 for butts and the rest tie or pallet price. I have some walnut cut to sell, was gonna cut a few more in a week or two and see how they do.
there holding here but by spring that will be a totally different story
Quote from: ehp on October 03, 2022, 06:07:21 PM
there holding here but by spring that will be a totally different story
If it weren't for the favourable exchange rate, I think we would be in pretty tough shape here.
Walnut, red oak, white oak, hard maple, soft maple, hickory, and pallet are down here. Other than that everything seems great!! 😆
@Hogdaddy (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=51047) Things are mostly holding here. YP pulled off quite a bit at the end of the summer but veneer buyers are back if you can find some nice white butt logs (up to 21') and thats somewhere in the $1/bdft. RO export veneer is ok so is domestic. Good RO butt sawlogs at 850, 650 on the 3 side. Walnut is down $0.50-$1 on sawlogs here.
All that seems drastic but really only because of the last 18 months being a bit better than the prior few years by a longshot. For us this is still better pricing than we had 2019 etc etc. WO pulled off very slightly. Otherwise ok. CO is down to $1.50-1.75 on good sized butt sawlogs. Lots better than a few years ago.
Hickory I don't know about, I guess not so good- we'll be sending some and will find out.
Dnash, Oh I'm pretty sure were in for a pretty rough go here next year , another that helps us is the sand as our wood is a lot whiter in color than most
Thanks everyone for the comments... sounds about the same here. next spring could be very rough... may have to do a little extra fishing... :)
NW, prices that are equal to 2019 may look ok on paper, but look at the prices of everything else in that time frame.
And the land owners want the same amount per tree that was last year when prices were high , you pay that amount or the bush stands until someone does pay that price
We cut on shared revenue models so we do t get burned, but we do 30 year contracts so it's the only way we can work.
Barbender the cost of groceries sure is higher, so is hydraulic oil. I think lots of things start falling, big company purchasing managers say input pricing 6 months out is all falling. Diesel is back to about $4. Not great but getting better. I bought off road below 4 last week. About what it was in 2018.
Shipping costs are far far higher and I am having to plan shipping more carefully. Ups wanted $600 to ship a 12 pound box next day by 10am. They failed so we got shipping for free but I think that would have been $100 2 years ago.
So far numbers are still in our favor. We track every dollar in and out and everything is categorized. Still up over 2018/19/20. But it is lower than 2021
I got a quote to service my skidsteer today as it got 250 hours on it , $1311 to pretty much come change the motor oil , 6 months ago that price was $804. Everything has gone way up in price , just look at the price of a new chainsaw as their jumping $100 at a time . So log prices are down compared to a year ago but all cost are way up so your bottom line has to of gone down . The only way it has not is if your not paying the same amount for the timber you were a year ago . It's pretty simple math
NW, I can't think of anything that I'm not paying substantially more for, whether groceries and household supplies, or anything business related.
and here we are again talking about the only guy making real coin and that would be our boat guy aka timber slasher equipment buyer himself . I was thinking he would of had a booth at the Paul Bunyan show just to buy more iron but then again maybe he does
Hard to believe a knotty red oak tie log is bringing the same price as a butt cut red oak veneer log. At least thats how it is here in the southern appalachians
Red Oak FAS lumber is at $.75 and 2A is .42 if you can sell it. Sawn Oak Ties are still $41 so with 43Bd/ft in a 7x9 cross tie by the time you consider the production and yield gain in selling a 7x9 "chunk" vs boards sawed plump (1 1/8") and kerf loss any log that will make a tie is more than Prime Red Oak, even beech and gum. Time to be cutting junk.
High grade logs are down here. Even white oak took a drop and walnut . Your lower logs like hickory and aspen are still holding goid
Thats what im gonna do. Cut the low grade and hold the rest. Landowner is in no hurry .. White oak is still good here . Saved enough of it on this job to get threw the winter.
White pine is still high too .
We still get ro veneer and ro butt logs are going for export. It's ok pricing.
Tie logs market is tough for us, far bit of miles.
white pine is very good here right now , I still sell veneer at a good price but they got to be good . Red maple is good as well
.48 a bf for w pine here, log in the yard. ::)
ya were alot more than that for WP if its big enough and long enough to make timbers
the buyers are telling us to hang on tight , she is going to get pretty rough here in the near future
I heard veneer is good just not the grade. But what does it compare to 2018-19? Heck why does that matter. My fuel went sky high again this week. Up .75 from last time.
That .75 is over $500 a month for me and I'm a small time nobody in these parts. Guys with multiple crews and trucks must be feeling it again.
the good news bad news on fuel is that if we head to recession the fuel price collapses. Russia and OPEC tried to force a price increase by cutting production by a huge amount but it's already falling like a rock again. Next week could be back under $80 a barrel and the oil folks think both Russia and OPEC are cheating on the production cuts.
2 weeks ago we had diesel at 4 and I almost bought 1000 gallons, wish I had. It's back close to 5 this week.
Log price news I was very happy at the price of the bridge timber crane mat prices. YP veneer is still good and so are RO and WO at least here. However, the walnut sawlog prices are reflecting lumber and falling hard.
We've been able to keep YP average straight through close to $0.65 or 70 but that's been work. The lower grade material is paying so well we sometimes just push perfect logs into that.
The Valero I passed by yesterday was $4.97 for fuel and they had none, pumps covered up. This evening it was $5.09, so the load they got in cost more again. Fuel prices are not following crude and are not going down anytime soon.
Quote from: nativewolf on October 14, 2022, 07:51:55 PM
the good news bad news on fuel is that if we head to recession the fuel price collapses. Russia and OPEC tried to force a price increase by cutting production by a huge amount but it's already falling like a rock again. Next week could be back under $80 a barrel and the oil folks think both Russia and OPEC are cheating on the production cuts.
2 weeks ago we had diesel at 4 and I almost bought 1000 gallons, wish I had. It's back close to 5 this week.
Log price news I was very happy at the price of the bridge timber crane mat prices. YP veneer is still good and so are RO and WO at least here. However, the walnut sawlog prices are reflecting lumber and falling hard.
We've been able to keep YP average straight through close to $0.65 or 70 but that's been work. The lower grade material is paying so well we sometimes just push perfect logs into that.
By definition Aren't we allready in a recession? And if so why is fuel still goin up? Because it can is what my guess is.
Pallet logs are still going down. No orders for pallet lumber comin in I hear from several buyers. I hear grade might be at the bottom but who knows at this point. Veneer is still good
In my opinion logs aren't a bad price. It's all the expenses that have gotten out of hand. ALL EXPENSES. If we have a dry fall all the mills
Up here will
Be stuffed full and shutting guys off or put on quotas
Our bolt mills are low. 6"-12". Literally everything we cut is open quota. But hardwood lumber is bad.
Pallet mills can't keep up with demands but supply is crushing pricing. Supply chain is sorting itself out and the buyers we've talked to say pallet demand is high. The issue is lots of folks dumping pallet cants as they can't move flooring- what I hear at least.
All the material thats not related to regular hardwood lumber (crane mats, peeler YP logs, pine saw logs, veneer, many export logs) are doing fine. Example: still at 800 a thousand for long good sized junky RO with a trucking bonus.
When markets zig it helps if you can zag.
Quote from: OH logger on October 14, 2022, 08:20:28 PM
In my opinion logs aren't a bad price. It's all the expenses that have gotten out of hand. ALL EXPENSES. If we have a dry fall all the mills
Up here will
Be stuffed full and shutting guys off or put on quotas
I agree and worry a bit about a dry fall in Ohio/WV/KY. We'll see.
Best of luck to all and I'll keep updating with thoughts and things I hear.
For us its the taxes on the fuel that is killing everyone , this carbon tax crap is crazy up here . winter heating oil is out of this world already and going higher , were pretty much double the cost per dollar on a barrel of oil compared to before , $100 cost per barrel use to cost us $1 a litre now the same barrel cost will cost us over $2 a litre
For what it is worth I thought you guys might like to hear that I'm steady having to turn down orders that I can't cut fast enough. I turned down a 100K bf per month order of pallet lumber two weeks ago. This week I turned down a 300K bf per month order of pallet lumber and a order for 16,000 12x12x30'. I say all of this to point out that the wood is still moving out there and more orders are still coming in.
I didn't think you wholesale stuff. Up here, there's no $$ in it.
I don't wholesale anymore. The point is that for three different companies to be calling asking for product than there is still a decent level of demand. I know that for the most part it is peanuts to what these guys are producing but on the other hand 16000 12x12x30' isn't a small order. I'm just a small mom and pop type of mill and get these calls on a regular basis. Someone is needing wood and they don't seem to have a regular supplier.
Wow @nativewolf (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=24089) my poplar went down again this week, avg. not quite .50 tree run. I would love to have .60 again... red oak is the pits here, from what I'm hearing it won't even avg .35 and they don't want it, tell you to take it somewhere else. Tough times are already here feels like to me, and going to get tougher.
Happy birthday customsawyer, have some beers! ;D
A local mill that buys sugar maple flooring bolts shut all their suppliers off yesterday. Loaded trucks enroute to the mill were told to turn around. This comes after just a few days ago they were calling suppliers looking for wood. No one outside of management knows the reasons for the shutdown or the future. They were paying around $200 per 100" cord with a 7" min. diameter.
That is real bad when they're turning around loaded trucks😬
Happy birthday, Customsawyer!
@Hogdaddy (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=51047) give me a ring and I'll try to find some poplar solutions for you.
Quote from: customsawyer on October 15, 2022, 06:35:53 AM
I don't wholesale anymore.
I get calls too. Pallet stuff.
Quote from: nativewolf on October 15, 2022, 09:44:50 AM
@Hogdaddy (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=51047) give me a ring and I'll try to find some poplar solutions for you.
That some sort of quid pro quo marriage proposal or something? :D
I was hoping he had some extra thick bacon or 2 year old cured ham. :D
fuel went up 50 cents a litre where I get fuel, that is a huge jump , thats like $1.89 for your gallon
Same Valero was up $.10 more this morning, basically 12 hours. Haven't left the field yet to see how much it jumped today.
Ours jumped back last week or two but since then it's been 4.90 for on road and not really moving. My off road is still 4.50
Were at $8.13 in your gallon for fuel right today , that's huge when the barrel is still pretty low . It's all tax and the gov't pushing everyone to buy battery powered everything here
Talked to another good exporter and he is not even going to start, he is heading south for the winter . All I'm going to say is I know I would not want to be signing a deal for a million dollar machine that I would be making payments cause with this market you cannot trust whats going to happen . I watched a fairly big white oak deal go side ways last week and the company that was to buy it said no thanks . That alone would tell any smart person to watch what they are doing, you trust what you cannot control
Quote from: ehp on October 14, 2022, 09:28:16 PM
For us its the taxes on the fuel that is killing everyone , this carbon tax crap is crazy up here . winter heating oil is out of this world already and going higher , were pretty much double the cost per dollar on a barrel of oil compared to before , $100 cost per barrel use to cost us $1 a litre now the same barrel cost will cost us over $2 a litre
Last time I checked, the average total share of taxes for one litre is around 36% or 48 cents per litre in Ontario. Kinda crazy when I think that I paid less than that
total per litre when I started driving in the late 90s.
If that fuel tax goes right back into your roads and bridges that's one thing. How are those taxes spent?
I had to fill my diesel pickup and 100 gallon off road tank today, about $660. I found a safe place and just went into the fetal position for a while😊
the fuel tax goes to whatever the govt puts it and we honestly have no real idea on where that is , you cannot believe any govt cause they lie to you . The amount of fuel tax we pay the roads should be pave every year and the center line done in gold. The only thing I see is the govt bank accounts are getting larger and at a fast rate
I don't mind a fuel tax (not at your rate though!) that is solely used for road and bridge building and repair. It has to be paid for somehow. But there are always some parasites trying to get their hands on those funds, I know here they've been pulling money out of that fund for bike paths. I'm not against bike paths, but don't pay for it with road and bridge money.
up another 20 cents a litre today , Almost to the highest we have ever had , One more big jump and we will be at that place
talking another .75% interest hike next wed for us . That is not going to be good
The Valero I have driven past a few times over the last week is up to $5.27 for fuel now. So $0.30 in a week, getting lots of calls for a 1/4 beef or more, wife was at a few stores the other day and said the meat shelves are just about empty.
It's a runaway diesel at this point and these "masters of the universe" are reaching down and trying to pull up on the hand brake.
A large regional flooring company went back to buying red oak lumber this week. Below cost of production but maybe a sign they think the market has hit bottom from pressure on the supply side. Not much demand but even less to desire to work at a loss. The whole market runs on speculation that often alters demand.
It's wet here so mill is gaining on us so thats a good thing here
It's been dry as a popcorn fart here, And the mills still don't have many logs. Really didn't want them, or wasn't horsing for them anyway. @stavebuyer (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=15189) I hope the red oak opening a little will help things. Thanks for the info
We had a $100-50/thousand raise on YP on top 3 grades.
Quarter saw Oak logs took another big hit. In the past 6 weeks dropped from $2.70 picked up to $2.30 delivered. Delivery costs us 450/mbf. They used to pay when scaled and now hold back half until delivered. Going down much faster than it went up. If it doesn't rain soon, you won't be able to give logs away here.
And the real scary thing to me is , this is the fall going into winter which always brings the highest prices per year and the closer to break up the prices fall so what are the prices going to be in spring ,
I'm seein about exactly what stavebuyers talkin about. Even QS white oak droppin now. Dryest October on record here. Bittersweet for sure. Not buyin much standing. I will when I run out of work I guess. Red oak is terrible
rained lots here
Quote from: stavebuyer on October 24, 2022, 07:01:59 PM
Quarter saw Oak logs took another big hit. In the past 6 weeks dropped from $2.70 picked up to $2.30 delivered. Delivery costs us 450/mbf. They used to pay when scaled and now hold back half until delivered. Going down much faster than it went up. If it doesn't rain soon, you won't be able to give logs away here.
How far are you shipping and how much do you get on a load?
Quote from: quilbilly on October 24, 2022, 11:15:29 PM
Quote from: stavebuyer on October 24, 2022, 07:01:59 PM
Quarter saw Oak logs took another big hit. In the past 6 weeks dropped from $2.70 picked up to $2.30 delivered. Delivery costs us 450/mbf. They used to pay when scaled and now hold back half until delivered. Going down much faster than it went up. If it doesn't rain soon, you won't be able to give logs away here.
How far are you shipping and how much do you get on a load?
Interstate and crossing state lines and scales. Have to axle out and gross under 80K. 3K feet Doyle and often less as the logs are 200'/log on average so the "one more" sometimes puts you over and you can't quite get to 80k. Right at 325 miles one way.
325x$4 mile=$1300 with 2900' Doyle feet comes out to .448/bd ft
QS logs and you're only getting 2900'? We put 3500-4000 mostly. Winter helps, a bit drier wood. Of course we don't pay the trucking on the logs and the buyer arranges that on backhauls. Our shipping distance is a bit higher too.
Our QS pricing has been solid, but then it didn't pop last year. Our best qs pricing was never $2.70 but $2.25 and lots of $2. But then we don't truck it so that's a big difference.
Another PA mill raised pricing a bit on RO, asking for all people will ship but other mills pay better. We can still get higher pricing elsewhere but it was good to see someone asking for logs. So that's 2 PA mills raising pricing or raising volumes. I'd still rather push RO into bridge timbers unless they are good butt logs.
Your wood is lots heavier than ours. We get about 4000-4500 on a flatbed with alder. Scribner scale.
The trucks and trailers are heavy spec and were purchased to hold up running 10% over in the mountains not to maximize payload on the big road. The drivers and loader man often aren't being held accountable to maximize as much as warned not to overload and be put out of service overweight. They could do better, but the average over time is what it is. I broker the logs, so the freight is not my area to oversee. When I used to handle veneer from this region 3200' was about it on an aluminum flat with light bolsters. Used to sub-contract this route out by the foot and they hauled heavy and bypassed the scales. Now with the electronic logging and hours of service you can't pull that off without making it a two-day trip. Used to be that you could get some flatbeds to backhaul. Now the bourbon trade has monopolized those lanes. Trucks and drivers aren't to be found.
The RR's claim the oak ties from this neighborhood are slower growth and heavier than anyplace else. These old mountaintop Chestnut Oaks are mostly from places that were skipped over when this ground was first logged in the early 1900s.
The wood is heavy, the trucks are heavy, the operators are erring to the side of being light rather than over. Maximize everything you could easily trim the $.45 haul down to about $.40 which is certainly worth doing but sometimes water goes over the dam.
Does anyone know what the white pine market in central Mass is currently?
I cut probably 2-3 tri-axle loads this week. Most of it is nice stuff, hate to see it wasted. It's essentially a by product of a farm improvement project I'd like to find a home for.
Newoodguy78, it all depends on if you're buying or selling. :D You could see if Brain Dammon in Fitzwilliam NH would buy them. He is on rt12 right below State line truck service. I'd give him a try.
Or Robinson's sawmill in Hardwick Mass.
WR Robinson Lumber Co.
I tried Robinson, was surprised when he told me they aren't buying right now.
I'll give Damon a call and see if there's any interest there. I've bought a fair amount of lumber from both places in the past.
The only logs I see moving here are cut by crews that work for local mills that own the timber. It's rained about 1/10" in last 5-6 weeks here and the deer are ganging up on my farm pond. Lots of leafs down, fire is a serious possibility but today, Sunday plus Monday & Tuesday says rain is coming.
white pine is pretty good here , its as high as its ever been for me . The log home pine market is high as well but a real pain in the butt to deal with as you move and move the logs for the buyers to look at
I was looking in the equipment trader and on page 5 they had some forwards on there. 2 of them were close to 20 years old with over 18K hours and they still wanted close to 80k bucks for them. Any that were close to 10K hours were around 250K. That's a lot of wood you have to move to pay for high hour machines. Are these prices normal? How much are the new machines? It seems like a tough market to be in if you have to have one of these to get the wood out.
Yep those are normal prices for forwarders.
Quote from: customsawyer on October 30, 2022, 12:39:59 PM
I was looking in the equipment trader and on page 5 they had some forwards on there. 2 of them were close to 20 years old with over 18K hours and they still wanted close to 80k bucks for them. Any that were close to 10K hours were around 250K. That's a lot of wood you have to move to pay for high hour machines. Are these prices normal? How much are the new machines? It seems like a tough market to be in if you have to have one of these to get the wood out.
Small one is $350+ mid to big size is 450-600,000. The only way that works is cut a lot and trade in soon. So your investment is only half what you paid and hopefully very little down time.
My quartersaw buyer calls today and says they went too far on the last price cut and it impacted their procurement numbers. Now they will revert to paying in full when the logs are scaled and add a $.30 bd/ft freight allowance.
Now that is good news! Hope you are cutting some nice large chestnut oak on that ridge.
So how do you guys store logs. All my Ash logs are checking terribly, the splits run the entire length of the log.
Keeping the bark intact helps a bunch. In the growing season a tree felled and not bucked or moved until the leaves wilt will help retain the bark. Winter cut logs will retain the bark naturally. "Debarked" logs either can be stored under water(a lawn sprinkler goes a long way), or sprayed with a coating like Anchor Seal. Anchor seal is great for end checking but is tough to coat the sides as well as expensive due to the quantity needed to treat an entire log. Commercial mills use sprinklers on the dark woods. Wood like Hard Maple they saw their inventory every week and don't try and store due to storage degrade. Common for grade mills to start their week sawing Hard Maple on Monday until its sawn out and stockpiling the oaks under water.
High grade logs are more perishable than most realize. They won't "rot" overnight, but they will certainly stain in week of hot and humid conditions.
WF, kind of wrong time of year to be cutting ash and the better the ash is the worse it splits , I had a job that had real good ash and it had to be cut right then so cut the logs up in 3 log lengths so 24 to 32 ft length and sent to the mill like that , mill cut them to length the day they were being sawn into lumber
Back to log prices. Just heard yesterday some outfit in TN. came down here and bought the white oak off of a tract. They payed $100.00/ton to the land owner, I'm sure for the best grade logs. For reference that is around what I pay for good tree length WO delivered to the mill, mixed grades. That will put it around 50 cents per bf. The biggest difference is this price was payed to the land owner. It will still need to be cut and hauled a min. of 3 hours and probably closer to 5 or 6 hours to get to where the whiskey is made.
White Oak staves cut from fast growing trees tend to leak. Somebody may get an expensive lesson with south-Georgia logs.
we pay more than that for white oak standing here and if good white oak its alot more than that here
Quote from: ehp on November 04, 2022, 05:16:35 PM
we pay more than that for white oak standing here and if good white oak its alot more than that here
Same here
For reference that is about double what is normally paid for standing white oak down here. There is a reason y'all get higher prices in the hardwood market report too. Yours is a better quality WO. Ours is full of stress and can be a pain to saw because of it.
Here it's .40 BF for the pallet del to the yard. I don't do pallet, I get a good saw logs for grade stakes and lumber. And that's like .70 a bf.
So, when he said per ton, how much does $50 a ton on pallet timber figure per foot. Hardwoods. Just need a rough guess.
I'm talking about what the landowner gets. Not what the mill pays. Would have to add logging cost and trucking cost per ton per mile to get that figure. At $50.00/ton would be a little over 25 cents per bf. but you won't get that for pallet logs or pulp wood. Probably 10-15 bucks a ton to the land owner. This is all for hardwoods. I wish Danny was still here he would have more info to add to this. Don't know what loggers are getting per ton now with these new fuel prices or what the trucking cost have gone up to.
Yeah. That's what they're paying for pallet hauled to the mill here. $50
nothing here is by the ton or cord, she is all by the 1000, land owners here get paid very well and there is enough guys buying timber there is no nice good deals unless its real junk and no one wants it . White oak is a tree you got to be quite carefull at buying cause we normally only sell the top grade of veneer cause its a long truck ride for the logs so they only want the top stuff and I mean its got to be perfect so you better know what your looking at cause the next grade down is a huge drop in pay , its less than half
My fault... I wasn't asking or talking about white oak, i was just asking how weight=board feet. (and price per ton versus price per foot) I think I got everyone confused. Just misc. hardwood pallet logs
Board foot to ton conversions vary with log scale and tree diameter. Hardwoods vary from 5-6 tons per mbf for big poplar to 8.5 tons per mbf for tie/pallet sized hickory. These are Doyle values as buying per ton is often in the SE where Doyle is the most common scale.
A 25 ton load of White Oak scales around 3200 Bd/ft on average so at $50 x25 tons=$1250
Divide the $1250/3200 bd ft yields $.39 per foot for the stumpage on Doyle Scale
Thank you. @stavebuyer (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=15189)
I appreciate stavebuyer stepping in and clearing some of this up. It gets misunderstood converting from scale, to ton, to yield.
The only ones that buy by doyle scale is small time guys like myself when buying from tree surgeons. All larger timber sales are done by the ton. Land owner, logger, trucking all get paid by the ton. I have never converted how many bf doyle scale was on a semi. I know that when I buy a 25 to 28 ton load of logs at $100.00/ton in white oak, I will actually yield around 4500-5500 bf of lumber. Keep in mind that most of it is going for flooring lowboy trailers so more over run than normal. I wonder if our southern white oak would weigh more or less per bf than Appalachian or Northern white oak? Or pick any of the same species.
It is common to get large lumber over-run with a band mill on Doyle scaled logs. That also varies greatly by log diameter. You might double lumber sawn versus the log scaled footage with 14" logs and have no over-run with 24" logs. The big logs will also change the log scale to weight scale ratio. The same 25 tons with a 24" log average might scale 4000ft.
I have bought on weight and resold by the ton and vice versa. Easy to get bit.
lumber here took a big hit hard yesterday , pretty much all grades . I talked to 3 different log buyers yesterday as they stopped by where I'm cutting just to talk , Boys things are not good and that's a understatement and next spring its going to be worse and to the point guys are going to be sitting at home wondering what to do , the one mill is going to start sending guys home now cause they got no sales for the lumber . The county put out 2 hard maple cuts to bid on and the 1 mill bid $2/ft standing and now they are in big trouble cause no way is that going to work out but they paid for the cuts , anything under the highest grade of veneer is a loss at that price and you still got to cut and skid it and truck it to the yard for the veneer buyers , I can tell you I sure would not want to be paying big monthly payments , the one big lumber yard that sells the lower grades is so full its telling everyone the price has to drop and drop alot , some of the other smaller mills are not buying anything cause they know the log prices are going down
So far it's holding here. YP peelers pulled back a touch- really just tightened specs. Going to send a low grade load of stave wood out- we'll see how it does. Not great wood so I'm not hoping for much. CO is still 1400 for a good sawlog.
Hickory sure is weak, we might leave the good ones til next harvest.
As far as I'm concerned. The crash is here and dropping fast
It's a global market and for the last 2 years China has been a fraction of prior sales. Combined with the last 2 years of Trump admin in the tariff wars we've had 4 years here with declining Chinese purchase. I think Canada benefited a bit on the tariff side of it.
The Chinese communist party is finally making some moves to get rid of the zero covid rules and to fix the housing market. That would do huge things to the global wood products trade. If that happens wood products will pick up during an interest rate driven recession leaving winter of 2023-4 being potentially smoking hot. That is just a guess but I'd say keep an eye out on what is happening in china.
The problem in China on the apartment/housing situation is that the developers sold the apartments, regular ol citizens have bought them. The construction companies then failed to finish them (commodity increases, covid, poor planning, fraud, embezzlement, land speculation among other reasons). So the problem is big (millions of units) and concentrated (several dozen big companies). It's the sort of problem that the govt there can fix if they put money into it. That is the sort of thing they can fix, if they want to.
You put all your eggs in China baskets . I am not . You very well could be right but I'm not taking that chance. I have been down this road to many times before . . Things are going to be tough and everything says it will be . China has no control over any houses being built here which is a big part of logging in NA . They are all telling us a 30 year mortgage will be at least 10% . That alone will kill everything . Your going to see big lay offs in the work force which is already starting to happen here. In a couple years things may pick up but not because demand for lumber has gotten a lot better . It's going to be causeblook at the average age of guts logging . There is no young people doing it and most guys logging are ready to retire or quit and do something else . Most guys here are my age or older so we're not going to log much longer
I'm saying China will move market regardless of the state of the economy here. That's what happened in 2009-14. All the price support was China.
There are other drivers of course. Ukraine is moving forward, that settles next summer as many experts think than Europe could explode with opportunity. It would be much bigger than Germany reunifying which had a huge impact.
The interest rate rise is likely about over here, we'll see. In the meantime I agree with you that things may continue to contract. I'd just be prepared for it to not contract.
Like you I see a lot of loggers leaving the business. Supply destruction has done a lot to support our business locally.
Just buy jobs today put a 5 year contract on em and sit on it!!! 😂
Target is expecting sales to be off these holidays. They also reported $400,000,000.00 in shoplifting losses. Prices have to go up. Inflation will keep people from remodeling and builders from building. Lumber prices will go down. Therefore log prices will go down.
But cedar is holding firm. Denmark wants a container every 1 1/2 months at 10 to 15% price increase. I will milk this cow until dry. Local sales continue at a good pace.
Since hardwood loggers can switch to cedar, I hope it fills our bare log yard this winter. It got bare this summer and fall.
Wish I could buy that far out , here most will only do 1 year period , our logging permit is only good for 1 year as well on a job
Cedarman I strongly dislike a empty log yard. It's hard to sell it if you don't have it.
Everybodys log yard is empty. That is why pricing has not collapsed.
I know 3 logging crews that shut down, 2 that are only cutting white oak jobs. Not a lot of logs moving.
Hopefully reports like Targets will keep interest rate movement down. Typically the fed is lagging, just like it was too late raising rates, it will keep higher too long.
I'm hoping for just the opposite, high rates = high returns. Target is just another of many middle man used to export USD to china.
Quote from: OH logger on November 16, 2022, 09:29:14 PM
Just buy jobs today put a 5 year contract on em and sit on it!!! 😂
we put 30 years on ours.
It's interesting because I buy a decent variety of logs, but not enough to get a "deal" from various places. Yesterday I paid 65 cents for poplar, about what I paid a couple months ago, $2.25 for butternut, about what I paid a couple months ago, and asked about 3CF walnut, it's holding at $3 to $3.50 which is about where it was last summer. Basswood was also 65 cents. Mixed tie logs were going for 53 cents, which I thought was pretty high because I had heard crosstie prices had started to drop.
I've been trying to get cedar logs for months, I can't get them. I'm not even sure what is a good price anymore because I can't buy what I can't get. I've had 2 cedar loggers call me recently, we set up a deal, and they never show, never even call back. I can only assume I was outbid, or I was being used as a patsy to drive the cost up to others, but either way, I don't have a cedar log to my name.
I was hoping the walnut log prices were dropping faster because the walnut lumber I sometimes buy has started to drop quality within grade (more cull boards, lots of sapwood), but not necessarily the price, maybe just a little. However the lower grades I get in the packs actually mean my net cost on walnut has gone up.
I bought this week a pack of KD FAS 8/4 hard maple from Pennsylvania, it was 4.80 which is unchanged in two months, and red oak from Kentucky at $2.93 which is exactly what I paid in August.
I just ordered about $10K worth of exotics from North Carolina, they actually went up about 10% since last order, I assume to pay for freight. I buy exotics from about 3 different places, only one could fill my order because of the scarcity of them being able to get the variety I needed.
Just my information this week. It's interesting to get the information on this topic from the logger's standpoint. I typically only buy near veneer or 3CF and better logs so live bid in an accumulation yard for them against other buyers. Not like a formal auction, the logs are laid out, I pick the ones I want, and there's usually another guy or two, like me, buying also. I'm the most "non pro" out there, yesterday a guy was buying about 5 semi loads against me, (I only bought 3600 bdft) and he was stapling barcodes generated from a handheld computer thing on the ends of each log be bought. We were buying within a few cents of each other, so if I'm getting ripped off, he as a professional log buyer, was getting ripped off too.
nativewolf
30 years !!
You obviously have some enlightened land owners.
When I was contracting up here I tried to offer a service to manage their wood lot no dice it was a case of how much how fast. I was competing with crooks that offered unrealistic stumpage cleaned the lot off and only paid a pittance to the landowner.
Cheers
Al
30 years and revenue share and we do TSI in the harvest, first harvest cull and fix. Try not to go broke. Contract ties to land. Nobody else can do commercial harvest. Second harvest will be strong. Can't work on crapped out high grades.
Our big challenge is getting production up to a steady 3 trucks a day.
30 years is pretty ambitious, don't know how anyone could sweet talk a landowner into a contract tying up their land for that long.
I don't deal in KD lumber; but someone is doing quite well if they can buy wholesale FAS RO green lumber at 715 and sell it KD for 2700. You can buy all the 4SC RO logs your checkbook can stand for $.60 Doyle. Also seems odd the 3SC Walnut logs are bringing that kind of coin when 4/4 green FAS Walnut lumber is at 2300.
6x8 ties are dropping $.50 but 7x9 Oak are still bringing $41 so tie logs at $.50+ is very common and above average margin for the mills that specialize in them. We are still in severe drought locally and every mill is overflowing with logs. Many have loggers on quota.
Quote from: nativewolf on November 17, 2022, 09:26:00 AM
30 years and revenue share and we do TSI in the harvest, first harvest cull and fix. Try not to go broke. Contract ties to land. Nobody else can do commercial harvest. Second harvest will be strong. Can't work on crapped out high grades.
Our big challenge is getting production up to a steady 3 trucks a day.
I'd be willing to bet the land owner can break that contract just like any contract it's only good today.
Not a logger...
What are examples of exotics?
I agree it's odd. The KD we buy is at the very high end of FAS, 95% to 100% clear, with a minimum wane, same as for all our wood we have to buy. So there is a premium markup there, buts it's still sold as FAS. One of the reasons I can't purchase FAS locally even though there are a lot of mills here is that they grade to minimum specs of FAS at 83% and we reject unless it is 95% our better. The logs we buy in RO are basically veneer butt logs but when we run out of wood I've sawn, I have to buy elsewhere. I asked one of the mill owners to grade higher for me and he said that was his margin so wouldn't do it.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/21488/69032469027__D930CC8A-A826-4406-97F0-8DF3E9A2E51C.jpeg?easyrotate_cache=1668699201)
H
Here is the little jag 8/4 rock maple and 6/4 red oak delivered Wednesday. Basically zero knots, minimal wane. As I mentioned, we are out and need some supply for the Thanksgiving weekend shoppers.
Here is the reminder of a pallet of 4/4 soft maple here, on top. Again sold as FAS but with very few defects. This came form Pennsylvania:
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/21488/IMG_4811.jpeg?easyrotate_cache=1668699163)
Here is the one that really lit me up last week. I saw and sell non steamed walnut but also sell steamed walnut (some customers prefer it to match existing furniture) provided through a big distributer, who usually gets it from Missouri. Anyway, they were completely out of 4/4 steamed or unsteamed 4/4 walnut, but the last price I paid was $8.80 per bdft. So I had to backslide and get some steamed from a local source near Nashville, 2 hours away, and they send FAS grade, for about $7 per bdft. Well, I got what I usually get from "normal" walnut mills here, which is why I don't like buying from them, FAS with a lot of sapwood. I know sapwood isn't a defect (up to point) in NHLA rules, but woodworkers will not buy it. When they buy walnut, they want purple, not white. So we don't sell sapwood, and we had to clean this mess up yesterday and will lose a lot on edge drop. Total net price? I don't even want to think about it.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/21488/IMG_4684.jpeg?easyrotate_cache=1668699164)
Exotics are purple heart, mahogany, red grandis, zebra wood sand such.
Looking at a price sheet from one buyer, last month and this month--
hard maple, soft maple and white oak down a bit ($25-75 per Mbf depending on grade), some staying the same (cherry, ash, red oak), yellow birch jumped $50 on all grades.
Looking at a different buyer, hard maple and ash are down, but again with yellow birch taking a bump up.
Checking my records I sold #1/#2 hard maple last winter for $50 more per mbf than what prices are currently, which is what the price was last month. Prime HM price is the same as I sold for last year. Cherry is $50/mbf more now than it was then.
Love to follow this thread, always learning
I understand if you need the best of the best, a premium would be involved but take RO for example. In green lumber there is only about a $300 spread between 2&3 and FAS. They can pull the premiums for you and sell the rest of the FAS for flooring at half what you are being charged. Somebody somewhere has an I-dry or needs one to sort and dry you some lumber.
There are mills right now that can't even get a PO for FAS RO green. I'd be joining some state associations or take a few independent lumber brokers fishing. There are small mills around that would be perfect suppliers for those kinds of orders.
Maybe lumber brokers, but the ones I've talked to are not ones I want to have a business relationship with. At least the ones I know. I'm sure there are some good ones, bit we haven't crossed paths yet. Id would love to find one, me shopping for logs and lumber consumes a lot of time. Since I don't buy from them, they tell me how they push and pull other mills to manipulate prices. I don't want that, I want an "honest" broker, who I haven't found yet. Yes, we are a very high grade lumber buyer and seller, so that does skew prices a little.
I don't want fishing favors, I want to do business with an operation who can do a quality business at my level of requirement. I want professionals as lumber suppliers, dryers, and business associates. Hobbiest people can't hang, been there did that. I can't tell you how many phone calls I've made back to independents who put "lower grade in the middle of a pack."
I do have several independent mills (3) that can send me green wood, and are honest, but we have 47 different species, and they are erratic at best and only do mainstream, vanilla wood. I do mainstream and specialty. That's why I have no cedar right now. However, the reason I buy KD red oak, or other vanilla wood, is because my kilns are chokepoints, and I shouldn't have to saw and dry a species that any competent operation should be able to do. So if they can meet my grade both in quality and moisture content then I will do business with them, until they get complacent and rip me off, then I move on.
There is one circle hardwood mill that does very well for us, they grade my wood green with a "no knots" grade, and I spend quite a bit of money with them. They are good, but they can't do my variety (don't saw bassood, hickory, any maple) for example, and doesn't do any 8/4. They do 4\4 at 40Mbf to 60 Mbf a day. They broker their good logs, won't even saw it. I do occasionally buy green vanilla wood from them, but it just backs up my kilns, which are filled with my specialty wood.
So I purchase sassafras, basswood, walnut, Osage, hickory (nobody saws hickory here) even the mega mills, pecan, sycamore, QS white oak and red oak logs among a bunch more. I have to mill and dry all of these myself and that's what cycles and occupies my two kilns. So those are our choke point. I'm not getting another kiln.
So it's doesn't do me any real good to buy green red oak, poplar, etc because I don't have the kiln space anyway. Since 6/4 and 8/4 take so much longer to dry, I don't want that green anyway, I want it KD 8/4 ready top sell.
The local contract kiln dryers, big and small, around here are a joke, they rip off everyone around, don't take responsibility for badly dried wood and if I had another kiln, I could make good money drying for others. The professional, big operations don't contract kiln dry. The little kiln operations, including a few Idry's are very poor, but good for my business because they rip off customers, who get mad and come my way. So the more they dry for others, the more customers I get and I won't buy from an independent unless they can prove their wood has been dried to a proper MC and sterilized. None so far have met the challenge. I need a paperwork record. I get this from pro kilns, never from the independents. They don't because they can't.
So I only work with above board pro kilns so I don't have to wonder if they did their job right.
Anyway me chiming on on this isn't to tell people about my operation, I'm doing what I do, and buy and sell what I sell. My point was simply to provide the other side viewpoint. I am an operation that buys relatively decent quantities of KD vanilla wood from professional operations who serve large, multi state areas. So I am just providing information on what I am paying for vanilla wood, to provide a little information to the people who may find it useful or interesting. I competitive price shop amongst professional suppliers, and these are the prices I am paying this week. I'm simply providing food for thought, a different viewpoint as a high grade KD lumber buyer and retailer. Many of the price sheets I get are spreadsheets, they are not necessarily to me, just general prices to a range of wholesale customers.
I thought it would be interesting for people to know what I'm paying for some species, not to start an argument or hijack the thread.
Fishing trips and golf scrambles are organized with the intent that people in the field can build connections and develop relationships with others in the profession.
I often donated firewood to people in need, sawed for free, and overpaid for junk logs I didn't want to help people who were less fortunate. People with an attitude got the opportunity to do business somewhere else.
Yep, that's my point.
Y.H., How did you wind up with some of my walnut? :)
The input is different and appreciated YH. Thanks
Advice was given that networking might benefit procurement.
My mistake as the network works both ways.
As it was said earlier, log prices are falling, or at least not going up, but actual retail lumber prices, or even wholesale KD premium lumber prices I see are not dropping, or only dropping in terms of grade. There is a huge disconnect between what a logger gets paid, or even the landowner, what the HMR reports, and the end retail user has to pay. I'm not involved with the inner workings of the distributers who supply me, but I feel they are being professional and fair, and I pay what I think their services are worth.
As I said before, I don't know why there is such a disconnect, I'd like to get a better picture of it, and understand why so I can account. In some ways it doesn't make much difference in the business, I call up suppliers, they tell me their sale price, and I can either agree or not. Or I can buy green off the mill lumber, or mill it myself, then sticker it, air dry it for 6 weeks, kiln dry it, sterilize, then plane and edge and sell it. There is a huge time delay in such a process, and I can't sell it if I don't have it. So when I get in a bind, I put in an order. Most of my distributers run trucks during the week, with everything from lumber to flooring, to plywood, (we also sell that on occasion) so if they have it, and I need it, I can get it in a day or so.
I think it's also important to know the true high retail price points of some of these vanilla species. For example, it you look on the Lowes website, a red oak 1x6"x8' long board currently sells for $53. That's $13.25 per bdft. It went up since this summer where it was $11.75 per bdft. I post their prices in my showroom so people know what the big box store retail prices are.
Poplar 1"x6"x8' is $34. These are the stores I'm competing against, and these are the types of places the average retail buyer purchases from.
There is a huge disconnect, time delay and price insulation between log prices in the woods, and the lumber that that average retailer has to pay for. So much so that as log prices drop, loggers quit, supply goes down, and the actual retail price sometimes goes up.
It also translates to businesses who use lumber, but don't want to deal with wholesale purchases of it. For example, I'm not sure what maple logs are doing, but I have a professional cabinet maker driving up tomorrow from Meridian Ms, 8 hour round trip, to buy that jag of soft and hard maple I showed in the picture. I asked him why he had to drive that far, and surely he could find it closer, because he shouldn't have to drive that far for maple. He said he had called everybody, all the home supply stores, wholesale building supply places in his area and as he said "I just can't get maple here, I used to, but not now." He has an order for cabinets, and needs the lumber and didn't hesitate to say he was driving 4 hours here to get it. That's why I had the picture to post on the Forum, I had just sent it to him.
Anyway, I'm just providing a different viewpoint.
I try to buy good logs, working with some loggers can be a pain. After one load of logs from some, I buy no more from them.
Looking for wood is harder than just cutting it, sometimes. :D :D
Quote from: Peter Drouin on November 17, 2022, 08:58:12 PM
I try to buy good logs, working with some loggers can be a pain. After one load of logs from some, I buy no more from them.
Looking for wood is harder than just cutting it, sometimes. :D :D
Meh, paying a premium price still on the stump then having to make it marketable for what it is. All the while keeping good relations with landowners, and believe me some can be tough. Then having log buyers drop the price by 50% over night after getting said stumpage fell, skidded, and hauled. Anyone is welcome to try this path instead of buying the woods finished product ready to go
Quote from: bigblockyeti on November 17, 2022, 09:36:20 AM
30 years is pretty ambitious, don't know how anyone could sweet talk a landowner into a contract tying up their land for that long.
Yeah, never happen here either... ;D
I buy in #2KD 4/4 pine by the semi load. Normally around 14,000 bf per semi. I buy one every couple of months. A year ago I was getting it for $700.00/M. Then it went back up to $750.00/M and now it is back down to $700.00/M. That is what I paid for a semi load last week. If the price has only changed 5 cents per bf. when buying semi loads at a time it shouldn't be changing much in the log woods. The most I paid when pine was through the roof was $1200.00/M and the lowest I have gotten it several years ago was $585.00/M. So with the change in fuel prices I would say I'm getting it about as cheap as I have ever gotten it but it sure isn't reflecting what y'all are saying you are seeing in the log woods. Like YH I'm just trying to share what I'm seeing on my end. I find all of this very interesting.
so il logger, I pay what the big mills pay and more sometimes.
And like W Pine, I buy 8' and 10' that the big mills don't want.
Because of that, I get loggers want to sell logs to me.
When I call a logger for wood, I tell them the price up front and keep it. I don't bs no one. And I pay the next day in full.
I could hire men and cut a lot of wood if I wanted to. But, At my age, I don't want to work that hard anymore.
Money is good to have, but, It's not on the top of my list.
I get by just fine.
Good luck to you, sir.
the bought a head bushes here may turn out to be not a good thing , I know I got 5 already bought from last winter with out this years amount of timber so I most likely will be cutting timber cheaper than I planned cause log prices went down . Only bush I am kind of worried about is a bush full of beech and if it drops by $100/1000 in price that will not be good
It's bad when you cut a four ft on the stump northern read oak slick as a gun barrel and the top log with 8 in limb knots brings the same as the butt cut .
Tie logs are bringing the same as prime here. Every three weeks a new price sheet comes out ,with Prices dropping, then trucking getting higher .
I was getting more for red oak 30 years ago when 5 gallon of hydraulic oil was 10 bucks and diesel 70 cents a gallon.
I'm about ready to park it all and set by the wood heater with a good book and a cup of coffee this winter.
Old-timer.. I see and hear quite a few guys saying the same thing here . If this keeps up no one will be left but good old Barge . And I cannot see very many other people getting into logging as the cost of equipment is threw the roof and very little profit at the end and lots will have zero profit
Even if you log because you love it, you still need to have a couple of nickels to rub together at the end of the week.
Quote from: so il logger on November 17, 2022, 11:04:26 PM
Quote from: Peter Drouin on November 17, 2022, 08:58:12 PM
I try to buy good logs, working with some loggers can be a pain. After one load of logs from some, I buy no more from them.
Looking for wood is harder than just cutting it, sometimes. :D :D
Meh, paying a premium price still on the stump then having to make it marketable for what it is. All the while keeping good relations with landowners, and believe me some can be tough. Then having log buyers drop the price by 50% over night after getting said stumpage fell, skidded, and hauled. Anyone is welcome to try this path instead of buying the woods finished product ready to go
It is funny you mentioned it, we have been in discussion on 6k acres on just that sort of agreement not too far from you. Slow discussion, we are not in a hurry, too much on plate already. Also had inquiries/ requests from NC LA CA HAwaii MD WV.
Quote from: ehp on November 18, 2022, 06:15:22 AM
the bought a head bushes here may turn out to be not a good thing , I know I got 5 already bought from last winter with out this years amount of timber so I most likely will be cutting timber cheaper than I planned cause log prices went down . Only bush I am kind of worried about is a bush full of beech and if it drops by $100/1000 in price that will not be good
Our fingers are crossed for you here in VA.
Hope beech picks up!
Quote from: nativewolf on November 18, 2022, 01:28:53 PM
Quote from: so il logger on November 17, 2022, 11:04:26 PM
Quote from: Peter Drouin on November 17, 2022, 08:58:12 PM
I try to buy good logs, working with some loggers can be a pain. After one load of logs from some, I buy no more from them.
Looking for wood is harder than just cutting it, sometimes. :D :D
Meh, paying a premium price still on the stump then having to make it marketable for what it is. All the while keeping good relations with landowners, and believe me some can be tough. Then having log buyers drop the price by 50% over night after getting said stumpage fell, skidded, and hauled. Anyone is welcome to try this path instead of buying the woods finished product ready to go
It is funny you mentioned it, we have been in discussion on 6k acres on just that sort of agreement not too far from you. Slow discussion, we are not in a hurry, too much on plate already. Also had inquiries/ requests from NC LA CA HAwaii MD WV.
Would love to know where this 6k acres is "near" me. If you want to play here it costs big money. To cut valuable timber that is.. I been in this my whole life, and it's a multi generation occupation. Nobody will sign a 30 yr contract on shares around "here". It's money up front and 3 yrs is about the max contract you will get
Westvaco signed up to manage a large chunk of West KY/West TN/So IL and helped landowners clearcut their hardwoods and plant pine. That didn't work out so well.
Quote from: so il logger on November 18, 2022, 02:25:46 PM
Quote from: nativewolf on November 18, 2022, 01:28:53 PM
Quote from: so il logger on November 17, 2022, 11:04:26 PM
Quote from: Peter Drouin on November 17, 2022, 08:58:12 PM
I try to buy good logs, working with some loggers can be a pain. After one load of logs from some, I buy no more from them.
Looking for wood is harder than just cutting it, sometimes. :D :D
Meh, paying a premium price still on the stump then having to make it marketable for what it is. All the while keeping good relations with landowners, and believe me some can be tough. Then having log buyers drop the price by 50% over night after getting said stumpage fell, skidded, and hauled. Anyone is welcome to try this path instead of buying the woods finished product ready to go
It is funny you mentioned it, we have been in discussion on 6k acres on just that sort of agreement not too far from you. Slow discussion, we are not in a hurry, too much on plate already. Also had inquiries/ requests from NC LA CA HAwaii MD WV.
Would love to know where this 6k acres is "near" me. If you want to play here it costs big money. To cut valuable timber that is.. I been in this my whole life, and it's a multi generation occupation. Nobody will sign a 30 yr contract on shares around "here". It's money up front and 3 yrs is about the max contract you will get
He will let you know when he has the contract signed
Quote from: stavebuyer on November 18, 2022, 03:26:00 PM
Westvaco signed up to manage a large chunk of West KY/West TN/So IL and helped landowners clearcut their hardwoods and plant pine. That didn't work out so well.
The contracts were common all over the SE, then mills discovered genetics, improved pine, did better management and they could not process all the pine they grew. The contracts were not the problem but the focus on pine. Tens of thousands of private landowners with no contracts did the same exact thing. They all made mistakes. Heck we have pine plantations west of Winchester VA that will never produce merchantable sawlogs. When the local mill closed they were SOL and now beetles slowly but surely wipe them out and oaks and hickory replace them.
Contract or no contract I call bull on 6k acres in Illinois. I guess a gov contract on Shawnee forest land is a possibility, with the right contacts to the left at current standings. But locals will inevitably burn the equipment though. If it's outside of Illinois it is not "near" enough to me to care. @nativewolf (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=24089) better cruise it before trying it
So logger , I got kind of the same thing here but not as big, got a bush of 600 acres to cut if I want and mill called BS until they seen a picture of the area and oh my god your telling the truth lol lots of white oak and red oak are the normal tree types , bit of hard maple but that stuff will not be great cause of the clay its growing on, there should be alot of walnut but never seen a single tree but figured it got cut 40 years ago when bush got logged last time
so il logger, who will burn the equipment? Tree huggers?
I didn't say IL and the point wasn't if you did or did not care... but that landowners all over are willing to engage in that sort of contract. Stavebuyers brought up the point that the mills had in fact signed up tens of of thousands of acres in your neck of the woods in long term contracts. Those style contracts were the basis for ours- I have reviewed dozens of mill contracts to find out what did and didn't work. I like long term management as it takes decades to grow a good hardwood forest. Pioneer forest in the ozarks is exemplary management and is now struggling with success as regeneration has changed as the forest avg diam has become larger. Freaking ozarks. The point here is that just because it is a long term contract doesn't mean problems end. It just lets us address some of them so we can focus on growing forest. You have to be agile in your management.
Farmers all over your county have signed up for long term CREP style agreements. I am a big fan of long term management designed to grow great forests. That's what I'm about. When people say they have not had luck with it I suggest trying it a different way, don't give up.
To argue that it can't be done when it has been in the past and is being done in farming today is to argue against facts. For us the harvest are a means to grow a better forest. We spent all the money on CTL so we could grow a forest; do a harvest and TSI simultaneously and not go broke.
FWIW CREP ground is generally considered waste land and not making any money for the farmer, so the incentive is to get something.
Quote from: nativewolf on November 20, 2022, 08:00:19 AM
I didn't say IL and the point wasn't if you did or did not care... but that landowners all over are willing to engage in that sort of contract. Stavebuyers brought up the point that the mills had in fact signed up tens of of thousands of acres in your neck of the woods in long term contracts. Those style contracts were the basis for ours- I have reviewed dozens of mill contracts to find out what did and didn't work. I like long term management as it takes decades to grow a good hardwood forest. Pioneer forest in the ozarks is exemplary management and is now struggling with success as regeneration has changed as the forest avg diam has become larger. Freaking ozarks. The point here is that just because it is a long term contract doesn't mean problems end. It just lets us address some of them so we can focus on growing forest. You have to be agile in your management.
Farmers all over your county have signed up for long term CREP style agreements. I am a big fan of long term management designed to grow great forests. That's what I'm about. When people say they have not had luck with it I suggest trying it a different way, don't give up.
To argue that it can't be done when it has been in the past and is being done in farming today is to argue against facts. For us the harvest are a means to grow a better forest. We spent all the money on CTL so we could grow a forest; do a harvest and TSI simultaneously and not go broke.
Isn't what you guys call TSI a thin and part of a normal thin? Normally thinning there's plenty of stuff you cut that you don't get paid for it's part of the job as well as the land owners shouldn't be getting charged for.
I don't think most farmers view forest much differently... at least it does not seem like it, the analogy is one we use with farmers. In most areas the forests are the truly marginal lands, that's why they have been allows to revert to forests.
Not sure about that. Timber shows up on your balance sheet and tax bill as a valuable asset. CREP ground is taxed at almost nothing as it's too wet to crop or graze so the program is "found money".
Quote from: Peter Drouin on November 20, 2022, 06:56:05 AM
so il logger, who will burn the equipment? Tree huggers?
Absolutely, no way I would get involved in a harvest down there. Nutjobs
Quote from: Southside on November 20, 2022, 09:59:44 AM
Not sure about that. Timber shows up on your balance sheet and tax bill as a valuable asset. CREP ground is taxed at almost nothing as it's too wet to crop or graze so the program is "found money".
This exactly
here we also got to watch your equipment as things can happen to it and most times its not loggers that do the harm , its other people . I hope things stay like there are and do not drop the price any more cause that will be bad for a lot of people besides me , lots of guys have payments to pay each month and its not good if they cannot make ends meat to stay alive , If enough guys are not working and the mills cannot get enough logs then the mill closes for good and that does no one any good in the long run , everyone seems to be out just thinking for themselves but sometimes its alot better to think as a group and keep everyone a live so then everyone makes enough money to keep going , I agree its a risk letting others know what your plan is but its also I feel that people like the mill knows what your planning and the amount of logs they can count on getting cause when the crap hits the fan like it is doing now the mill will count on you alot more than a guy they cannot get along with , he will be at home watching Maury while your working
Quote from: ehp on November 20, 2022, 04:08:02 PM
here we also got to watch your equipment as things can happen to it and most times its not loggers that do the harm , its other people . I hope things stay like there are and do not drop the price any more cause that will be bad for a lot of people besides me , lots of guys have payments to pay each month and its not good if they cannot make ends meat to stay alive , If enough guys are not working and the mills cannot get enough logs then the mill closes for good and that does no one any good in the long run , everyone seems to be out just thinking for themselves but sometimes its alot better to think as a group and keep everyone a live so then everyone makes enough money to keep going , I agree its a risk letting others know what your plan is but its also I feel that people like the mill knows what your planning and the amount of logs they can count on getting cause when the crap hits the fan like it is doing now the mill will count on you alot more than a guy they cannot get along with , he will be at home watching Maury while your working
Agree with you, hope prices stay up. Some good news on fuel that barge shared . We have seen it, gas below 3 again. Diesel still high but on road 4.99 so it broke 5.
Our overall pricing is frankly not terrible.
Quote from: Southside on November 20, 2022, 09:59:44 AM
Not sure about that. Timber shows up on your balance sheet and tax bill as a valuable asset. CREP ground is taxed at almost nothing as it's too wet to crop or graze so the program is "found money".
Fair points but here the crep lands are just ag, all taxed on crazy DC area pricing with it being a requirement to keep on land use or pay full boat on land valued at 8-10 an acre. Forest are always taxed at a lower rate than any grazing land.
The crp land here is mostly made up of river bottom flood ground. The same land that the gov paid to be cleared for ag use in the 60's and 70's and my dad worked ahead of the clearing operations harvesting timber for free basically, they are paying again but now to have trees planted on. To me this is wonderful, a vast majority of the river bottoms that couldn't get a crop to market due to flooding is all going to be timber again. I own land that is in this program and planted the trees 20 years ago. I'm into my 2nd contract because the first expired and why would I turn down another 15 years of getting paid for the trees to grow. There is however, no stipulations that they can come in and harvest the timber when it's ready. The contract is only for allowing it to become a woodlot to prevent erosion, I maintain the fire breaks and when the time comes and it is ready for harvest it is my call
I know a lot of some of the best land around here (which is not saying a lot) was signed up in CREP. Total waste of tax payers money as far as I'm concerned.
Is CREP the same as what we got here? I'm talking ground that floods and they furnish the saplings and pay for planting then pay a yearly sum by the acre of trees growing. What would otherwise be flooded out farm fields basically
The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) is a part of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the country's largest private-land conservation program.
Partner (https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/conservation-programs/conservation-reserve-enhancement/crep_for_partners/index)
Just remember when you get into one of the contracts. Your in. If you want to take it out it's going to cost you. The deeper you are in ( the more money that's been paid through payments and incentives that's all calculated with penalties and interest if you want to take all of it out or some of it.
In my mind most of these programs are another form of welfare. Most of it falls under getting paid for doing nothing.
This is one that could fall under that. I've talked to some guys that have done this and I thought about it but never checked deeper into it. It involves maintaining your woods and many different variables. It's like a point system or basically the more aspects of the program you do and maintain you get paid
The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) is NRCS' flagship conservation program that helps farmers, ranchers and forest landowners integrate conservation into working lands.
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs-initiatives/eqip-environmental-quality-incentives (http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs-initiatives/eqip-environmental-quality-incentives)
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/Conservation%20Incentive%20Contracts.pdf (https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/Conservation%20Incentive%20Contracts.pdf)
Quote from: Walnut Beast on November 21, 2022, 12:37:26 AM
Just remember when you get into one of the contracts. Your in. If you want to take it out it's going to cost you. The deeper you are in ( the more money that's been paid through payments and incentives that's all calculated with penalties and interest if you want to take all of it out or some of it.
In my case, why would I want out of such a short term contract to allow trees to grow on useless ground?
Quote from: customsawyer on November 21, 2022, 12:46:37 AM
In my mind most of these programs are another form of welfare. Most of it falls under getting paid for doing nothing.
I guess all farmers are on welfare. I welcome you to come take care of my CRP!! And pay the taxes on the payments!!! No welfare there!!! I could have made more money cash renting out for farming but chose to rest the land and give back to nature and wildlife.
Quote from: customsawyer on November 21, 2022, 12:46:37 AM
In my mind most of these programs are another form of welfare. Most of it falls under getting paid for doing nothing.
Hmm... Welfare.
Ok
Yeah, pay the taxes and maintain the ground. Lose out on cash renting the acreage for ag purposes, although it almost always floods that would not be my problem after being paid a by the acre yearly amount. Or let trees grow and collect "welfare" I chose the trees..
Come on
Ask most guys that have put land in CRP! It ends up being more work than they thought from maintaining. With the use of labor, equipment and chemicals!!! And they do checks to see if you are following your contract! It's not a money hand out by far!!! And did I say you pay taxes on the payments received from the contract.
There's 3 examples I've dealt with in NY, Creps isn't typically looked down on or "welfare" farming here but we arent big "ag" like out west, it is paid so that farmers wouldn't drain / clear off swamp or wet areas. There's 480A here, forestry tax abatement plan that puts your 50+ acres into the state forestry bank, you have a managing forester and follow his plan, very strict looked after plan. I cut a fair amount of these jobs. Landowners typically save 50-80% on the taxes being in the program, if you want out of it a kidney wouldn't do it. The true deal with the devil where I'm at is selling your developmental rights to NYC / DEP, they fork over a fairly large amount of money, typically the land is already in 480A, and basically yeah you own the land but they tell you where you can ever build or do anything on it. Basically sold your soul, never getting out of it, was a popular thing here for a few yrs, again NYC owns 30% of the town where I live, the state owns probably another 20%+, you get further down by OldGreenhorn and its even higher.
Quote from: Walnut Beast on November 21, 2022, 01:17:37 AM
Ask most guys that have put land in CRP! It ends up being more work than they thought from maintaining. With the use of labor, equipment and chemicals!!! And they do checks to see if you are following your contract! It's not a money hand out by far!!! And did I say you pay taxes on the payments received from the contract.
Maybe I worded it where you didn't understand or maybe you aren't telling me directly. But I agree
These programs are put in place for different reasons some better than others but telling me Or anyone else in a government contract program that it's collecting welfare is not accurate!
Quote from: so il logger on November 21, 2022, 01:03:42 AM
Quote from: Walnut Beast on November 21, 2022, 12:37:26 AM
Just remember when you get into one of the contracts. Your in. If you want to take it out it's going to cost you. The deeper you are in ( the more money that's been paid through payments and incentives that's all calculated with penalties and interest if you want to take all of it out or some of it.
In my case, why would I want out of such a short term contract to allow trees to grow on useless ground?
I just was using a example if you were wanting out of the contract or a portion of the land. A example is I took six acres out for two three acre lots of CRP and at the time I was into the contract for three years and it was close to five thousand dollars for the six acres of paid payments, incentives, interest and penalties I paid back. No free ride or welfare!!
I said most not all. I planted enough trees, for landowners in the program, some were decent programs, some not so much.
Point here being that yes, farmers all over the country sign long term contracts on land management and they are contracts with teeth. Our forestry contracts are not so different.
The Conservation Easements- where one sells the development rights to another entity (govt or private) are a big deal in Virginia and in some counties 30% of the county is in the type of easement. I think every county in the state has at least a landowner or two.
Barge- for what it is worth conservation easement land owners make good clients for our long term management type of contract.
Forest land use is another type of agreement, we have several properties where we are writing the management plans and updating them for tax purposes. Here the exact discount varies by county. Some counties it is a 90% discount on tax.
We have the same thing in my town, gov buy the rights to the land. we have a family that has 1000 ac in town. They just sold 50 ac for $100.000. The farmer is still cutting hay and selling it.
Just can't build on it. [Open spaces] and the land will be in the family forever. The farmer never wanted to do anything but cut hay on it.
In NH we have a thing called current use, where you get $$ off your taxes. A lot of people go for that too.
I myself have nothing to do with any of it. I could, but, no.
We have a couple different routes down here in SC, at least in Spartanburg county. I've got a 6 acre, mostly wooded lot I'll eventually build on or sell it after pulling out a few select trees, the neighbor across the street also has just over 4 acres that's mostly field with woods toward the creek. She's paying almost $950/yr vacant and adjacent to her lot where her house is, I'm paying under $8/yr with an ag exemption because I'm growing trees on over 85% (or 90%, can't remember) of the undeveloped land. There's another lot down the street that's ~7 acres, he's also paying ~$8/yr and it's classified as "undeveloped" so there's routes to saving a bunch on property taxes.
I have seen pics of 'improvement' lands where trees were planted along streams and they were planted in straight rows, like a plantation, and, to me, that is NOT ideal because it looks anything but natural. I would think they could get the density for whatever they are after, be it for less bank erosion, wildlife habitat, etc. without planting them in perfect rows. The aesthetics are not good. I would want it to look more natural. I dunno, I just don't like the plantation look at all. Even in pine plantations. It's bad enough it's a monoculture of one species, but planting in rows just ruins the forest for me.
Ma is like N.H. We have what's called Chap 61, 61 is forestry land, 61a is farm land and 61b is recreation land. I have 10 ac, in 61 I'm required to have a 10 yr forestry management plan. With this I get reduced taxes this yr I paid $36. The NRCS is in charge making sure that I do what's required by the management plan, but that's over the 10 yrs. Right now I'm signing up for an additional plan ( NRCS-CPA-1202 ) CPA is short for conservation program agreement. This program is for help with non-native invasive plant eradication. 1 yr program where the FSA watch's over it. And we can sign up next yr too. It pays me back for work done. On the chapt 61f if I want to get out of it, if it's less than 5 yrs I pay the whole taxes, if over 5 yrs we pay tax on each yr over 5yrs. While we're on it we can't build a house but can build farm out-buildings. Also they have different payment for the tax schedule, using the Connecticut river east is higher that west.
Oh, spf mbf is $478.50 this morning ;) .
I understand what you mean on these plantations. But for some people it's beautiful. Several guys on here have them. A few years back I went about 30 miles from me to a meeting/ lunch good time to a retired Forester place that was trying to get the state Black Walnut Council more active. Him and his friend had some small Black Walnut plantations and the one had a Christmas tree farm. Pretty interesting how they cut and form Christmas trees with a long razor sharp knife. It's amazing people that have their little slice of heaven or make it into their little castle!! We had a little tour of his place with his plantation. He did a lot of work keeping it very nice. He talked and had records on Black Walnut trees he harvested of the number, size and total price of what he sold three different times over the years from his farm. Not from the plantation yet. Had a really neat old cabin and very elaborate outhouse that was like a little house and a semi trailer that was used for a bridge across a creek to his Cabin that has seemed to work for years.
This topic should have its own thread!
Around here ag is king and we have ditches to drain the ground. Some are DEEP. What kills
Me is some of the ditches have "buffer strips" along em to keep pesticides and other runoff out I suppose. Which is all well and good. The problem is some of those same ditches have been dipped and cleaned out (and dirt barely spread out away from the banks)so many times that there's a heck of a rise of the elevation to get in the ditch. So unless the pesticide laden water goes up and over the berm it ain't never gonna get in the ditch but yet WE are payin the farmer to not farm the berm that's full of rock from the last 10 times they dipped the ditch.
Wasteland or lowLand never brought any money here so why should it be bought for next to nothin then the government pay to not plant crops on it? Good dirt goes for $15,000 an acre here. Sounds like river bottom in the flood plain would be a better investment. Let the govt cut you a check and sit on it. To mE that kinda goes against what should be the proud American attitude. If you really want wildlife why not plan and pay for that yourself? MYbe I'm all wrong but the handouts is part of the reason why this country's in the shape we are in right now. No government assistance for loggers and here we are survivin
Dairy is absolutely huge in New Zealand, and it was government subsided forever. I think it was in the '90s that the government said "hey we're broke so you're on your own" to the dairy industry. Guys were in complete panic, they knew it was the end.
Guess what, today they kick our butt when it comes to profitability, output, etc. and all those same guys agree, they will never go back to farming for the government again.
I would say it's for the best that the government stays out of the logging business.
Hand outs are the new normal. :D :D :D :D :D ::)
Well this is a tiny thing, but it kind of fits in this thread. I got an unusual call today from a guy in Ontario looking for Ash logs. Now I don't sell logs and rarely buy them and at that, just a few here and there, never a load.
But this guy called and left a message, so I returned his call after checking with my friend Bill who does sell logs on occasion.
The fella had an odd accent that was hard to pick up over a bad cell connection. It did not sound French or Canadian, but I could be wrong. Frankly I thought it was Asian. We chatted briefly. He would buy anything over 10" diameter and said they would send a truck or container. My spidey sense went up on full. His only criteria was 2 clear faces and that the trees could not be EAB killed. I told him he was 15 years too late. :D But he could try cutters over in Delaware or perhaps Schoharie counties where they still had a few trees that were clean and green. What I should have done was asked him the price he was offering. Dumb move on my part. Bill is ticked at me for that. ;D
I thought it was weird that a guy from that far north was making cold calls for logs down this way. I am pretty certain it was for export (send a container?), and as I have read here several times, the Chinese buyers are pretty notorious, and getting paid is not always a sure thing. The whole thing just struck me as weird and smelled a little funny.
Quote from: Southside on November 21, 2022, 08:59:40 PMDairy is absolutely huge in New Zealand, and it was government subsided forever. I think it was in the '90s that the government said "hey we're broke so you're on your own" to the dairy industry.
I think it was before the 90s that the Govt dropped the "Supplemental Minimum Price" scheme for agriculture in general. The original idea was that a levy would be paid in the "good" years, and that would prop up farmers incomes in the bad years. Turned out that most years were "bad" and it just ended up as a Govt subsidy. ::)
As you say, it was better for the Govt to be more hands off and just set the broader regulations, while letting the farmer owned companies adjust operations to suit the market (not adjust their operations to the suit Govt subsidies).
Other difference is the main dairy Company is a farmer owned co-operative. That removes that "who's making the profit here?" squabble. The more profit the company makes, the more the farmers get paid. The company can't increase profits by forcing down raw milk prices, like a sawmill can make more money by paying less for logs. It's more like if the forest owners formed a company to operate their own mill.
In the case of my small acreage crp tree program it is all 100% flood prone land. That said, even after contract expires it can not ever be dozed to make ag field again. Same with any other low laying woodlot here. So following the handout or welfare theory how is receiving a measly sum for trees to grow different than receiving money from a farmer to cash rent it? Around here most all farmers are receiving big gov subsidies, so it would after all be welfare money? I do have expense and labor maintaining this crp whereas I wouldn't by cash renting it for corn. Guess I just never thought of it as welfare and it pisses me off that I would be considered a recipient of such. Have worked hard for everything I got in this life
Quote from: Old Greenhorn on November 21, 2022, 09:36:18 PMI told him he was 15 years too late. :D But he could try cutters over in Delaware or perhaps Schoharie counties where they still had a few trees that were clean and green. The whole thing just struck me as weird and smelled a little funny.
DEP probably owns the largest concentration of ash left in the state down around the reservoir, Ashoken, Pepacton, drive around the Gilboa dam and every 100ft the guard rail is smashed from the ash falling over. Unless it's a big bag of money there's to much risk even getting involved with them. Foresters can't get jobs cut fast enough to save it, he couldn't even get a bid on this one a couple weeks ago, I'm 4-5yrs out now at the pace I'm going.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/34634/IMG_20221121_215225.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1669086295)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/34634/received_835480267683122.jpeg?easyrotate_cache=1669086559)
🤦♂️.
Quote from: so il logger on November 21, 2022, 10:28:51 PM
In the case of my small acreage crp tree program it is all 100% flood prone land. That said, even after contract expires it can not ever be dozed to make ag field again. Same with any other low laying woodlot here. So following the handout or welfare theory how is receiving a measly sum for trees to grow different than receiving money from a farmer to cash rent it? Around here most all farmers are receiving big gov subsidies, so it would after all be welfare money? I do have expense and labor maintaining this crp whereas I wouldn't by cash renting it for corn. Guess I just never thought of it as welfare and it pisses me off that I would be considered a recipient of such. Have worked hard for everything I got in this life
Don't sweat it! Nobody is 💰 your taxes! Do what's best for you! Anybody can say what they want but you can bet they are looking out for themselves and their land
I'm not knocking anyone receiving government subsidies. The farmer or landowner that refuses em puts himself at a disadvantage to the other landowners and farmers (competition) that are receiving them. I'm blaming the government for starting all
This . All industries should be able to survive on their own without the government "help". My family farms and dad said years ago that he wishes he could just sell
His crops for a fair price and keep the government out of their business.
I am surprised some loggers don't join up to do a coop sawmill. It's worked well in many industries. Tillamook dairy is a good example. Big dairy farmers in Oregon but they make darn good cheese and icecream. I buy that in my local foodlion whenever the pocketbook allows.
Back to log pricing. Domestic YP veneer is much slower than last year. I only have a couple of orders- too bad because I have some nice logs. Since we don't do the trucking the overall profitability on the YP veneer loads is double that of a regular YP sawlog load.
Our YP sawlogs loads run about 4X00 feet (can be up to 5k) and are paying out at just about $0.70 a foot through 2 sided. The 1 side or no side logs go to a low grade market. The buyer is sending butts out as export I think. YP veneer is just $1/bdft but cutting the $ on trucking drives profit up considerably. It really looks like China opens up this spring and if the govt bails out these large apartment companies we will see the export market pop next winter. That would drive the veneer pricing in something like YP up 20% and push the grade down into logs that are less white.
I still find it interesting that there is such a thing as a YP veneer market. I'll post pics of a few in the what are you cutting thread.
Most of the poplar v logs I'm seeing exported this year are going to Europe. China wants some but the Europeans have been pretty steady last few years and are more "comfortable" to deal with for most westerners.
I am not saying china is inconsequential but they have a lot more headwinds than the western world at the moment. The wood manufacturers r having a tough time adjusting to a world where the govt is not juicing everything. The # of players over there continues to shrink. Capitalism adjusts faster than socialism.
Quote from: Old Greenhorn on November 21, 2022, 09:36:18 PM
Well this is a tiny thing, but it kind of fits in this thread. I got an unusual call today from a guy in Ontario looking for Ash logs. Now I don't sell logs and rarely buy them and at that, just a few here and there, never a load.
But this guy called and left a message, so I returned his call after checking with my friend Bill who does sell logs on occasion.
The fella had an odd accent that was hard to pick up over a bad cell connection. It did not sound French or Canadian, but I could be wrong. Frankly I thought it was Asian. We chatted briefly. He would buy anything over 10" diameter and said they would send a truck or container. My spidey sense went up on full. His only criteria was 2 clear faces and that the trees could not be EAB killed. I told him he was 15 years too late. :D But he could try cutters over in Delaware or perhaps Schoharie counties where they still had a few trees that were clean and green. What I should have done was asked him the price he was offering. Dumb move on my part. Bill is ticked at me for that. ;D
I thought it was weird that a guy from that far north was making cold calls for logs down this way. I am pretty certain it was for export (send a container?), and as I have read here several times, the Chinese buyers are pretty notorious, and getting paid is not always a sure thing. The whole thing just struck me as weird and smelled a little funny.
Canadians looking for wood down here has been going on for a long time. A logger friend had to take the signs off his pick up and keep his machinery hidden as best he could as they would be knocking on doors trying to offer a land owner more and take the wood lot. When the market heats up there is a lot of competition some of it welcome.
I'm pretty sure the guy you were talking to is French and we have pretty much zero ash left here that is good . Sure you find the odd group of ash the bore has not killed but most is dead now
There are Chinese operating out of Canada buying Ash and Hickory in KY.
So a neighbour and a buddy have 150 acres between them. Neighbour guy has a JD skidder, buddy has a bunch of skidder trails on his land already and I've got the LT40. The idea; harvest ash trees, mill out cants and stuff them into sea containers that the contact guy will arrange for. The full container would be fumigated before export. Things fell apart when we got to the details on filling and hauling away six containers, then getting paid (their position) or freight on board and eTransfer before the load leaves the yard (our position) The deal didn't get past that point, let alone $ per cubic meter.
The Chinese are operating out of and in Canada too.
the chinese own more mills than lots of people would think and veneer mills as well , they sure have bought up a pile of land around here
I know one domestic slicing company they bought and let go back to the seller. (3 slicing mills) Seems that the face veneer game is not quite as easy as it seems lol.
Quote from: Old Greenhorn on November 21, 2022, 09:36:18 PM
Well this is a tiny thing, but it kind of fits in this thread. I got an unusual call today from a guy in Ontario looking for Ash logs. Now I don't sell logs and rarely buy them and at that, just a few here and there, never a load.
But this guy called and left a message, so I returned his call after checking with my friend Bill who does sell logs on occasion.
The fella had an odd accent that was hard to pick up over a bad cell connection. It did not sound French or Canadian, but I could be wrong. Frankly I thought it was Asian. We chatted briefly. He would buy anything over 10" diameter and said they would send a truck or container. My spidey sense went up on full. His only criteria was 2 clear faces and that the trees could not be EAB killed. I told him he was 15 years too late. :D But he could try cutters over in Delaware or perhaps Schoharie counties where they still had a few trees that were clean and green. What I should have done was asked him the price he was offering. Dumb move on my part. Bill is ticked at me for that. ;D
I thought it was weird that a guy from that far north was making cold calls for logs down this way. I am pretty certain it was for export (send a container?), and as I have read here several times, the Chinese buyers are pretty notorious, and getting paid is not always a sure thing. The whole thing just struck me as weird and smelled a little funny.
I've also talked to guys like that. They want them peeled and packed In a container. Now how am I going to do that?
I was selling to a legit log buyer that was shipping them to China for a few years but that market has dried up and the logs are no longer viable .
United Furniture Industries layed-off all 2700 employees last week. A lumber broker in the loop told me between the company plants and contractors they used 500,000 feet of mostly mixed hardwoods per day. A major market just evaporated. The Mississippi river drought and now this has to be lean times for the likes of Anderson-Tully who dominates the mixed hardwood market with its river bottom holdings.
Pallet market was getting tight before this. Going to be a world of cheap lumber dumped shortly.
I read about that massive layoff. Any idea what led to it? Not good, whatever the case.
Ummm, $5+ fuel, run away inflation, shrinking power of the dollar come to mind.
Fired the entire senior management team back in June. Something was up then and I expect the lawsuits to figure that out, they didn't give required notice so the lawsuits are flying, fired everyone day before Thanksgiving. They will go into bankruptcy.
I know alot of shopping is done online anymore, but it was quiet when I went out black Friday. Couple firewood guys are talking about how quiet it is, fuel prices have taken the extra money people had. We are seeing half the ship traffic we did from July till now.
Here its fuel and food that is taking everyone spare coin , It's still hard to get lots of things that before covid was just go to the store and pick it up . Hard maple is not doing great here , we will see how I do on red oak this week as I'm cutting fairly big stuff and big white oak and white pine
Quote from: nativewolf on November 28, 2022, 08:13:13 PM
Fired the entire senior management team back in June. Something was up then and I expect the lawsuits to figure that out, they didn't give required notice so the lawsuits are flying, fired everyone day before Thanksgiving. They will go into bankruptcy.
Bankruptcies on this scale will take many small suppliers down with them; guys that have been strung out for 60-90 days waiting on payments for lumber that they already delivered and have been operating on borrowed funds. Tragic.
Quote from: stavebuyer on November 29, 2022, 06:32:19 AM
Quote from: nativewolf on November 28, 2022, 08:13:13 PM
Fired the entire senior management team back in June. Something was up then and I expect the lawsuits to figure that out, they didn't give required notice so the lawsuits are flying, fired everyone day before Thanksgiving. They will go into bankruptcy.
Bankruptcies on this scale will take many small suppliers down with them; guys that have been strung out for 60-90 days waiting on payments for lumber that they already delivered and have been operating on borrowed funds. Tragic.
Yes it is. They were giving people promotions the week before. This is pure cold blooded private equity evil. Feel sorry for the guys owed money, they'll never see a dime I guess.
For people that don't know this was the old and famous Lane furniture brand from Virginia plus many others.
Quote from: nativewolf on November 28, 2022, 08:13:13 PM
Fired the entire senior management team back in June. Something was up then and I expect the lawsuits to figure that out, they didn't give required notice so the lawsuits are flying, fired everyone day before Thanksgiving. They will go into bankruptcy.
I worked for a plastics recycling company that had already reorganized twice previously so when things started getting weird, I knew the seed money was running low. I was banking 4 weeks of vacation I was worried might evaporate so I moved some assets of interest into storage where few people had access as quasi colateral. I was at a wedding several states away when I got the call the doors were chained shut and everyone was SOL. Being in maintenance I, along with several other maintenance personnel, could run the entire plant on a skeleton crew at reduced capacity. We were asked to do just that to finish inventory and a couple dog and pony shows for potential investors. Over that 4 weeks, most of the stuff in the maintenance department disappeared, including some pretty big stuff like a Bridgeport among other things. No one said a word.
QuoteOver that 4 weeks, most of the stuff in the maintenance department disappeared, including some pretty big stuff like a Bridgeport among other things.
Meaning stolen?
So did he take the Bridgeport out in the same manner Johnny Cash got his Cadillac or did he just strap it to his back and walk out with it?
Re-homed.
I was offered 380/1000 on my Ash, I'll firewood it before I'll give it away!
Quote from: Bradm on November 29, 2022, 01:44:30 PM
So did he take the Bridgeport out in the same manner Johnny Cash got his Cadillac or did he just strap it to his back and walk out with it?
That one I have no idea about and I wasn't about to ask. I think I might have seen the plasma table in another guy's truck but I specifically avoided looking to maintain plausible deniability.
Quote from: Woodfarmer on November 29, 2022, 01:45:18 PM
Re-homed.
I was offered 380/1000 on my Ash, I'll firewood it before I'll give it away!
Just curious, any details you care to provide? CAD or USD? Standing timber or logs, Delivered or on landing, Bug killed or live, Woods run or a pile of logs all one grade?
Being nosy, have some more live ash to cut :)
That is #3 or even lower grade pricing from two buyers on your side of the border
Cdn, logs at the landing. Hasn't been an Ash tree around here in 5 years that wasn't killed by the borer.
All graded as saw logs.
Quote from: Woodfarmer on November 29, 2022, 07:04:09 PM
Cdn, logs at the landing. Hasn't been an Ash tree around here in 5 years that wasn't killed by the borer.
All graded as saw logs.
Dead ash is hard to give away.
find a different mill , ash is worth alot more than around here , bigger stuff is double that price
black and red oak that made timbers paid $200/1000 more than grade logs so this stuff will be cut into as many timber logs as I can get , white oak grade pays more than white oak timber logs , No much in here that will make slicer veneer as stuff is beat up abit more than I would like to see
I heard last week that there was a slight increase in red oak lumber, not from a very reliable source though. Anyone else hear anything?
I know around here the mills are telling us to be ready and do not buy anything stupid that you do not need . It's going to be a real bumpy ride
Stock up on popcorn and your favorite soda and hope your favorite shows are on TV so you and your dog can watch them together
QuoteI heard last week that there was a slight increase in red oak lumber,
Hogdaddy
One would think an increase in lumber should or eventually mean an increase in log prices. Hope that happens.
Old marketing ploy, is to get others to slow down so there will be fewer producers. But in the meantime, keep producing themselves.
Yes, marginal. The demand end hasn't moved but the weather and subsequent supply drop off has the major domestic players feeling like the market has bottomed out. Same old story. Fear of missing out on a rising market or getting hung in a declining one has more to do with pricing than actual supply and demand.
I have heard several reports of small price increases, @ehp (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=1195) AMEX just raised prices and apparently is looking for wood.
I even heard walnut had bumped but I do t know how much.
AMEX is not just looking for wood they are crying and begging for it!
Also I confess that I think stavebuyer has it right, careful buying wood. Good time to raise cash and be ready for a downturn.
Quote from: mudfarmer on February 05, 2023, 08:19:45 PM
AMEX is not just looking for wood they are crying and begging for it!
But not raising pricing too much 😂
Amex does not come here , they tried and that didnot work . Trucking is a long ways from here and they only want the best so what do you do with the rest as once your log pile has been picked threw good luck selling the rest cause no one wants the left overs . They cannot mix our wood with the rest cause ours is white in colour compared to anything grown on clay or different colour sand .
It's like the Big Guy here says , 2023 will seperate the girls from the boys and lets see who is left and standing at the end , Cost of buying timber has not gone done a touch in the last year but our cost to cut has gone up alot and what we get at the mill is the same pretty much so less money left for the logger . Mill knows things has to change or there will be no loggers left
How are things looking for you guys?
Price on Select white ash has bumped up for me but Prime did not, now getting the same for both ($750/mbf). I will start sending more Select instead of hoarding them. We need a bit more nice hardwood for a house build but not for 10 house builds...
mudfarmer
Do you have the grade-specs that separate Select from Prime logs that you can post or link?
Sure thing. Prime: 14"+ 3CF, Select 12" 3cf, 15" 2CF
Thanks.
No minimum length?
8' minimum, 6" of trim on everything
everything is about the same here , I was to see another $50/1000 on beech timber logs starting last week but some how the mill seems to of forgotten that but Monday morning they will get a reminder .
Hey that's good, nobody wants our beech because of the blister, $50/mbf increase would be 25% ;D, no matter how nice it is I can only get $200 from main buyer.
Buyer says hold on, price drop inbound here... That's ok for me I am back in a firewood hole and prices only going up for that, shut down april1 for bark slip too.
Watch out for the bears on st Patty wknd they are as thick as spruce and apparently I forgot to register trailer :o
What was the price drop on?
Hey Joe, hasn't happened yet, sounded like he expected nearly across the board but tight lips or didn't know. I know the most recent sheet Amex sent out was down a little. I'm still new to this for all I know this is normal and happens every spring?
Yeah in years past things dropped some in spring. Then they started saying "oh that don't matter anymore." (Storage and stain do to heat) then the last few years it's been wide open sky high about year round. I'm expecting things to be "normal" just high operating cost. Less profit overall. Honestly as long as we keep moving wood I'm ready.
For the first time I can remember there is quite a few loggers trying to sell their logs on social media and lots. Guys with junk to good stuff like hard maple. That cannot be a good sign
From what I was told, HM lumber isn't moving at all up here. Some of the mills up north that deal mostly with WA and HM have shut completely with a few out for good.
My understanding is that if it isn't WN or WO, it isn't worth cutting right now.
No if real loggers are trying to sell logs on FB Marketplace that is not a good sign at all, ehp. If my old boss popped up with an ad on there selling logs I'd know the end was near😬
Ya I seen piles of hard maple for sale north of me a couple hours where Im sure they paid more for it standing , I hope I still get to cut this summer but if not I do have a boat and can go fishing , I do have a bit of fishing gear and I'm sure most guides donot have what is at my place in gear . I sold some walnut last week and it sold well and white oak veneer , there is not much hard maple right here cause its already been cut but there is some and it sold good last week . Aspen and junk ash is selling pretty good and the same for soft maple
There you go ehp, glad sales went ok despite some slow down in the market. In Virginia WO and Walnut are ok. RO blah, YP bellow five year average, and hickory about normal. Chestnut is moving ok.
I don't really have any maple but I think that's the hardest hit.
Pulp is also hit down here. Not sure what pallet logs are doing, will find out I guess.
How are things comparing to 2008 or prior to pandemic prices. 16-17-18? I don't keep up on the exact prices. I'm just a producer generally. But what I see is yes prices are down but mostly they just aren't buying.
Prices are up from 3 or 4 years ago but not a lot BUT the cost to produce those same logs has gone WAY up and I mean at least 50% if not closer to 75% on some of the things we use . From say 8 years ago my trucking is up 300% , Just ordered 2 new cable mainlines , those are crazy in price , now over $600 a piece , you donot have to be that good with a pencil and a piece of paper to figure out the bottom line is not good and I feel I live in a good place , the guys north of me 5 hours or so are in bad shape and lots of machines will be for sale or repo guy is coming to get them
The smartest guy here is Barge , he is on a boat making more coin I am sure than 99% of us and no worries if the log market tanks which it is and on its way quite hard right now , He is banking tons of coin and just waiting before he pounces on all the good equipment he will buy for pennies on the dollar and once this storm is over he will be sitting on top of his mountain of equipment and will rule the north east of USA
"Prices up from 3-4 years ago" Guys were making bank here then. Have been for many years until this year basically. Yeah I know all cost are up but in my case it just takes some of the profit. Doesn't necessarily hurt me. Just not going to do all the extra fun stuff. Guys won't be buying chrome and new fancy equipment I guess. Well I never have. At this point still good money in it as long as wood keeps moving. In my opinion.
thing is lots of land owners want more coin for their bush as well so the profit margin gets smaller and smaller every year , Lots of guy complaining that now their equipment is worn out and worth little and to up grade to new is just way to far out of reach , govt keeps taxing everything so bad its hard to make ends meat for a lot of guys , It was abit ago but not that long where the last crash hit up north guys were cutting and skidding hardwood at $2.65 a tree , Like to see how your pencil makes that one work
Oh I get your point. Guys here buy wood 2 years out. How do you pencil that in the markets? Guys finance $1mil in equipment 5 years out. How do you pencil that in the markets? Most sales here are bought in lump sum. Like I said 1-2 year contracts. Land owner gets x amount and maple goes sky high then the logger makes $500 per tree profit. How does that pencil out. Good years bad years. Bank it when you can and keep the ball rolling when you can't. Just the way it works. Win some loose some.
I don't think there is any figuring the market right now. One day it's slow. The next day I can't catch my breath. A week ago Monday I quoted 1.3 million in 15 minutes, while riding my dog around my property. I have no expectation of getting any of those jobs because I put the I don't want to do it price on them. However if I do get them I will be in the pucker factor trying to get the logs for them. This will put me paying a extra premium for any logs I can find to fill the orders. The loggers that can get the logs will be getting 4 times what the logs are worth and smiling all the way to the bank. I will be grinning a little myself. There is money flowing out there you just have to think outside the "normal" box to get it. You can't be doing things the same way you were a few years ago and expect to do as well. The markets change extremely fast and you have to keep up or get left behind. Y'all buckle your seat belts and hold on, it's going to be one heck of a ride.
Talked to a guy if Cottonwood was worth anything now. 24 cents bdf. In one area. But down the road 175 miles it was 42 cents
175 one way miles on a log truck these days(if you can find one) will cost you the difference.
Yes we all understand that but the problem is there are still enough loggers left that will do the job for nothing and slowly starve to death do it so that puts alot of good loggers in bad shape and they end up going broke but the smart mills do under stand that and they are taking care of their good loggers they can count on
Quote from: stavebuyer on April 05, 2023, 02:18:00 AM
175 one way miles on a log truck these days(if you can find one) will cost you the difference.
Was going to say the same thing. Over ~50 miles from a mill or port starts to affect the economics of logging here. 18c more at the mill doesn't help if the trucking was +20c.
Tried out a new buyer a little while back, no problems with existing folks in fact they are great but figured half the trucking distance might as well give it a shot. New guy's scale was not as good and it -zeroed- out the trucking savings. Oh well, nothing ventured nothing gained right? Next load that went to original buyer the scale and grade were low and they knew I was sending logs elsewhere :D Bite the hand that feeds, get smacked :snowball:
Well, a guy has to try. I avoid selling to short stick operations if I can at all help it, I just don't like the way they do business. It ends up being I feel, false advertising.
Say the short stick mill is advertising $500/1000 for #1 Red Oak (just throwing out whole numbers). The mill that gives good scale is paying $400/1000 for the same wood, but your loads consistently scale 15-20% more at mill #2. So your load will pay close to the same at both mills, you'd then be a fool to haul it an extra 50 miles to the short stick operations for a claimed $100/1000 more.
I saw this play out many times. As I've mentioned before, MN has a limited grade hardwood market. A lot of hardwood goes to a large pallet mill. Their scale is always fair, and prices are ok. Their is a grade hardwood mill that was typically about another 50 miles beyond the pallet mill. When I was hauling wood, I delivered a few loads to the grade mill and a lot to the pallet mill. A load that scaled 12 cords at the pallet mill would only be scaled 9 or 10 at the grade mill.
A 12 cord load @$120/cord is $1440. A 9 cord load @$200/cord is $1800, a difference of $360. The additional haul distance and the fact that the truck was tied up an additional half a day, thereby losing other loads, led us to the conclusion that it was not worth it. Not to mention we felt like we were dealing with crooks🤷
I find it interesting that in the Bible, among a few choice sins that it mentions as being very abominable before God, false weights and measures are right up there with the other really ugly stuff.
Didn't mean to suggest anyone was doing anything abominable, I honestly have thought before that the first place scales high sometimes but decided maybe my thumb was extra large or his small ;D ??? The deal with the new buyer was square and I will sell him more wood in the future if he wants. Just thought it was decently related to price over here vs over there combined with cost to truck over here vs over there and sometimes you can try as you might but you get what you get!
Nah, I didn't think that you meant that. I'm just relating what I've seen, and how some mills scale. They're basically making their own measurement, no different than if I advertise my firewood for sale at a competitive rate, or cheaper than everyone else. But then
my cords only measure 3/4 cord if anyone ever bothers to stack and measure it. It's one thing if it is an honest mistake, quite another if you know you're doing it and trying to get away with it. Stealing plain and simple.
Logs seem to have picked up here just a little, HM is very rough though. Low grade red oak is still rough. Stave logs are selling real well right now, that helps.
On the other side of that, me being the log buyer. When I get someone new bringing me logs I always scale their first load with them here and show them how I'm going to be scaling future loads. If they don't like the way I am doing it that is fine. I will put it right back on their truck and zero hard feelings. Most of the big log trucks coming in here is by the ton and lots of them are in the habit of putting poor logs in the middle of the pack. You end up having to put them back on the truck so they don't count on the weight. There's crooks on all sides of this wood business.
Yep I agree with you there, Jake.
Here's another example from the grade hardwood mill. They always talked a big game how if the load graded really well they would pay you extra. I delivered several loads of 24", veneer quality aspen logs. Never saw an extra dime over the base aspen price.
These guys are a bit aggressive at times sending out mailers trying to buy your logs. I figure if they were more honest they could skip the mailers and guys would bring them their logs.
barbender
What is the mill doing with veneer grade Aspen ??
Sawing them, or are they peeling them for panelling?
Was involved with a potential start-up plywood operation back in the day with thoughts of making sheathing-grade, 5-ply plywood out of Aspen from northern MN.
Different grades of Aspen logs were selected, then peeled, veneer sheets dried, and sheets graded. End result was enough clear-face plywood to drop the sheathing-grade plywood idea and switch plans to making Aspen paneling instead.
From what I was told today , things are not good
Beenthere, we sold them to them as saw logs but that mill does sort and remarket logs to other buyers. Actually their mailers used to state, "we want all the logs off the job", we'll of course they didn't want the pallet grade but they wanted everything else, and they weren't paying you anymore for the veneer logs either.
I don't fault them for remarketing the veneer and whatever makes more sense for them at all. I just thought they were a bit disingenuous the way they went about it. If I had a job that had a bunch of veneer, I sure the heck wouldn't sell it to them, for sawing price so they could turn around and make a huge profit on it.
Let me take a step back. Like I said before, northern MN doesn't have much of a grade hardwood log market. The main hardwood log consumer is a large pallet operation that has 2 mills, with 4 saw lines all together I think. They basically get everything for hardwood sawlogs that are produced, because most loggers up here don't want to mess with sorting sawlogs and honestly most don't know the difference between a veneer log and a pallet log. The only "specs" that most crews are going by are species and minimum diameter, "no rot, straight, and well trimmed" I believe is what the pallet mills spec sheet says. Even when other hardwood mills up here buy logs, it is usually by species and diameter. So Red Oak for instance would be 10" minimum top, with some quality specs but no one is sorting logs by #1, #2, #3 and what the heck is veneer?😂
Now you better believe that the pallet operation is sawing and remarketing a whole lot of grade lumber, those guys are no fools.
Getting back to the first mill I was discussing, they simply buy their hardwood logs by the cord. Minimum diameter spec, and they're not going to take any obvious garbage. But they don't grade the logs until after you've sold them to them. I think they basically pay a #2 price for the whole load and then make out great on anything that grades better.
One of the things that I think is disingenuous, is they would give you vague assurances of better pay if the logs were really nice, but being they didn't grade them until after you left they had no motivation to do so. I used that aspen as an example because there was no way that those massive butt and second cut clear logs could've graded any higher, but they did not adjust the pay. I never heard of anyone else getting any grade bonuses either.
Now let me contrast that with another hardwood mill I got to work with 2 falls back out of Wisconsin. They had me skid the wood and lay it out on the landing, and pre-grade from the forwarder seat. Once I was running out of room, their timber buyer came out and graded, scaled and tallied every stick. Then I would pile it up for their trucks. So, in that case you had a set price per grade and species, and you knew what you were getting before it left the job. Far more professional and I really enjoyed working with them. Also, it tickled me that it meant the other mill I was talking about wasn't getting any of that beautiful timber, except perhaps all of the #2 red oak that didn't pay enough to send 200 miles back to Park Falls, Wisconsin😁
Quote from: ehp on April 06, 2023, 04:42:09 PM
From what I was told today , things are not good
Is that on everything? From the sounds of some of these log buyers unless you have some serious amounts you can't even get somebody to give you a bid
Im better than some I guess but there just not a very big demand for mainly hardwood other than lower grade stuff , Pretty much all the white pine I cut goes for timbers so cut into squares and I cut a fair amount of that over the winter . Problem is there is not much money to be made cutting low grade here as the timber cost so much to buy standing and now log prices are going down , Stuff like hard maple just let it stand and walk by it . Just hope a couple of the loggers that bought bushes of 250,000 or more of hard maple got them cut cause they paid pretty crazy prices for that in my mind , They are talking at least a year or more before they see stuff come back up
Sawn tie prices expected to drop this week. As low as flooring lumber dropped actually surprised that they didn't drop last fall.
Last rain here was Friday night, none predicted until this weekend. Bark is starting to slip. Good time to garden and cut hay lol
At least this guy wasn't shooting for the moon. 2x 10' sticks of yard tree Walnut loaded with metal, wire, he said he pulled the clothesline out of it 🤦♂️😆.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/34634/Screenshot_20230410_171429_Chrome.jpg?easyrotate_cache=1681161345)
Your a Bad Man Barge , putting those thoughts in that guys head
Cut around my landing yesterday , about half of the trees were white oak and they all were almost dead , another 3 to 5 years and they would be on the ground
I know lumber is not equal by any means to log prices, but May '23 lumber futures today dropped 5%, to $340 per 1000 bd ft of random length spruce/pine/fir 2x4s. This is its lowest mark since approximately 3 years ago, without even accounting for inflation.
Yes the construction industry binged and then all the cutbacks in capacity caused shortages. People responded with a mess of new mills from TX over to Florida and now that interest rates soared we have a glut.
Softwood construction lumber is a big boy game. Hardwood prices are most holding but that seems to be a loss in supply as much as anything. China has been a cautious buyer so some support there but it is not booming.
Walnut and especially white oak are doing fairly well.
I know I will not get rich cutting this big wormy soft maple . Good thing only a day or 2 left then on to the next one
The bourbon backlash begins;
Bourbon warehouse construction put on hold while Kentucky county rethinks zoning (yahoo.com) (https://news.yahoo.com/bourbon-warehouse-construction-put-hold-191153513.html)
The stave market is what drives white oak veneer and lumber pricing.
The elimination of the tax counties collected from the distillers while the bourbon ages turned the distillers into non-grata freeloaders overnight.
On the other side of the coin I have spent the last two days trying to buy 1x8x16 KD #2 pine. Not able to find it anywhere in the state of GA. So if the market is in such a slump then why can't I find the lumber I'm looking for?
I'm not trying to be a smart alec just trying to say that if there is no 1x8x16 pine to be had then who is buying all of it and where is it going.
I fully understand that y'all are logging and I'm selling retail so we can't get much further apart on the scale but it is still a crazy market. When y'all can't sell and I can't buy then what is the answer?
Quote from: stavebuyer on May 09, 2023, 06:25:45 PM
The bourbon backlash begins;
Bourbon warehouse construction put on hold while Kentucky county rethinks zoning (yahoo.com) (https://news.yahoo.com/bourbon-warehouse-construction-put-hold-191153513.html)
The stave market is what drives white oak veneer and lumber pricing.
The elimination of the tax counties collected from the distillers while the bourbon ages turned the distillers into non-grata freeloaders overnight.
Maybe you could give some backstory as I don't know what tax you are referring to?
Quote from: customsawyer on May 09, 2023, 07:54:07 PM
On the other side of the coin I have spent the last two days trying to buy 1x8x16 KD #2 pine. Not able to find it anywhere in the state of GA. So if the market is in such a slump then why can't I find the lumber I'm looking for?
I'm not trying to be a smart alec just trying to say that if there is no 1x8x16 pine to be had then who is buying all of it and where is it going.
I fully understand that y'all are logging and I'm selling retail so we can't get much further apart on the scale but it is still a crazy market. When y'all can't sell and I can't buy then what is the answer?
the pine mills are cutting 2 x X instead of 1 x I guess. What a strange world.
Quote from: customsawyer on May 09, 2023, 07:54:07 PMWhen y'all can't sell and I can't buy then what is the answer?
Dig a pond. :D
Quote from: nativewolf on May 09, 2023, 08:44:55 PM
Quote from: stavebuyer on May 09, 2023, 06:25:45 PM
The bourbon backlash begins;
Bourbon warehouse construction put on hold while Kentucky county rethinks zoning (yahoo.com) (https://news.yahoo.com/bourbon-warehouse-construction-put-hold-191153513.html)
The stave market is what drives white oak veneer and lumber pricing.
The elimination of the tax counties collected from the distillers while the bourbon ages turned the distillers into non-grata freeloaders overnight.
Maybe you could give some backstory as I don't know what tax you are referring to?
The distilleries, even the iconic brands are now foreign owned. Takes only a handful of people to run a modern distillery, so the only local tax revenue was the personal property tax levied on the bourbon in the barrels as it ages. The sales taxes are all collected elsewhere as are the income the taxes on the multinational corporate profits. Our county the barrel tax was roughly 40% of the budget. Been a lot of money already spent on infrastructure, as well as long term real estate tax abatements granted. Nobody wants a distillery, a refinery, or pulp mill as a noxious neighbor unless there is some benefit. Here that benefit was the barrel tax.
Kentucky bourbon-makers toast bill phasing out barrel tax | AP News (https://apnews.com/article/bourbon-barrel-tax-kentucky-fd42c742aac4c257c7548e372310cebc)
The amount of sawn lumber has to dry up at some point cause not many mills left and the ones left are not producing huge amounts , even mills that made hardwood flooring are not making as much if they are making any at all
Quote from: stavebuyer on May 10, 2023, 03:41:36 AM
Quote from: nativewolf on May 09, 2023, 08:44:55 PM
Quote from: stavebuyer on May 09, 2023, 06:25:45 PM
The bourbon backlash begins;
Bourbon warehouse construction put on hold while Kentucky county rethinks zoning (yahoo.com) (https://news.yahoo.com/bourbon-warehouse-construction-put-hold-191153513.html)
The stave market is what drives white oak veneer and lumber pricing.
The elimination of the tax counties collected from the distillers while the bourbon ages turned the distillers into non-grata freeloaders overnight.
Maybe you could give some backstory as I don't know what tax you are referring to?
The distilleries, even the iconic brands are now foreign owned. Takes only a handful of people to run a modern distillery, so the only local tax revenue was the personal property tax levied on the bourbon in the barrels as it ages. The sales taxes are all collected elsewhere as are the income the taxes on the multinational corporate profits. Our county the barrel tax was roughly 40% of the budget. Been a lot of money already spent on infrastructure, as well as long term real estate tax abatements granted. Nobody wants a distillery, a refinery, or pulp mill as a noxious neighbor unless there is some benefit. Here that benefit was the barrel tax.
Kentucky bourbon-makers toast bill phasing out barrel tax | AP News (https://apnews.com/article/bourbon-barrel-tax-kentucky-fd42c742aac4c257c7548e372310cebc)
Wow...I had no idea there was a "barrel tax". The things you learn on this forum. Sorry to hear about the struggles with distillers. We finally found a stave buyer that worked with our process and had started using him as a buyer on our culled suppressed WO.
Our White Oak Qtr log market just took a big hit. Not buying any logs next week followed by very limited quotas and as yet to be announced reduced pricing. Was less than two months ago they only had a weeks worth of logs at their mill yard and were begging for help hauling logs to keep from shutting down.
Without pressure from veneer(summer) and Qtr logs the cooperages will drop prices or get picky because they can.
It's getting rough out there , Barge is the smart one living on a boat
Rough isn't a strong enough word. Not sure what the right word is though.
Trying to bounce from job to job to cut what you can actually sell is a pain, quotas are tough. The loader is still a job behind.
Mine is getting caught up still have about 200 cord of various sorts on two jobs. Not terrible I guess. But wish I had it all moved.
Yes you have to be very careful next 2 months. Just remember there will be a fall and prices will recover so let the good wood sit. @stavebuyer (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=15189) Tough news on the QS market. Strange that it filled up so quickly.
I wasn't planning on cutting any oaks til late in fall/early winter and that seems like the right plan as of now.
Just remember , buying timber at $8/ft standing and selling it fir $2/ft is not a good plan ;D, mill is telling us to watch close to what were doing which in my case is not a lot :D,
Sounds like them two guys that got in the hay business. They had been at it for a couple of weeks and one day as they took a break one said "if we keep buying this hay at a dollar a bale and selling it for a dollar a bale we might need a bigger truck to make any money".
Just like the dirty chip market here in northern ny just had Fort Drum shut down and mothball the chip burner supposedly the staff is treating it like it will restart at some mystical point in the future. Really leaves the burner in Burlinton Vt as the only market for the eastern side of the adirondacks, Back to the old saying i've heard from the chippers losing money on every load but you make it up in volume. Not really been able to get the pencil to figure that one out.
What's everyone's predictions? Any word on markets. I think we'll be running strong here but it may take a year. And I'm sure prices will stay down. They've came up a lot in the last few years and the big markets.. (Pine, crating logs and pulp) for our area has only came down a small amount. It will be tight for sure. I think the high roller logging will be done for awhile. I keep coming back to wanting to take the next steps. Now obviously isn't that time but if I can be one of the survivors I may jump in on the other side of all this.
Log and lumber will cycle. Paper and chips are becoming obsolete. Being a contrarian in a down market is savvy, but best done with saved earnings and not high interest debt. Margins are too slim to have the bank as a partner. Look at the very bottom line as a % of sales. Better to be the banker than the logger.
Our pulp is cardboard for packaging and osb board. I dont see either one of those going away. And yeah I've always had the be your own bank idea but realistically you can't. By the time I save enough cash to buy a used $500,000 machine I'd be dead anyways.
Quote from: Firewoodjoe on May 14, 2023, 08:20:06 PM
I keep coming back to wanting to take the next steps. Now obviously isn't that time but if I can be one of the survivors I may jump in on the other side of all this.
Joe, I think your instincts are good. Self control is all important now. You are a young man with many years ahead of you. Probably good years if you stay smart, keep your wants under control, and make your moves when it seems to you to be the right time.
All the best to you.
Log/timber industry is no different than any other commodity producer market at the very high level. Strategically ever region is going to be a bit different- subject to different whims and different economies of scale. Global trends play a huge role, everything is connected. As stavebuyer said- pulp markets continue to contract- that is a global trend from Finland to the USA. Everywhere.
Since you seem to mostly do contract cutting for others you'll be able to really focus on harvesting and not the acquisition of timber nor the disposal/sale of timber. The risk to me ...from hundreds of miles away is that your region is a market of strength in a market that is contracting globally. One small hiccup could shut down a pulp business and upend everything. Eyes wide open that the global market is absolutely at play. Will rising interest rates hurt your mill owners because you can bet they are leveraged up to their eyeballs.
Many people have loans that float along with interest rate increases so payments can soar. Our payments went up over $3000 a month so far. Not great for us...not a killer but not great. Historically these interest rates are actually pretty fair- just not great compared to post 2008. Managing the interest rate risk will be helpful.
Globally the tariff wars of the previous administration and then the pandemic crisis and now the russian invasion of Ukraine have disrupted things so there is a lot of overhang- the market is not back to normal. The Pandemic crisis is over, the other two are not though. Biden admin has kept the Trump policies on China mostly unchanged. Less belicose but same and China seems to be in no hurry to change. The situation in Ukraine is vastly different and the hot portions of this conflict will end this year (my somewhat informed opinion)- you can see that with Europes huge tilt this week to support Ukraine- everyone is rushing to be nice and give Ukraine more and more. So following events winding up we will see Russia needing to massively increase the exports of oil products to pay for war damages and to rebuild the russian economy. We should see Europe rebound strongly next year with European energy costs plummeting. I'd count on that pretty strongly. How much trade goes on between the upper midwest and Europe?
I believe that the integration of Ukraine into the EU or at least the European zone will greatly increase the economic prospects for all of Europe. Ukraine will spend 2-3 trillion on rebuilding and that's a going to heat up all of europe along with a big fall energy pricing. Natural gas pricing is already far below what it was pre pandemic and that is before Gazprom has to start cutting pricing to regain marketshare when they are allowed to sell again. Ukrainian rail is going to change to integrate with Europeans, rail lines are being setup to run from Poland to Black Sea ports, pipelines are bypassing Russia entirely, etc etc.
That to me is the big positive world wide-huge spending in Europe to rebuild Ukraine plus low energy prices. I don't see China really increasing trade too much and Chinese growth seems muted.
Domestically:
The economy looks ok in the USA. We have been in a bit of recession but a mild one. I would be careful re timing. Is now the best time or August? The lack of bank regulation is worrisome- did we learn nothing from the savings and loan crisis and then 2007/8?
The IRA is causing huge investments to be made in manufacturing in the USA. That's going to keep pressure on but also create opportunities.
See if your bankers can tell you if any big producers are going to shut down. Or mill managers. The good news here on your own costs will be that diesel should stay pretty cheap. If russian refineries start selling to Europe again they will be selling diesel, those refineries are tuned to over produce diesel at the costs of being less efficient overall. That will dump diesel in the global market. The US trade in sending diesel refined here to the EU could end=more down pressure on diesel.
Trends wise if hardmaple is really out of favor than does that hurt your local sawmills? Just something to consider. Here our wood basket is pretty diverse: yellow poplar, hickory, red oaks and white oaks, walnuts, and a mix of other- cherry, maple, sycamore, etc. It does help provide options in bad markets.
So I guess my checkbox would be local and global markets for your sawmills. Keep your buyers diverse- maintain relations with more than 1 mill and mills that do more than 1 product class. Don't rely on pulpwood. See if the Fed can get through the August meeting without raising rates. See if you can qualify for a grant to help offset your spend. See if your bank has a loan product that fix's interest rates for a year, they'll have sold your loan or most of it so they can give you some leeway. See if any producer is going to stop (many here are retiring-more every year).
Personally I think this year and early next year are all about a lack of supply and not so much booming demand. I think in late spring/summer of 24 we'll start to see some global economic recovery and that will show up in the USA. Another caveat..the IRA is going to roil things starting in about 3 years when the battery factories all start pumping out batteries. Eyes wide open
Log buyer told me today walnut is dropping hard and fast . Even lower grade veneer here shortly is a no sale . They do not want it
Ours are all export logs. They do t want anything domestic either.
Pulp and low grade logs keeps the ball rolling around here. Grade and veneer are just bonuses.
One of the larger sawmill auction houses had a full page ad in last weeks trade paper. 10 upcoming absolute sawmill auctions listed by one company. The market positives are caused by lack of supply from primary manufacturers going out of business.
This time last year green 4/4 FAS Hard Maple was flirting with $3bd/ft. Today its $1.20 if you can get a PO.
China has been the salvation for hardwoods since 2005. The China-US trade is going to continue to contract as there is open antagonism on both sides of that equation. China won't buy a thing that they can source or substitute from somewhere else and neither will we.
No need to worry about trying to save up a half million as in bad times there will be good deals on stuff the lenders took back and need to dump for pennies on the dollar. People with cash are always the ones who get those phone calls begging to make some kind of offer because the lenders are also over-extended.
You don't need the next newest and greatest. Go the sales and buy up all the parts, tires, hose making equipment bringing scrap prices. Buy your own stumpage, timberland etc. Being the biggest, fastest, highest leveraged supplier for the next legacy mill on the auction ad isn't a good place to be.
You don't need the next newest and greatest. Go the sales and buy up all the parts, tires, hose making equipment bringing scrap prices. Buy your own stumpage, timberland etc. Being the biggest, fastest, highest leveraged supplier for the next legacy mill on the auction ad isn't a good place to be.
Half a million is a good deal or it's already getting worn out. They're $700-900,000 for one machine. You need two. And I already have what you said except buying my own stumpage. Time will tell. This always comes around. And I still don't know why prices from last year are being compared. Wasn't that record highs? When was the last time it was that high? Like I said time will tell. I won't be doing anything until I see fit.
I just looked at the last few months of state sales. Guys are still bidding high. Mills and loggers. They don't seem to be to worried. All types of species. Pulp logs. One was 11,000 cord. Went over $700,000
A bigger hard maple sale just went here last week a couple hours north of me where hard maple is King and big bucks , Feb sales were going at $1700/1000 standing , last week $400/1000 for same type of maple , Lot of guys got caught paying big money and now cannot sell it
The most expensive sale I've cut was 800/1000. Otherwise it's always 250-600.
The sales I was referring to were just bought. They have two years to cut them. A lot of wood gets bought around here so guys have 1-3 years of work.
Same but different. In November 2007 my farm sold for $10K an acre to a high roller who was and had made deals all over the place, less than three weeks later the market was dead. Buyer went bankrupt. I paid $2K in 2012. First lesson is that high rollers only know how to high roll and will keep doing so right until they smash into the wall at Mach 2.2. The second lesson is that things stay low for a lot longer that they stayed high after a crash.
Look at how fast the supply chain collapsed and how things still aren't back to normal. Nothing is immune to gravity.
Quote from: Firewoodjoe on May 15, 2023, 07:40:59 PM
You don't need the next newest and greatest. Go the sales and buy up all the parts, tires, hose making equipment bringing scrap prices. Buy your own stumpage, timberland etc. Being the biggest, fastest, highest leveraged supplier for the next legacy mill on the auction ad isn't a good place to be.
Half a million is a good deal or it's already getting worn out. They're $700-900,000 for one machine. You need two. And I already have what you said except buying my own stumpage. Time will tell. This always comes around. And I still don't know why prices from last year are being compared. Wasn't that record highs? When was the last time it was that high? Like I said time will tell. I won't be doing anything until I see fit.
yep CTL sure is expensive. You'll know a good deal when you see it and don't worry if timber prices correct back to a norm. I don't have the HMR in front of me but I am sure HM was much lower at all points compared to last year which was not normal. I can give you the 5 year average on HM sometime if you like.
800/1000 for stumpage is quite high. In YP we might be at high 3 or 4 something straight through. I have paid $4000/1000 for walnut- that was fun.
Things with China don't look great but Europe does so that's good news we haven't seen in a few years.
Quote from: ehp on May 15, 2023, 09:06:13 PM
A bigger hard maple sale just went here last week a couple hours north of me where hard maple is King and big bucks , Feb sales were going at $1700/1000 standing , last week $400/1000 for same type of maple , Lot of guys got caught paying big money and now cannot sell it
Weyerhauser buyers even got caught doing it and they are not younguns. They have been around the block more than once and still overpaid. It happens.
an average for just run of the mill timber is $600 to $1000/1000 standing and with prices coming down the land owners want the same price or they will not sell , I have seen hard maple sell at $2500/1000 standing , walnut double that quite a few times but when they are all done they really did not make any more than the guy cutting average timber but they took a huge risk
Your hard maple will not compare to ours so to compare prices it needs to be prices from here , You can say what you want but it's pretty easy to see it's not good out there and turning worse quite fast , We got mills closing down which has never happened like this before up here and with this govt running the show like they are there is no reason for this to turn around any time soon
I don't have an axe to grind and could care less what choices anyone makes. What I can offer is long term perspective about the loggers, sawmills, and paper mills I have dealt with the past 45 years. The market cycles and the number of players contracts. All the loggers here locally who grew large at the behest of the papermills are all long gone as are the mills they contracted for. Most were liquidations. Some were casualties of corporate raiders selling off the parts. More than a few suffered through divorces possibly from the stress. The common recurring theme is large debt coupled to the whims of a single major income stream. Unlike farmers who can hedge input costs, coupled with crop insurance and forward contracting loggers are at the mercy of the weather, global trade trends, and the corporate mill that may be sold or closed next week. The procurement manager needing wood this week will get the memo about the mill closing the same day as the press release.
I applaud anyone who doubles down and bets on themselves. The gambling kicks in when your house becomes collateral subject to the whims an activist shareholder at xyz paper company Inc or any of the pitfalls of being dependent upon a collapsing industry.
Cost and productivity of equipment that produces a product that has no value becomes irrelevant. Only thing the banker is concerned about is if the monthly note is paid on time.
Joe I think the takeaway here is that even though we may all have different perspective on timber values and log pricing, etc the one thing we all share is a belief that pulpwood as a product class is a very very high risk business. It's high risk especially because the owners are not local...they have a myriad ways to skin profitability that have nothing to do with how well you do your job or even how well anyone at the mill does their job or everyone at the mill. If the treasurer said 4 years ago..hey lets do a high yield junk bond indexed to the WSJ reported prime rate (which was then .025) to finance operations and we'll take all the profits and now that note will come due in Feb and a replacement note is 9.025% than the mill has to scramble to create a 9% greater profit and in a recession that extra 9% is not there. In fact the opposite...they may need more cash than before. Well the mill starts planning to shutdown and you know what they do in the meantime...run wide open. You won't see it coming.
This is happening all over the world, in Finland you'll hear the same complaints you hear in Maine. In South Africa..the same. In MN..the same.
Stavebuyer and I don't always agree on everything and that is as it should be on a forum with many people from many backgrounds. That's the value. On this point that could be vital to your business plans...Stavebuyer and I agree. Pulpmills as customers are high risk. Eyes wide open. That's all we are saying. You seem like a great guy...all hustle and no bitching and whining. We all want you to succeed. All we have is a bit of perspective as we have seen the earth go around the sun a few more times.
If I were in your shoes I'd be looking to de-risk by getting some USDA grants (value added producer grants, etc) to help back your endeavor and take some of the risk off.
At the same time you have some advantages- Michigan has some furniture makers, its a state that might have turned the corner. At least Michigan is landing it's fair share of big new factory builds. You have some species diversity vs say Northern MN. You have lots of sorts going on in your harvest and that means many buyers, I don't know who they are but man that is a good sign. If all the pulp sorts go away what is left?
Paper mills have been a loosing battle for many years. As we sit on an our electronic devices. We dont have a paper mill. Well brown paper for cardboard. If a divorce was going to happen in hard times then they shouldn't have been together in the first place. That was just bidding time. House as collateral!! No thanks. Yes markets are not good nobody is saying they are.
Look up pull hard logging. Just seen him on YouTube. Don't know him and is way south of me. Baught two new tiger cats and sold two big log sales. Walnut and white oak. 100,000 feet on one sale. Guys are moving wood. Just not getting rich like they were last year. More like a bad normal. 🤷♂️ we'll all see soon.
A guy selling 100K ft of Walnut or White Oak is the guy that can afford new toys. He probably isn't doing much chip wood contracting by the cord. Be that guy.
Quote from: nativewolf on May 16, 2023, 07:29:56 AM
Joe I think the takeaway here is that even though we may all have different perspective on timber values and log pricing, etc the one thing we all share is a belief that pulpwood as a product class is a very very high risk business. It's high risk especially because the owners are not local...they have a myriad ways to skin profitability that have nothing to do with how well you do your job or even how well anyone at the mill does their job or everyone at the mill. If the treasurer said 4 years ago..hey lets do a high yield junk bond indexed to the WSJ reported prime rate (which was then .025) to finance operations and we'll take all the profits and now that note will come due in Feb and a replacement note is 9.025% than the mill has to scramble to create a 9% greater profit and in a recession that extra 9% is not there. In fact the opposite...they may need more cash than before. Well the mill starts planning to shutdown and you know what they do in the meantime...run wide open. You won't see it coming.
This is happening all over the world, in Finland you'll hear the same complaints you hear in Maine. In South Africa..the same. In MN..the same.
Stavebuyer and I don't always agree on everything and that is as it should be on a forum with many people from many backgrounds. That's the value. On this point that could be vital to your business plans...Stavebuyer and I agree. Pulpmills as customers are high risk. Eyes wide open. That's all we are saying. You seem like a great guy...all hustle and no bitching and whining. We all want you to succeed. All we have is a bit of perspective as we have seen the earth go around the sun a few more times.
If I were in your shoes I'd be looking to de-risk by getting some USDA grants (value added producer grants, etc) to help back your endeavor and take some of the risk off.
At the same time you have some advantages- Michigan has some furniture makers, its a state that might have turned the corner. At least Michigan is landing it's fair share of big new factory builds. You have some species diversity vs say Northern MN. You have lots of sorts going on in your harvest and that means many buyers, I don't know who they are but man that is a good sign. If all the pulp sorts go away what is left?
I didn't see this @nativewolf (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=24089) must be I posted right when you did lol
Yes very diverse world wide. Many different situations and markets. One pulp mill has been here since 1948. They could definitely go out but with all the other states closing up pulp mills and the newest mill spending big money to start here, I'd say someone much more involved than us figures Michigan is worth it. If pulp went out we'd be down to all the log. Low grade and high grade. And all the pallet logs. 12" to 6". That is a more problematic market than any of them. They have shut down many times. Then pulp would have to go for firewood or chips. Yes they're still here. The price actually went way up at one facility last year. Some guys pulled their chippers back out. Will the world stop using OSB board? What about cardboard? The paper mill in the U.P could cause more problems. Wood would have to transition from there to down here or Wisconsin. That would constrict our markets but with the mac bridge weight limit and fuel cost that only works with back hauls. Mills here have went out. Currently three small ones. But they have a history. Fires 🤔 and suppling one weird market and not staying diverse. There's no guarantees that's for sure. But when I see pics or YouTube of other states logging, we market 5 times what everyone else does. Pulp and firewood that's saw log size? Logs.... Get so trimmed up and pampered! We cut it shorter and send it! By size and if it's straight and solid. The crooked or punky goes for firewood or pulp. Michigan markets are nothing like the south or East or west. Even lake states like Wisconsin or over to Minnesota. They don't sort like we do. I hate sorts but in times like this it keeps options open. Heck logs trucks in the UP don't even have enough stakes for us to run full loads of logs. They set them up for mostly 8s I could go on forever. Michigan is not like the rest. And I hope it stays that way.
Quote from: stavebuyer on May 16, 2023, 07:06:58 PM
A guy selling 100K ft of Walnut or White Oak is the guy that can afford new toys. He probably isn't doing much chip wood contracting by the cord. Be that guy.
He's in a different region of the sate. No pulp mills down there and he has big oaks and walnuts. We have aspens oaks and maples. And pine stands.
Besides how can he afford new toys when everyone says the grade/veneer market has collapsed so bad.
Same way I see guys buying $1.3 million combines on $8 beans. Pray to pay. I take chances, plenty of them, but I can't sleep well that way.
Probably good to be skeptical of people on youtube with all the newest stuff that are doing something like farming or logging. Not a comment on who you are talking about because I didnt look, but a comment in general... You never know their situation, some inherited money, some worked hard for it but doing something else, some financed a $1.3M combine to harvest $8 beans :o did well in the stock market, slipped on peepee at the costco and got a settlement check, etc etc etc. If he sold 100k ft of walnut and oak --- did he buy the stumpage? If so that tells you where the new tigercats came from, he already had money and who knows where it came from. He could be buying 100k ft for $2/bf and selling for $2.01/bf for all we know.
This region we cut 60% pulp and I haven't seen anybody worried about anything. For the most part nobody has cut a stick of wood in 8 or so weeks because of load restrictions and spring melt and it's business as usual, equipment is getting repaired, new machines are arriving, new machines are getting ordered, etc. Sales being sold on 2 year contract are still bringing good money.
Frankly I'm a little surprised that guys aren't getting at least a little concerned, expecially with thousands and thousands of cords of pulp yarded up all over that still needs to be hauled to the mill.
Quote from: mudfarmer on May 16, 2023, 07:39:31 PM
Probably good to be skeptical of people on youtube with all the newest stuff that are doing something like farming or logging. Not a comment on who you are talking about because I didnt look, but a comment in general... You never know their situation, some inherited money, some worked hard for it but doing something else, some financed a $1.3M combine to harvest $8 beans :o did well in the stock market, slipped on peepee at the costco and got a settlement check, etc etc etc. If he sold 100k ft of walnut and oak --- did he buy the stumpage? If so that tells you where the new tigercats came from, he already had money and who knows where it came from. He could be buying 100k ft for $2/bf and selling for $2.01/bf for all we know.
Very true and agreed. I'm just going off what I see. I don't spend money off anyone's actions or opinions😂 No offense to anyone! Lol
Quote from: chevytaHOE5674 on May 16, 2023, 07:46:07 PM
This region we cut 60% pulp and I haven't seen anybody worried about anything. For the most part nobody has cut a stick of wood in 8 or so weeks because of load restrictions and spring melt and it's business as usual, equipment is getting repaired, new machines are arriving, new machines are getting ordered, etc. Sales being sold on 2 year contract are still bringing good money.
Frankly I'm a little surprised that guys aren't getting at least a little concerned, expecially with thousands and thousands of cords of pulp yarded up all over that still needs to be hauled to the mill.
They have to be optimistic and climb the mountain when it comes. Around here anyways guys can't just put the old chainsaw in the shed and park the 230 cable Skidder and ride it out.
This industry has always had ups and downs. I think back to when covid first hit and everyone was talking about the "new normal". I think the wood business as a whole is going to have to find a new normal. Some stuff I'm selling so fast I can't produce it fast enough and can't find anywhere to buy it. Other products I can't give away. All I know to do is keep plugging away and make the most of it.
Quote from: Firewoodjoe on May 16, 2023, 07:48:53 PM
Quote from: mudfarmer on May 16, 2023, 07:39:31 PM
Probably good to be skeptical of people on youtube with all the newest stuff that are doing something like farming or logging. Not a comment on who you are talking about because I didnt look, but a comment in general... You never know their situation, some inherited money, some worked hard for it but doing something else, some financed a $1.3M combine to harvest $8 beans :o did well in the stock market, slipped on peepee at the costco and got a settlement check, etc etc etc. If he sold 100k ft of walnut and oak --- did he buy the stumpage? If so that tells you where the new tigercats came from, he already had money and who knows where it came from. He could be buying 100k ft for $2/bf and selling for $2.01/bf for all we know.
Very true and agreed. I'm just going off what I see. I don't spend money off anyone's actions or opinions😂 No offense to anyone! Lol
I think you'd have to be a nimnut to cut a whiteoak job and not do pretty well on it these days.
The guy i run processor for just signed on the line for a new Scorpion, which has quite a lead time on it.
His words to me were "you have to keep moving forward and be ready to cut wood". I just laughed.
I can't say too much we just signed a purchase agreement for 280+ acres of farm ground adjacent to this farm. Cattle prices are projected to stay high for 2+ more years so we figured we would take a giant leap.
Darn that's a nice spread Chevy! Congratulations!
Quote from: chevytaHOE5674 on May 16, 2023, 08:28:51 PM
The guy i run processor for just signed on the line for a new Scorpion, which has quite a lead time on it.
His words to me were "you have to keep moving forward and be ready to cut wood". I just laughed.
I can't say too much we just signed a purchase agreement for 280+ acres of farm ground adjacent to this farm. Cattle prices are projected to stay high for 2+ more years so we figured we would take a giant leap.
That's just it. You can't think about going backwards. Just watch every step as you march forwarder. You may trip, you may fall but you gotta keep going.
My problem is I have alot to learn about the paper work and marketing.
you will make more money with the phone than the saw
I don't care how optimistic guys wanna make this sound, I'm watching stuff go for sale, 6 months ago I couldn't find a low hour J, now pick which one you want. Pulp just took a hit up north, finch down here is still taking it but for how long.
Quote from: chevytaHOE5674 on May 16, 2023, 08:28:51 PM
The guy i run processor for just signed on the line for a new Scorpion, which has quite a lead time on it.
His words to me were "you have to keep moving forward and be ready to cut wood". I just laughed.
I can't say too much we just signed a purchase agreement for 280+ acres of farm ground adjacent to this farm. Cattle prices are projected to stay high for 2+ more years so we figured we would take a giant leap.
Congratulations!!
Southern PA mills are looking or RO, one called us offering $900/mbf and still buying RO veneer at $1500. Frankly that is above most of the 2017-2022. I was surprised. YP is still off the highs but they offered $800/mbf. That's pricing on good clean logs.
It must be ok because they have me in oak and I believe the other crews are also. Or at least a mix.
I don't think there is any figuring the market now. Every time I start thinking I have it figured out it makes a fool out of me. I have learned that if I don't worry about it to much and just follow the market, I come out alright.
Yes that is the truth @customsawyer (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=1861) , we thought RO would be in the toliet...here is a huge mill calling desperately to find some logs. Bizarre market.
Coming down from camp today on 87 and seeing back hauls of hardwood logs going up. Must mean a price increase.
This is a standing timber appraisal of a place I'm possibly looking at. I was taking to a log buyer today ( not the one I had). Good long talk on several things and this included. He was able to pull this up of what I was talking about in our conversation on the standing timber price evaluation. Any thoughts on evaluations like this from others.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/59695/6E6BCEC0-4024-4BEB-A113-1BFA40F9A4CB.jpeg?easyrotate_cache=1685574479)
I always like to know the number of trees and diameter averages as well as the distribution for each diameter class. I also like to know what the white oak sub species are as that is where the money is on that tract. Quercus Alba and Chinkapin are worth a lot more than Post Oak and Bur oak.
In terms of gross numbers that's about what one would see around here stumpage value wise on that number of acres of nice mixed timber.
Demand for flooring lumber has been one of the few bright spots in domestic hardwood lumber. The main buyer at a very large regional flooring plant recently commented that "sticks are the only item in short supply". Translation "the yard is full" and they don't need any lumber.
The market always cycles. My opinion is that most domestic log prices will continue to soften to match the wholesale lumber market going into summer. The market will turn when inventory levels drop to where some items are hard to come by for wholesale lumber buyers and then a panic will ensue to the upside so as not to miss out on the bargains.
The buyer I talked to said they are done for the season but still had over 200k+bf of walnut they haven't got to yet
everything looks ok but I would want to know how good the white oak is and see how accurate the scale is to what you are really going to cut out of that stuff
Waiting back for a call from the company that did the appraisal for the detailed DBH and several other questions
WB one thing I have learned over the years is lots of foresters honestly have very little knowledge on grade of timber which really makes no sense cause their the ones putting the price tag on the standing timber , seen lots put the top butt log price for the whole tree and there sure is a huge difference between a good butt log compared to the last upper pallet log , we got foresters up here right now saying red oak is $875/1000 standing and they wonder why no one is buying their wood lots
Still moving some white oak veneer but not much else
Everything else is going for timbers or flooring
The timber appraisal that you posted is from a farm very close to me. My real job is RealEstate and Farm Management with the same company that has the listing, but out of our office in Albia IA.
The White oak there is pretty nice slick stuff. I have not walked the Walnut but that volume is normal for this area.
The price is high and that farm has sold twice recently. If you have any questions or need any unbiased opinions on things in this area let me know.
Thanks. Totally agree with you on the price. Going to look at a couple farms tomorrow with tillable and timber. Will see what the woods look like. Thanks for all the tips guys
Hans2017 I'm actually going to be a hour away from your office. Lineville Iowa
I have quite a few mature white oaks on my ground. Never cut any but a few days ago thought I would take down enough to make a couple thousand board foot of KD lumber. Every tree I've cut has a hollow butt from ground level up three or four foot. All are good looking trees. Sure hurts the grade yield. Just curious if this is a problem in other locations.
I've cut a lot of red oak off the same ground without any heart rot or hollow spots.
I find the opposite here. White Oak being the longer-lived species, has fewer heart rot issues. Abnormal amount of heart damage many times is the result of past fire damage. White Oak will tolerate a drier site and fires on south/southwest slopes burn hotter and more frequently.
No oak to speak of here except on the mountain side and tiny pockets that have been high graded mostly for firewood and pulp. But any old sugar maple over 20" is more than 1/3 heart or rotten. The veneer market never wanted more than 1/3. Yet for yellow or white birch the heart never mattered at all, had to be sound wood of course. Have my doubts they are paying much around here anyway, the land of cheap wood.
When you say "same ground" are there red oaks you have harvested beside or close to the WO? Were all the WO close to each other? Is this close to an old field? Or close to a small ravine?
Common causes of this sort of rot are fire and animals and logging. Which one? Old farms often had trash dumps they burned and if the fire got out a bit, sometime terribly so. Livestock (pigs and cattle in particular) are notorious for rubbing bark off younger trees, so if the area is close to an old field and there is fencing further back that's a clue. Logging...self explanatory.
If you can take a thin cookie from the butt of a log (first undamaged 1/2") you can get the age of the tree and the rot infection. Then compare that to a RO. See if these are from the same time. It could be the RO and WO come are different ages due to prior harvests. If the WO are close to an old logging site and they logged it with mules or ox than it is very easy for nearly every tree to get scarred and have rot. The difference is the scarred WO will not rot all the way through and a scarred hickory or RO will often rot out so much they get destroyed by weather or just die. So the fact that the damaged WO is still standing is testament to it's toughness while only undamaged RO remain.
The easiest way to understand is cut a few trees and look at the rings. Fire damage rings are pretty easy to spot once you have seen a few.
WB, I have shown a few of the farms on the market in the Lineville area. That area tends to be high priced as it is a pretty well known "celebrity" type hunter/landowners.
In response to the question about the hollow WhiteOak here it is normally due to cattle. The information about fire makes sense also.
been moving abit of white oak veneer , more than normal per week as log buyer seems not to be as picky
Hans2017 send me your contact info. I was outside Lineville looking at a farm yesterday
Had a good talk with one of the log buyers I know that ships all over the world and he says almost all markets over seas do not want to see a single log until maybe Sept and thats Europe and China and the rest , red oak is moving abit here , hard maple is dead, walnut is moving but not great , white oak is moving but needs to be true white oak , prices are down but not brutal at this point , there are mills sitting with zero logs in their yards as they shut down until things get better , so take it as you want but this guy knows everybody and deals with everybody and tells it like it is . Like he said donot stick your neck out buying bush or equipment unless you can afford to sit on it for a couple years
all of our walnut is going in containers, whole tree. They will ship all summer apparently. RO veneer going offshore too I hear, it's paying $1.5 but what to do with the low grade RO. That's been our trouble from day 1.
Domestically it is as you say..not brutal just not good. The folks cutting hard maple are in more trouble than others that is for sure. Business has never been more brisk on the property side, we will have to stop taking clients again pretty darn soon. Another 3-4 and we'll be at capacity for our 15 year rotation plan.
Containers is what this guy mainly does and a lot of them and ships to every corner of the earth , lots of guys here have to cut cause they got payments to make but they are loosing dollar value compared to later fall, I know a couple loggers bought really costly hard maple bush standing last fall and never touched it cause the price fell so bad , only thing is when you bid on those bushes you put 25% of your bid in with your bid and if you win you got 30 days to pay the rest of your bid so now your tie up a lot of your own coin and could be 2 or 4 years before you cut a single log and everyone is saying hard maple will not return to what price it was at
Most loggers have more timber to cut than they can cut
Quote from: ehp on June 06, 2023, 08:45:18 PM
Containers is what this guy mainly does and a lot of them and ships to every corner of the earth , lots of guys here have to cut cause they got payments to make but they are loosing dollar value compared to later fall, I know a couple loggers bought really costly hard maple bush standing last fall and never touched it cause the price fell so bad , only thing is when you bid on those bushes you put 25% of your bid in with your bid and if you win you got 30 days to pay the rest of your bid so now your tie up a lot of your own coin and could be 2 or 4 years before you cut a single log and everyone is saying hard maple will not return to what price it was at
So that's how the deals are done up there. Really hurts when the price falls. Wow. Hope you are not out of money on HM. There is a guy in NY, just outside Albany that has some coin. Interest rates are brutal though.
Was glancing at the Hardwood Market Report this morning. Hard Maple is really getting ugly and Walnuts spring rally has evaporated. Thick stock FAS Walnut was down $125/1000 from last week. Not sure I can recall any species ever having a 3 digit price drop in a week and the 4th of July vacation lull is still three weeks away. Good time to oil up the fishing reels.
Our Walnut buyer said stop..please..no more. Seriously, he has to buy another 3-4 loads but then he wants us to hold off on Walnut. Lots of people got cut off last week.
RO prime cut from 900 to 600 last week, not great news.
YP prime cut from 900 to 600 as well, even worse for us. So we have peeler orders starting this fall but no high end.
RO Veneer is smoking- $1800 max for good rift logs.
YP veneer won't show up til October
CO veneer and quarter saw market is doing well, from $2.5-1.25 for 2 side CO QS logs
WO is smoking
Quote from: nativewolf on June 15, 2023, 07:49:16 PM
Our Walnut buyer said stop..please..no more. Seriously, he has to buy another 3-4 loads but then he wants us to hold off on Walnut. Lots of people got cut off last week.
RO prime cut from 900 to 600 last week, not great news.
YP prime cut from 900 to 600 as well, even worse for us. So we have peeler orders starting this fall but no high end.
RO Veneer is smoking- $1800 max for good rift logs.
YP veneer won't show up til October
CO veneer and quarter saw market is doing well, from $2.5-1.25 for 2 side CO QS logs
WO is smoking
Our QS buyer is on a tight Quota, they are still paying stupid money for logs they don't really need. If these genius managers ever figure out that supply is seasonal and impacted by weather, we could quit the shadow dancing.
Just got a note from a broker we bought cedar cants from a year ago. Back then had to wait in line. Now wants to know if I need any. Our sales are very good and no price drop. I quote, they say saw it.
Our QS buyer called me this morning and they are putting him out to pasture on Friday. He isn't being replaced. Their most senior buyer. I have been dealing with him 15 years or so. Sad.
Just visited ours at his mill, but he owns the mill- small shop. They were out of logs because loggers don't want to cut now. He had to cut timber he had bought to get any logs. Pricing is a bit down but not terrible.
Whats the latest anyone has heard on walnut, veener or lumber logs?
We sold 60k feet this summer of field walnut with a few veneer here and there. Veneer was far down and grade logs as well. It moved down all summer then 1st of july our 3 buyers asked us to stop whereas in the previous year they asked for it all summer.
China is apparently full of walnut.
Veneers were $6-8 for good good logs. Sawlogs were 2.5 for good sized sawlogs. Amish were the only ones buying at the end.
How are your mat logs doing?
Everything is still moving here but the big diameter short pallet logs. Not exactly good but steady. The mat logs will be the next market full. Pulp will move but most guys aren't happy with the prices. If pulp keeps moving and crating or grade stays steadily trickling out we'll keep doing good.
Our tie log pricing ok, $0.45. We're mostly going to cut WO this fall so a tie market lets us clean up a bit, I hear in PA it is up to $.50-55 for tie logs but the cost of shipping does not make that possible.
@nativewolf (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=24089)
Mat logs
16' 10" -.45
18' 12" and up -.55
20'-24' 15" and up -.65
30'-15" and up- .75
40'-15" and up=.85
doyle measure, and pretty tight with the stick in my opinon
Are you able to stay in WO heavy stands @Hogdaddy (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=51047) ?
Looks like we have the same sort of basic mat log pricing right now. Our tie mill scale is international though so it helps some on the smaller logs
No, on the white oak stands... where I'm at now is heavier toward red oak and hickory, maybe 10-12% on the white oak. @nativewolf (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=24089) Ash is moving pretty good
Oh good news on the ash!
Our buyers have all increased log prices significantly. RO has moved from $600 to $750 and veneer is back to 1400, YP export is $0.90 to $1. YP prime is at 725-800. Hickory export start next month.
Anyhow, that's all the news for today.
Well that definitely good news. What about inventory? Most loggers I know moved to oak. I know the mills around here are pretty full. Some sorts got quotas cut again. It could take some time to move what's stacked up.
I can only speak about 1 mill, they had let inventory go to over 2mln feet in June and then slashed pricing so only desperate people were delivering logs- over half of the mill production is gatewood so they are just buying what loggers send.
It took them until last week to get it below 400k feet and they saw 50k a day so it is a good sized mill. They are one of several that raised pricing.
Hardwood market report says that inventories across the USA are low right now.
HMR pricing on RO, WO and Walnut uppers have been improving. Unlike the NE, it's been dry here all summer and the mills are brim full of logs. Lumber has been improving but logs haven't. Still some major players with idled mills waiting on better lumber pricing. I think the price increases are due to lowered supply and not increased demand. Doesn't take much to correct that supply/demand imbalance. China has been huge since 2008. Until there housing crisis gets resolved I don't see much chance of big bull lumber market.
I agree Stavebuyer, I think the issue is even a bit more difficult in that the USA is leading the worlds economic revivial. Europe is behind, China in danger of stalling out completely. Japan is moving to lower population. Mexico is a bright spot and India could become one but for now...things look bleak in most of the big economies EXCEPT here in the USA where we are much better off by comparison.
Therefore, domestic oriented products should fare better.
There is a huge pent-up demand for more housing in the US that is moderated by higher mortgage rates and post-covid construction costs. I think we will see a decline in house sizes and a trading down of features like solid wood floors and cabinets to more affordable alternatives like laminates and RTA cabinets to compensate.
There will always be markets for the "good stuff" but the number of people able to afford it maybe not so much.
I agree. But theres already people with small houses and cheap floors. But I think the people that want big best and expensive will always want that. No matter the cost. People complained about $80,000 and yet the same ones have a decked out one. A few people are building here also. Don't seem to care about cost.
Hardwood logs are being exported right now also.
80,000 pickup
The people around here that always had money still have it, just a lot more. The people that never had any still don't have any, and many are living on credit. PPP loans really skewed the difference of the haves and have nots.
There are more and more biomass projects failing, are they going to be able to take that feedstock to make MDF cabinets, OSB etc? There was a hardwood mill here that got bought by a Canadian company, now sawing huge amounts of our nice Adirondack pine and sending across the border to get turned into door and window frames, high recovery with tons of finger jointed pieces. Possible things will adapt to changing markets as they always have.
I'm along for the ride, more ash to sell this winter, but it was bought right 👍
Always hoping that Cherry prices recover 😂😂
@ehp (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=1195) Amex sending out price raises every week or so now. Not sure if you get those or not?
We got one today and it was a pretty good raise on RO.
If a guy only had a stand of veneer. Big want for that right now. Everything looks ok to me. Crating really could use a boost in digestion but I think that will be plugged full for awhile. All my wood is gone though🤷♂️
I keep hoping for raises on red oak here, but haven't heard anything.
Called the buyer I'm pretty decent with yesterday, said I'm starting to put wood out. He goes DONT call me / ship wood again till after next week. 🤫 fair amount of wood prices are going to jump back up again after Oct 1st, when the Chinese put their orders in. Biggest problem here is the weather, guys just can't get it out.
Quote from: Firewoodjoe on September 20, 2023, 08:30:47 PM
If a guy only had a stand of veneer. Big want for that right now. Everything looks ok to me. Crating really could use a boost in digestion but I think that will be plugged full for awhile. All my wood is gone though🤷♂️
We thought we'd have a bit more veneer but the quality has been terrible. Lots of cutting 4-6' off WO butts. Kills profits. Forest is quite old and had a lot of use I guess.
I'm aggravated....the guy I'm cutting on has 2 more farms, one is covered up with big white oak, one is average timber.... he wants to cut the average stuff first. I hope white oak doesn't go down next year. :-[
Log prices are abit better but logging cost has about doubled so read between the lines
As long as wood keeps moving we'll make it. Keep your chins up tighten up and keep pushin. All we can do. I can handle most cost. Oil has seemed to slow. Actually dropped a tad. Fuel isn't good but I've always bought on road up until this last big jump. So it's only about a $1 more than I was kinda used to. I'm getting bigger fuel hungry iron though since I started. I notice that. If I don't stay in the right wood it hurts in a matter of weeks. I've always been cheap and try to save where I can. Prolly do things a lot of guys wouldn't think of. Weather it's right or not it keeps the ball rolling.
My pencil is quite sharp.and works very good and writes honest numbers not make believe like I see lots do . There is tons of wood around but what there is less and less of is sawmills that need the wood . You loose a mill that's 75 miles away or so and then you got the guys that feed that mill.trying to cut in on you and sell their logs to your mill. You
Is the "You" at the end referring to me? Well I don't sell logs. And I don't cut in on any logger. And my mill don't buy logs from any logger. All in house. A lot of mills are that way around here. In fact every mill I know has crews out. Like everything else. Trying to cut out the middle man. And it will happen some day.
@Hogdaddy (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=51047) that is strange. This is the market to cut the better WO. He's not stringing you along is he? Do you have contracts on it? My worry would be he gets you to cut the junk and send the WO out to bid or something. Of course he's probably thinking the opposite, he's worried you'd cut the WO and not cut the junk. Cutting on shares?
FWJ and EHP : markets are tight and fuel increases didn't help. The one advantage of training an employee is that he's slow and new to forestry so fuel use plummeted. Our fuel costs are lower than EHP but higher than FWJ so I am happy about our $3.70/gallon tank of offroad. WTI and Brent oil markets collapsed last week and oil is heading downhill quickly from almost $94/barrel to 83 or so today. Diesel should slowly follow suit.
Good luck everyone!
@nativewolf (https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?action=profile;u=24089) Naw, I don't think so. If anyone cuts them, I will. I found out that he doesn't want me on the white oak farm because that's his primary deer hunting farm and season is just around the corner.
Oh, yes we get that one a lot. Well all's good then. You should be there in the winter/spring? Veneer should still be strong I'd think.
Anyone have any updates on log prices? We seem to be holding pretty steady, from what I hear anyway, I haven't cut in 3 weeks. They think I tore my meniscus in my knee. Going to find out for sure tomorrow.
Anyways, White oak is still flying, red oak is holding for now, poplar going down some, walnut is back to a half way decent price and hard maple is in the dumpster.
Maple is gaining, so is good Red Oak. Walnut and Qtr saw logs are falling. Hickory is a dirty word. Sawn ties, especially 6x8 are getting hard to move. Flooring markets have all the lumber they really want. Staves are great but getting a purchase order for 8/8 white oak lumber takes calling in a favor despite the crazy prices. Maybe a few holidays and raindrops will help. Production is well below last year and the market is still tepid. Was a half million bd/ft timber bid sale just east of us last week with 60% W. Oak that only attracted 1 token bid and didn't sell. The big players are content to muddle through. Probably wise to follow suit.
I have not seen it yet but I am told we will see 2018 prices on logs here shortly now think back to what logging cost was in 2018 and you will find at least and average of 70% higher logging cost so that is really going to cut into your bottom line , we got some bigger mills up north that are closing or going to be closing so that is going to kill those towns up north , it's up to everyone to do what they feel is best for themselves but I can tell you I'm not sticking my neck out very far cause it will get cut off . I have zero payments on machines to make and I donot like how things are , It would bother me quite bad if I had a million or 2 million dollars of equipment I had to pay for at this time
A guy had a retirement auction of a sawmill operation a month ago and had 500+ various Cedar packs that people got some good deals on stored inside that went through the kiln that was around 350k in wood
Pretty much what I'm hearing. Everyone switch to cut tie and flooring, stave, stuff that was selling and bringing ok money. So now those are getting full wonder what the next wave of sorts will be. The big pine mill is offering a bonus on a sort. Pretty much everything can be moved here, just decide how low you want to sell it. I'm finding some prices have come down. Some oil is only up a little. My chains are only up a little. I'm very content as long as it all keeps moving out. That's what hurts the bank account. When the ball stops.
I wouldn't want to owe a million in any market. Unless I had 5 crews. Then the million would prolly be the small headache.
Yeah the equipment payments suck right now, especially as the freaking machine has had enough downtime to get it recalled as a lemon. Oh well, Ponsse sending a crackerjack mechanic to stay until we say leave so that's something. Finally.
Pricing is what Stave says in our view. WO still the thing to cut.
Stavebuyer did the sale have issues? Or the seller just wanting top dollar?
I buy logs, Maybe not a good place to put this,
Just showing what log prices are here.
In NH good W pine was up to .53 a bf. from a low of .35. bf. It was at .35 for a long time. I'm buying some nice W pine for .45. I think it will come down to .40 soon. Hemlock was at .25 for a long time. Up to .30 to .35 now. I have some coming this winter at .30 bf.
R oak 3 good faces I can get at .65- .70 a bf. I need good logs for the grade stakes and trailer decking all kinds of stuff.
All logs with a 12" + top.
What hurts is the Canadians looking for a back hall.
If you can load them at the landing. They cut out the local trucking guys. ::)
Maybe they pay more, I don't know.
Peter
The Canadian prices are competitive, and the trucking is "free" You load them and off they go. If you can get those beauty queens in and out of the landing easily sometimes it pays better. But when you got a quebecois in slippers stuck in the mud/bushes screaming at you in french it eats up the "savings" quickly...
Local log trucks are getting scarcer in my neck of the woods that equates to higher prices for the wood to be delivered to the mill. Drivers are aging out or finding easier truck work. More work in our valley for truck farmers and they don't stop for the mud...
Has not been much wood cut on my road for years. Once in awhile a load or two of aspen pulp or fir, the fastest growing and cheapest woods up here. Quite honestly, I would prefer fir over spruce, nice straight grain. Grows twice as fast. All same grade stamp. ;D Sure, you have a wider harvest window with spruce because it lives 3 x as long. That just means you manage your woods more closely with fir, and don't expect too much from old suppressed stuff. If you didn't space it long before this, don't be looking for much nice fir. ;) White pine prices are nothing to brag about either. There's so much junk pine, that all you end up doing is high grading and leaving more % of junk. ::) Hemlock up here is worth less than aspen pulp, it all stands behind after harvest until the next big fall wind storm. One time a lot of hemlock went to Maine, maybe still does, but it was never a money maker for the seller. I don't think very many cedar mills are left now, the last one of any size closed in 2020 in Hainesville. A lot of the other ones are boom and bust operations.
Quote from: nativewolf on December 04, 2023, 08:03:57 PM
Yeah the equipment payments suck right now, especially as the freaking machine has had enough downtime to get it recalled as a lemon. Oh well, Ponsse sending a crackerjack mechanic to stay until we say leave so that's something. Finally.
Pricing is what Stave says in our view. WO still the thing to cut.
Stavebuyer did the sale have issues? Or the seller just wanting top dollar?
Some fire damage and the man we had look was uneasy about one boundary line. Was a little too distant for us to be competitive. Seller had realistic expectations just no interest.
Courthouse time on property boundary lines can eat profits, then survey on top. We are working in a very developed county outside of DC, in WV but Charlestown/Harpers Ferry area which is now a commuter community for DC suburbs. One of the great things about it is the clear property lines, marked and blazed and signs every 10-20'. Over a mile from Shenandoah up to the National Park so it's nice to have some help on those. Downside is that on a 15 mile drive off 4 lane road there are 7 private forests property owners with more than 50 acres, just 7. Oh well. White oak is cutting ok, a bit of rot that clears up. Not much veneer lots of stave.
Donk, I'm with you on the balsam fir, I'd take balsam fir over spruce anytime. It's nice and straight grained. On my sand property, the balsam grows quite nicely but the spruce always has a lot of red rot. I don't know if the soil is lacking a mineral or what.
I'm hearing pretty strong rumors of other mills up north closing as well and one of the largest hardwood companies in the States is strongly thinking their going to be closing down . This is going to weed out a lot of logger and mills plus the companies that build the machines to do the logging , There is a Ram dealer in PA that with pickups parked side by side their line up is over a mile long , No one is spending their money . Other thing is how come our log prices are the same as 2018 but when you go to the lumber store they sure are not 2018 price. Yes that price is down a but but a hell of a long ways from what they charged for lumber in 2018. If this keeps up they will have to buy all their lumber from other countries cause no loggers will be left at this cost
I pay way more for white pine standing than what your buying it at already cut. Real nice big tall white pine goes easy $750/1000 on the stump here
AWP is for sale, bank asked the family to put money Back into the business or sell. Bailie (who owns Wagner and who is owned by Bain capital - private equity group) does not want to buy it all, Northwest (old weyerhauser hardwoods arm) is not interested in buying it all. These are the two players that could, but won't, but it. If they go under it would be a gigantic hit to WV forestry. They have a dozen mills there and I would rank them as the second largest hardwood mill company- maybe Stavebuyer knows more.
I also think it is too big for the Amish in Ohio .
I know that there is less of a demand for hardwood products now days, and the US is producing way less hardwood lumber than lumber than 15-20 yrs ago. Is it finally going to dwindle down to where most of us are out of a job? What do you guys think?
There is no labor to run old hardwood mills and not enough margin to automate them. Always be some empty containers headed somewhere to load since there is nothing built here to fill them.
Hate to wish hard luck on anyone. I know a few AWP guys well and have bought lots of logs from them in past from PA mill but the only thing that's going to turn this market around is less lumber production. Unless it's wo or wal my log suppliers say they face downward pressure on lumber/sawlog prices. Inflation missed most hardwoods. Some mills are taking down time just to reduce production. Others refusing to buy timber/logs until prices adjust. World is using much less hardwood than it did 10 yrs ago and production hasn't adjusted. We have this huge resource and infrastructure and not enough outlets for it. Sad to see the decline. The Chinese overbuilt and now see less wood demand. High interest rates probably don't translate to increased home building in US. Lumber production has to adjust for the industry to keep going. Mills in NE are in a real pinch with competition for timber still high and no competition for their product.
I guess it has to do with what part of the country you are in. Two of the biggest hardwood mills in North America, Beasley forest products and Battle lumber co., are less than 60 miles from me in opposite directions and both are expanding. They both cut pine as well so maybe that is the difference. I was down at Beasley's last week and they showed me where they are putting in a whole new mill and down stream line at their sister mill, Thompson hardwood. The info I received, estimated somewhere over 100 million being spent on it.
They just spent close to that at the Beasley mill just across town in Hazelhurst a few years ago.
I hear you guys on here talking about mills closing in your areas and down here the big guys are expanding. I don't get it. Ehp mentioned a Dodge truck place with rows of trucks on the lot. Folks down here are placing orders and waiting several months to get them. My business sales are off about 30 percent from last year but last year was one for the record books. I can't expect that to happen every year.
I'm not doubting any of what you guys are saying. I just find it nuts to be so different from North to the South. Maybe it is just my little neck of the woods.
We spent far too long ignoring the values and beauty that hardwoods offer so it is no surprise when things like vinyl flooring are gutting the hardwood flooring industry or that plywood and metal painted cabinets replace wooden ones. The industry has no marketing, NONE. Like stavebuyer says, older mills get depreciated by owners looking to milk every dollar and whose only competitive advantage is managing COGS- the price of timber.
For every big mill expanding you have a half dozen smaller ones closing. Forests that are not clearcut are high graded. The timber basket declines in quality and value the longer the local mills degrade the resources, 30 years later a good sized mill has cut 2000 acres of hardwoods a year and that 60000 acre woodbasket around them looks awfully poor so they truck further and need to pay less or steal more.
It's a vicious cycle and won't stop til hardwoods are properly marketed at scale, forests are managed in long term manner, and mills invest in advanced manufacturing processes. If Tesla can get electric vehicles off the ground at scale you'd think we could get people to stop putting crappy vinyl flooring into homes (that has 20x worse impact on the greenhouse gases, that is ugly, and has potential long term health issues) or cabinetry that is not ...cardboard with paint.
It's a very complex issue, not simple. Procurement, manufacturing, marketing. The hardwood industry has failed en masse.
Quote from: nativewolf on December 07, 2023, 08:02:02 AM
It's a vicious cycle and won't stop til hardwoods are properly marketed at scale, forests are managed in long term manner, and mills invest in advanced manufacturing processes. If Tesla can get electric vehicles off the ground at scale you'd think we could get people to stop putting crappy vinyl flooring into homes (that has 20x worse impact on the greenhouse gases, that is ugly, and has potential long term health issues) or cabinetry that is not ...cardboard with paint.
It's a very complex issue, not simple. Procurement, manufacturing, marketing. The hardwood industry has failed en masse.
Sorry, but we let money take over our political system and the folks that make the plastic flooring have VERY deep pockets to buy politicians with.
"The Vinyl Institute has long been a powerful force in Washington, D.C., but its dealings are rarely scrutinized. Founded in 1982, the group describes itself as "the voice for the PVC/vinyl industry" and represents vinyl, vinyl chloride monomer, and vinyl additive manufacturers, with an industry valuation of $54 billion."
"One of the Vinyl Institute's stated priorities is to "promote and defend the image and reputation of vinyl and the industry from those who make false claims and disparage our products in the public discourse." To accomplish this, the group spent $540,000 last year — its highest spend on record, up from $336,000 just two years ago."
How much is the Hardwood lobby slipping into politician's pockets? It is not enough to get them to vote to hold the companies making the vinyl flooring accountable for what they are doing to the world: https://theintercept.com/2023/02/18/east-palestine-plastic-industry-lobbying/ They will even use Uyghur slave labor in China to make the vinyl flooring: https://theintercept.com/2022/06/14/china-uyghur-forced-labor-pvc-home-depot/
Until these big mills start buying politicians like everyone else, nothing will change. If they are already buying them they aren't buying enough. Cost of doing (or staying) in business. That's the way we've set the system up.
The reason those truck lots with lots of vehicles lined up for sale aren't selling is they are about double the price of 4 years ago. A $40,000 truck has a sticker price of $89,000-120,000. So they will sit right there until the place closes down. I've seen lots of videos of guys going around lots showing sticker prices, lots full of trucks.
Well, concentrating the hardwood industry into mega giant mills that have the capital to automate won't improve forest quality, logging opportunity, product quality, or stumpage prices to landowners. Just look at the pine industry in the south.
More small and mid sized operations would accomplish those goals, through the nature of competition, but those mills can't automate and can't find employees who will show up to work and give a Dang.
As far as Tesla at scale - there are not many left around these days because they mostly burned up - but for a while recessed, wall mounted toasters were a thing too. Time will tell. I see Michigan has mandated that their entire fleet of state owned vehicles will be electric by 2040 with all passenger vehicles being EV's in 6 years. I can't wait to see EV plow trucks in the UP trying to clear a road so a Trooper can get through on New Years Eve. It's going to be epic, or it just won't happen.
Up north of me its not very good to be a logger , everything has switched to mech logging from hand cut but the log value has not go up at all but the logging cost has went way up , Sure the machines produce a lot more buy the cost of the machines is crazy . 1 guy I know has 7 machines , 2 track cutters, 2 grapple skidders , hoe, slasher and a dozer plus his log trucks . At the end of last winter when everything was paid the amount he had left was less than what I made working by myself and he was really thinking about pulling the plug cause I do ok but I donot make big money so why was he sticking his neck out that bad. I see more and more bush jobs coming up and the dead line date comes and passes with out a single bid . If your the kind of logger jumping around from mill to mill cause you gained $10/1000 on the last job and you phone the mill you left to come by your logs your in for a rude remark cause that mill no longer wants your logs . It's going to be quite tough for abit but most likely by next winter things should start picking up to where most guys can make money to stay a float and pay for their family cause for me that is the reason I get out of bed is to help my family live
Are those guys chasing trees to cut? Around here you would have two grapples to one cutter and the skidders would be working to keep up.
One of the reasons for the decline in logging employment is the increasing use of mechanized logging equipment, which reduces the need for manual labor
Yes, but loggers can barely find guys to put in the seats of the machines. When compared across the board with pension and benefits, a job in the woods pays less than half of a union construction job with the same skill set. Wages are simply not competitive in the woods for the available labor pool. Do you think if we went back to an army of cable skidders in northern MN, you'd be able to find enough guys to set chokers or run chainsaws bucking on the landing?
Been hard to get cutters for at least 20 years, but we cut mostly pulp, so the pay ain't that great. Mills with crown licenses chased skidders off their licenses anyway, told them they have to go mechanical because the price wasn't going to get any better and the big 'safety' push. Most guys I know with skidders are working by themselves or with a family member or friend. The farmer across the road bought a used skidder last fall. He hired a guy to cut wood. That lasted about 6 weeks, the skidder has never moved since. I don't think more than 4 loads of wood moved. I've never seen the farmer cut wood much himself, hasn't got much land anyway. Dad farmed 5 times as much and cut wood to, only had one guy working and later I cut on the yard when I was older. Dad cut huge rock maple all by himself one winter, that all went into investments because interest was high then, like 18%. That wasn't pulpwood. It was used for furniture locally. Of course the tops were firewood. It grew on nice loam ground. A lot of ash there to. The reason why the boomers around here had it good cut'n, was the old timers never cut much wood, never clear cut. Them days are no more, she's all been cut once and even twice on many tracts.
SS, I replied to your question but guess my reply got sent to outer space , The man was doing select cuts so that slows you down a lot , Around here Im sure I can fall a tree faster with a saw than a cutter could cause of the size of the trees plus alot of moving for a cutter to come from 3 sides and not touch the other tree thats 2 feet away on both sides
We have to be mechanical logging. We dont have much choice. If and I mean if you can find someone to run saw for even 4 days a week he couldn't produce/generate enough money to pay for the cost let alone a profit for the company. I don't know if many people realize what comp cost on a hand cutter but the last I checked here it was $42 a 100. So a $4000 per month wage the company has to pay and additional $1680 in comp. Than the saws and gas. A harvester actually gets to where it's about a wash in cost. And the owner has a lot less headache knowing no one is in danger and he dont have to listen to a whining employee. Maybe that last part is a lot of my own opinion 😂
Finding employees isnt hard. They all want to be a logger! As long as they have a cool company truck, operator a machine they think they're good at with ac and Bluetooth. Work 8 hours no holidays full benefits and a ball cap and boots just dirty enough to look the part.
Last time whiskey sales dropped was in 2008.
https://robbreport.com/food-drink/spirits/jack-daniels-whiskey-sales-dropping-1235441843/
I hope WO holds good cause I have walked some fairly good big stuff the last 2 days if price holds should go this winter , some pretty big RO as well, well for me there big as when the stumps get close to 6 ft I call them big so we will see , Move in the morning to mainly WP and HM cut, Hard maple has to go this winter as potatoes are being planted in the fields this coming year
Hard Maple lumber, while still down from its recent peak, has been advancing steadily.
Rumor on the interwebs is that Christmas Eve is AWP last day operating. Not sure how many mills get snapped up by Baillie or Northwest. AWP did 200 million bdft a year. That's a lot capacity and a lot of shaking out. They also ran the inland port of VA log yard (which took logs for anyone, Northwest ran this before 2018 when they went under and reorganized).
Northwest closed a mill here a few months ago.
They are also one of the largest producer of sawn ties, and the majority source of 7x8 ties. For some odd reason 7x8 worked in their scheme of things and make sense to nobody else.
The reality here has been whenever a mill closes it doesn't get re-opened. Any lumber share is mostly gobbled up by upgrades at other mills. Yeah collectively 250 mmbf is a big number, but divided by 10 or however many mills, a 20-30mmbf mill is chump change for a modern grade mill and if in need of major upgrades no prize asset to pursue.
Stavebuyer to your point Baillie had upgraded the mill in Everett to handle 100k feet a day, all automated now. They'll pull some of the capacity from the northern AWP mills. Still plenty of mills in WV, just seems that's going to hurt a bit in WV, especially the counties that ran schools from timber harvests.
So who uses 7x8 ties? That was a new one to me.
They use 7x8 in main lines just like 7x9. Cheaper so it cost averages the cost per down for the RR. Trouble is they changed the wane allowance to no wane on 7x8s and allow up to an inch on 7x9's so any log that will saw a 4 square edge 7x8 will also make an allowable 7x9 with wane. With a 7x9 at $40 makes zero sense to take a board and the chase the lower priced 7x8 unless your sawing FAS Walnut into crossties. Koppers and Stella will both buy all the 7x8s you care to make.
Well today two fairly senior folks told me they think AWP is inking a deal with a buyer. We'll see.
Might see some whiteboard pulp mill closures early next year, Rock is selling to Smurfit and Smurfit doesn't want them and is trying to flip them (maybe to IP). We'll see but it could be mill closure circus again next year.
There is sure a lot of moving going on , I feel safe for this winter but next summer I'm not so sure
anyone have hardwood prices for Pennsylvania/New York cherry walnut and oak specifically
I started cutting better timber on Monday, nothing great but not bad either and I can say I'm very happy with the log prices I got and I hope they stay there as I got some pretty nice timber to cut soon,
HM = is paying the same as the last 2 years
SM, and lower grade stuff like aspen, beech, hickory is all paying the same as well
RO= is up $50/1000
WO= is the same as last winter which is the highest its ever been here
WP= is paying the same which is very good here
Walnut= I have not cut much of it yet but will be in the new year as one job is all walnut if we do cut it
Started marking a white oak bush tonight and will finish it in the morning , the white oak is in trouble pretty bad in my area , lots and lots of die back and its hitting hard . Lots of people were saving the white oak cause it is worth good money but they will loose out on alot of coin if they donot cut it soon
Another good week for this old bald has been , log prices are holding good to very good for me . But I seen a couple fairly large bush lots that were marked by foresters that closed yesterday and not a single bid on them . That is not a very good sign when the mills will not bid cause they bid on everything when times are good .
What's causing the white oak dieback? Is there a desease in your area?
Yes we have a couple different things killing the white oak quite fast, gypsy moth has been real bad for years but there is other stuff going on
been talking to a few of the higher grade buyers and they all say the same thing , most places are buying just about anything they can get their hands on right now but plan on shutting everything off in the spring and not moving a single log for the whole summer and into next fall
weather sucks up here but did manage to get another 40,000 feet into the mill this week , I guess working last weekend and new years day did help , log prices are very good for me and seem to be making money some how , Not Barge kind of money but no one makes that kind of coin legally but doing ok for a old over the hill fat bald has been that never was . It seems like not many others are posting on log prices lately
Ed, we can't all be Barge but it's good to have something to shoot for😁
40,000 in a week is a lot hand falling/skidding by yourself!
If I still get to it with our late winter, I have an aspen/balsam pulp sale by my place to hand fall and cable skid. I haven't really cut anything like this since I cut our property about 20 years ago. The standard around here, is a 10 cord load of pulp per day, I'm told with a cable machine. I'm not sure if I got what it takes! I know I move way slower than 20 years ago😁
I remember dad cutting that with an old skidder and bucking to 100" and time to load the truck with the tractor and forks, then haul that night to Houlton, Maine. It was big wood to, so fewer sticks to cut. 300 cords of 90' aspen came off 10 acres. All fire origin aspen, so seed, not suckers. Most aspen now is 30-40 years old since the big clearcuts started. But it ain't 20+ inch wood either. Large tooth would be pushing 20" @ 40 though, but probably only 70 feet, not 90, in these parts. And never enough of large tooth. Those 90'ers were about 70 years old. I measured some near the property line when they were done growing in later years and they was pushing 40". I had a couple fellas measuring my yellow birch for their tree book. The birch was 26". I said have a look over there at how big aspen grow in here. One barely alive by then was 40" about 5 steps away. :D The birch was 75' tall, the aspen 90'. I actually measured blow downs with a tape, so it was no estimate error. They were dangerous trees to ever cut by then, some 30 years later, since dad cut in there. Big upswept limbs that looked like a widow maker if you ever saw them. No prize for beauty. :D
Ed, 40k feet in a week is flying by yourself, I'm lucky to get 20k... on good ground! Where I'm at now, 15k is good, pretty rough ground for me. Im very slow though, torn mcl in the knee and a bad back.
Yup, 40k is busting it. But output depends on so many factors that comparing figures become meaningless. Over the last 20 to 25 years (with 1 one-month clearcut exception) all I've been doing is select cuts on private land ... mostly my own. There were days when I took out only 1200 to 1500 feet of white cedar, but it was paying $1K per 1000 bf so I was quite happy with that.
Well Ed does pull out logs that scale over 1000 feet too😁
Bar some are , been averaging right around 40,000 a week for the last while , good timber and nice to cut. After that last bush cutting this much volume is a cake walk . Last bush was so thick it was hard to see the marks on the trees . I got 55,000 or so feet to cut if I can get cutting again on these 3 bushes side by side pretty much and I'm on blow sand , if you got any clay your not working anywhere around here unless you got some way of flying the trees or logs to pavement so the log trucks can load
Now if I could get up around 100,000 feet a week of high grade walnut then maybe just maybe I could sit at the same table as Barge without him looking down on me to bad but that is a Big Maybe , this stuff is around 500 ft per tree average so 20 trees a day gives you your 10,000 feet and it seems I can only get about 4 days a week with this crazy weather , I donot mind cutting in the rain but this close to freezing and the chance of 2 or 4 feet of snow coming at any point I just cut when I can skid
We all know who's making money, you don't have to play it off 😆. Im going to show such a loss from last year I need to start an OnlyFans page here soon.
Barge, you do not see any Tigercat skidders in my bush and we all know you got to have coin to drive and own a Tigercat , I did cut 1 walnut last week. Nothing great just a corner tree on edge of field so short and had limbs but gave me $3 a ft for butt log and $2.3 a ft for the other logs so just got just under $1500 for that tree , nothing great but I'm happy for that as it was just a lower grade tree , Got 4 more to cut here in the next day or 2 , Most of stuff today was hard maple
Quote from: SwampDonkey on January 13, 2024, 03:51:38 AM
I remember dad cutting that with an old skidder and bucking to 100" and time to load the truck with the tractor and forks, then haul that night to Houlton, Maine. It was big wood to, so fewer sticks to cut. 300 cords of 90' aspen came off 10 acres. All fire origin aspen, so seed, not suckers. Most aspen now is 30-40 years old since the big clearcuts started. But it ain't 20+ inch wood either. Large tooth would be pushing 20" @ 40 though, but probably only 70 feet, not 90, in these parts. And never enough of large tooth. Those 90'ers were about 70 years old. I measured some near the property line when they were done growing in later years and they was pushing 40". I had a couple fellas measuring my yellow birch for their tree book. The birch was 26". I said have a look over there at how big aspen grow in here. One barely alive by then was 40" about 5 steps away. :D The birch was 75' tall, the aspen 90'. I actually measured blow downs with a tape, so it was no estimate error. They were dangerous trees to ever cut by then, some 30 years later, since dad cut in there. Big upswept limbs that looked like a widow maker if you ever saw them. No prize for beauty. :D
SwampDonkey, reading that post of yours brings such a smile to my face remembering my grandpa. Sounds a lot like his "back 40" he was always saving for a rainy day. Giant big tooth that would yield 9 or more 100" sticks depending how many of the crown limbs would yield a stick or 2.
Grandpa had it cruised when considering getting into tax advantage forest crop assessment, the forester said it should have been logged off 25-30 yrs earlier. He got away from that when they pushed for a large scale quick clear cut from the professional's that far exceeded what we could do ourselves. Just a old front distributor 47 ford 8N tractor and home made skid plate....a truckload a day sounds exhausting to me.... Haha
When I was younger we would hand peel bark in the spring and let them dry until autumn. That would help our ford 8N skidder out losing some moisture. Towards the end, the specialty mill closed so we were green cutting pulp and bolts and that slowed production down and was immensely harder on our poor tired skidder. Funny that we always seemed to go after the stuff furthest from the landings and kept the close stuff for a quick easy buck if needed.
Grandpas been gone a few years now and it's been even a few yrs longer since we cut for production, but there's still a few acres left of that old growth stuff in there that we didn't get to and the wind hasn't toppled yet. I have a few lined up for my Woodmizer next spring. Your post just brought a nice warm thought to this cabin fever suffering semi pro :)
Yeah. I have a little grove of large tooth, they kind of grow in a circular plot. I would imagine the original tree or two grew there and they suckered off the roots. But anyway, some of them are all bear clawed where they will climb up them things. No idea why a bear wants to climb an aspen. I've seen art or paintings of cub bears up aspen trees (or white birch, some mislabeled as birch that are aspen). As a matter of fact I've seen 3 bear cubs climb aspen for safety. We saw them when rock picking the field and momma bear must have told them to take to the trees. For the first time in all the years I've walked those woods, I found a new bear den. Not on my land, but just beside the boundary line with my cousin. I keep the line cleaned out, it used that as a path. Also, I keep an old skid path open that they have also used. I have a lot of bears that roam my land. More so when the fields up there have corn. There is a local bear hunter guide that has always taken 2 or 3 bears out of there every year in the past. I don't think he is doing that much now for health reasons. I see him every fall when I'm cutting firewood, he stops and chats a little now and again.
Everything is holding steady here for me , prices are good but I think cause the winter for most has been fairly poor the mill is not getting the amount of logs it would normally , I know they sure would take 2 or 3 million feet of good logs in a heart beat so maybe they will have to talk to Barge about getting the logs from him
down anywhere from 1 to 8 percent across the board in Texas.
A few bright spots in pricing include Hard Maple, Walnut, and White Oak uppers. Sounds typical for mid winter. What's not typical is US Hardwood production in the 4th QTR of 2023 set an all-time low record.
Locally, a 3rd generation grade mill is closing the doors for good at the end of the month. Mixed wood lumber such as beech, soft maple, gum, and sycamore no longer generate offers at any price point.
The industry is dying.
First went the small dairy farms. Next went the tobacco farms followed by the small town car and equipment dealers. Only small business left are one day bath remodelers.
You have held on a lot longer than we have up here. In 1980 when I started playing with a sawmill a salesman would stop by as I was on his route. He showed me how to taper the log and sold me an inserted tooth saw. Up in Mass. there was Mill supply [Chase] that specialized in sawmills. There where sawmills in all directions from me. Today there is one sawmill shop in N.H. and no fixed traditional mills within a hundred miles I am aware of. The last farm that milked cows , in this town, sold out about i5 years ago. There are a few that still do hay or raise beef to stay in the ag. district. Gone also are the auctions of both farms and sawmills. I guess the bright side is the resources , undisturbed or wasted , still exist.
Quote from: stavebuyer on January 23, 2024, 02:48:13 AM
A few bright spots in pricing include Hard Maple, Walnut, and White Oak uppers. Sounds typical for mid winter. What's not typical is US Hardwood production in the 4th QTR of 2023 set an all-time low record.
Locally, a 3rd generation grade mill is closing the doors for good at the end of the month. Mixed wood lumber such as beech, soft maple, gum, and sycamore no longer generate offers at any price point.
The industry is dying.
First went the small dairy farms. Next went the tobacco farms followed by the small town car and equipment dealers. Only small business left are one day bath remodelers.
The industry is in the shatter and it is because of substitutions. I was meeting with NFP COO last week and we were discussing, vinyl everywhere in homes, sawdust/glue moldings, concrete and steel. He goes to green building events and at the biggest national convention only 2 hardwood companies there out of a thousand exhibitors. Crazy. Hardwood industry has themselves to blame I guess. He buys from very high end mills and when he'd meet owners he'd ask what were the goals for the coming year and he'd hear things like put money into 401k, sell fence boards for cash, etc etc.
401k... I know the market keeps hitting all time highs but if you buy a politician you still get better returns and sometimes they are surprisingly affordable :-X
Quote from: mudfarmer on January 23, 2024, 07:41:37 PM
401k... I know the market keeps hitting all time highs but if you buy a politician you still get better returns and sometimes they are surprisingly affordable :-X
That particular mill is now closed. I looked at it, never seen such depreciated sawmill equipment, everything very old. Rolling stock was all newish, mill was ...old.
starting the white oak job today , see how they turn out
So far the white oak has paid very very very well , just the sawlogs are very good without the veneer
Not as good as Barge when he is cutting spruce of aspen but close
Quote from: ehp on February 04, 2024, 09:12:31 AMSo far the white oak has paid very very very well , just the sawlogs are very good without the veneer
Yeah. for right now, white oak is flying here too.
White oak is the new walnut thanks to the pressure that stave has put on veneer.
We will see later today on how the Great White Oak log Fairy liked or does not like this stuff, I got 1 load in that I know the scale and value and highest I have ever seen , It will not be as high as you guys in the USA cause of trucking cost but still even sawlogs went up $500/1000 in the last month , Only got a few left to cut then have to figure out whats next, I have that small walnut job if we get to much rain today and tomorrow
I am getting all sorts of calls for White Oak. We do not have WO in my part of the country. I finally get some walnut at a decent price and decent quality and no one wants that anymore. I guess I'll keep filling the shop and my kids can sell all the wood.
The veneer glue up shops that i called to find out who the slice suppliers are all had a unamimous answer to my questionaire.. business is booming and they cannot get enough white oak slices or rift lumber.
If you have it, lay it out nice, take pictures and let facebook know. The industry players will find you and cover transport if you can load a semi on site.
We'd never see big prices here. It's impossible when you compete with government pricing. Even outsiders only bump the price a little to entice. Most of the big stuff is gone now anyway. Gonna have to manage the woods for hardwood logs if you want log prices and that is no guarantee unless we get away from crown licenses being pretty much the exclusive buyers.
So log prices are very good here with good scale , mill has went to a single shift cause not enough logs coming in and with breakup around the corner they need logs, they are down about 2.5 to 3 million feet of good logs in the yard for this time of year
Well I'm going to go from cutting OK timber to most likely cutting what I call junk , one job is mainly beech , other job is smaller red oak like 20 inch or so DBH, I got a small clear cut to do and small walnut job, its small stuff to
I hope I get to cut hardwood that big smiley_smug01
Beech over this way is all diseased and rotten. Used to be able to cut firewood out of it. I was on a lot about 15 years ago doing a cruise. Someone over time had cut all the rock maple out of it and left the beech. It wasn't even stove wood worthy, rotten junk barely alive. It's now 50 acres of potato field. Our hardwoods here never had hardly a stick of beech, was mostly sugar maple, white ash, scattered yellow birch, and some basswood and butternut. And we had some cedar places to. Funny how sugar maple when it's cut around here comes back to aspen, ash, red maple and fir mostly. No idea why red maple takes over, the old woods didn't have much at all. The cedar does regenerate good here, no deer of any significance, never was actually. This time of year not a deer track on the farm.
Now put it on the ground with the harvester and I'll really be impressed :wink_2:
Bar, cut a few today that at 16 ft the serco 1050 was full of it bottom to lift and it took a bit get get over the stakes , would take a pretty good loader on a forward to lift most of this stuff
I did flop a maple for the forester that was against his shop last friday , I never measured it but he said 84 inches across and I missed his shop , the 500i running 36 inch with skip tooth and very deep notch but it went as planned , do not think the shop would of liked that tree if it went the wrong way
Yeah we have to buck those at 10' and paint them before the harvester bucks them because they don't stay in the head.
Since this is log prices- the nice butts are $800/thousand, $700 for prime logs that are not butt, then down a bit fast from there. Log prices are not great...not stopping work, not great. Trucking is an issue. Stave buyers have pulled back trucking radius for now so we have to send them. Ohio stave prices 30% higher than here in VA. Stupid crazy difference.
I wish I had ohio log prices locally. Chestnut oak is $500/thousand more in Ohio than we can get locally. My trucking bill is high!
Log prices are pretty much the highest I have seen , $5/ft for good white oak, $6.80/ft average on hard maple , $8.70/ft average on walnut and that was not very good walnut and thats USA coin, ya I know most of you guys blow that right out of the water but I live on the other side of the border so moving logs cost lots here and the good logs go for long truck rides across the border. Sawlog prices are still going up as well and I'm thinking about 1 more month then it will crash some
Only thing that is not good is at these prices it will be fairly hard to buy 100 acre plus bush lots unless your Rich like Barge , NW, Bar, and Jeff, $100,000 does not go very far these days buying bush , $500,000 goes further but thats a big chance , 100 acres went a couple weeks ago for just over $200,000 here
A veneer buyer told me a few weeks ago that top white oak is bringing $6-7/ft when multiple buyers know theyre having a showdown for it.
Cruise the timber. Better than just relying on what the last 5 lots ran/acre. Cuts back on the risk a lot. 100 acres doesn't take very long to cruise. A lot with the same species up here can run 20 cords/acre on one lot, the next could be 36 cord/acre. I've seen maple ground close to 40 cord/acre, also seen lots more that hover around 24. Guess work is kinda seat of the pants. I'd do my own, I don't care if someone feels insulted that I did. In the end it's my money.
That's the first I've heard it being so high. Mills act like they're starving. Timber bids are still low compared to two years ago. Some jobs aren't being cut.
Ed, I have two sales on the books. One was $650, the other around $3500😁
The above prices are from Lachute, Quebec this week. Multiply the prices by .75 to get USD.
Since 2022 the price of (prime) white ash has gone up $350; poplar has dropped $150; yellow birch is up $200; maple is up $300
Im on very light color sand so our wood is white in color and its about a 40 mile by 60 mile area so our wood does being better log prices than the rest up here , only problem is the mill cannot mix our wood with wood off clay or rock ground , the color is night and day ,
Those log prices do not work at all here ,
If the timber sale is not good timber there will be zero bidders here, lots of sales here have had zero bids . If its good timber then it gets 4 to 6 bids but most of them are the bigger guys cause not to many smaller guys can lay out that much coin once you win the bid and you may not get to cut it for a year or so , I get a fair number of jobs handed to me but in lower grade stuff that does not pay real well but the land owner still thinks he should get roughly 60% of the timber value for himself which would be a complete lost to whom ever logs it , logging cost and trucking cost is to high and cutting these low value timber jobs cost you money
No bid sales usually run their course for various reasons and periods of low timber demand. They then need to be negotiated at the minimum appraisal value or not sold and taken off the market for proposed sale at another time after reevaluation.
Had another good talk with log buyer yesterday I just told him my thoughts and he agreed , If you donot think about what your doing it's not going to work out very good for you in the long run, If your lucky or smart and have the material that the mills need you should be in good shape cause the mill then needs you but if your just cutting lower grade pallet stuff here your in trouble
Well I actually liked your positive post or good log prices. Back to doom and gloom I guess 😂
Actually our pallet wood is moving well. Some mills are quit low inventory. Not saying price is great on anything but moving easy. That's the biggest battle.
Kodiakmac, I'm trying to wrap my head around the numbers you posted. Am i reading it right, that red oak is higher than white oak?
Pallet is a big market for mechanical crews around here. Savanna Pallet is a big pallet mill in our area, with two mills. They buy a lot of hardwood, and enough softwood to compete with the big Potlatch stud mill. Savanna is where most hardwood logs go, whether pallet or grade logs because our grade log market is pretty limited. The management isn't stupid and they pull all the grade off in their mills and market that.
The quality of our hardwood is such that this model just works for everyone. The trucking to get grade logs to a market is high enough that most loggers don't feel it is worth the trouble of separate sorts and trucking.
Some independent loggers here do the same. Mills will pay more standing than they will to a logger for gate wood. Then complain when it's all going to Amish.
I've never understood the big mill philosophy on wood prices. They will be at the timber sale bidding up massive tracts of timber, for prices way in excess of gate price. The reason being, they need to guarantee wood supply. My thinking is, if they weren't always trying to pay rock bottom prices to the loggers, they would have their guaranteed supply.
FJ, the log prices I have gotten this winter or whatever you want to call this weather has been pretty much the best ever for me , I'm getting pretty much veneer prices for saw logs so I cannot complain about that , not going to say for much veneer I have sold but lets just say more than a log or 2 as well . Mill seems quite happy with the logs that I'm sending in and what I'm doing even thou I'm a old single guy doing the work . , Things are going to change and I think for the better as far as loggers around here cause there are not many of us but a few of the younger ones are in pretty big trouble money wise so that will just free up more bush for the guys left . Only time will tell
Quote from: customsawyer on February 21, 2024, 07:28:44 PMKodiakmac, I'm trying to wrap my head around the numbers you posted. Am i reading it right, that red oak is higher than white oak?
Yup. There are some head-scratchers on that list!
Quote from: barbender on February 21, 2024, 09:02:03 PMI've never understood the big mill philosophy on wood prices. .
Same way of thinking by food processors. It's a racket they all know well.
Stumpage sales sounds kinda like grain futures.
Yesterday i drove by the stave mill, which doubled their production capacity from last year. And also doubled the land area used to store logs.. theyre sucking a tremendous amount of WO away from the veneer market and making them pay dearly to get these logs. I now know a few veneer buyers a that shop that stave mill for logs. Stave guy does real good flippin them to slicer market.
We will extinct WO around here soon enough at this rate.
That's actually a true issue. I don't remember all the details but it was discussed in our annual forestry education class. Never was good at listening in school 😆
Probably won't extinct white oak, but it will drop the diameter classes a bunch. Like we went from spruce saw logs and veneer to a stud wood model. Lots of sticks with live edged corners there in the pile of lumber. :D
Quote from: barbender on February 21, 2024, 09:02:03 PMI've never understood the big mill philosophy on wood prices. They will be at the timber sale bidding up massive tracts of timber, for prices way in excess of gate price. The reason being, they need to guarantee wood supply. My thinking is, if they weren't always trying to pay rock bottom prices to the loggers, they would have their guaranteed supply.
Exactly!! The mills have been doing that here for a long time. What they buy, and add a cut bill, is 50% higher than gate logs.
Most sales here are auctions, with mills buying 95% of the timber. We have one mill here that doesn't as much anyway, and I appreciate that, not competing with the logger. And they always have good logs, and plenty of them.
There's a sale next weekend that I'm actually looking at today. A lot of white oak is in it, we'll see what it brings.
Im exagerating a bit about extincting white oak as a species.. the reality is already prettt much here, and its that we highgraded any walnut first, and now all the fat white oak that can make plywhood or barrels isnt in the forest because its in the parking lots of mills. Whats left in the woods is there cuz it cant make a barrel. Consecutive diameter limit harvesting takes all the fast growers and keeps all the 90 yr old mossy 8 inch spindles standing, which never get better or bigger. They fall over to be replaced by some other shade tolerant or just vines and ivy.
Then the forest comes out of production and goes to subdivision. The ultimate cha-ching.
Anyone with young fast growing tall clear straight white oak should be releasing the heck out of it and protecting it like a prize. Alcohol consumption is never going away and doesnt have some other undiscovered supply of raw materials to choose from. Nor will another species or a plastic ever replace the white oak barrel. It will become a name your price situation for those who hold the right timber in the next generation.
It wont be easy, you cant harvest a 28" veneer without not harvesting it as a 16, 18, 20, 24, 26. This generations inflation problem is causing a mass harvest thatll lead to an endangered species in that log class. Making them almost priceless.
Maybe WO plantations will become a thing. I have seen row planted walnut a few times but not WO.
Just because a sawmill log yard has certain species of logs doesn't mean they are sawing them. And they will buy unwanted logs from their regular suppliers to keep the parade going. On the white oak demand, that makes it almost impossible for me to get any length of low grade for trailer planks. I substitute locust but with the black holes and worse lucky to get 12 foot.
The White Oak extinction real here too. A neighbor asked me to do some salvage work around a clear cut they had done, blowdowns and such. It had been nearly 100 AC of post War of Northern Aggression White Oak. The farm has been in the family that long and it was open during the war and WO when they harvested it. The dirt was a time capsule, absolutely amazing. It was replanted with subsidized SYP. My guess is that ground will likely never grow WO again.
Let's see if this works. I knew I heard right in class. 🤦�♂️ 36 years old and still have to go to school once a year.
https://mucc.org/white-oak-initiative-the-treemendous-importance-of-white-oak/
Lots of pressures on WO for sure.
Up here it's been directed at maple, no scarcity of trees, but scarcity of nice logs and stand conversions to something else, whether that be aspen fir or softwood plantation. I was told by the mill I was thinning for last year they prefer a decent looking aspen over red maple from clumps. Reason being most red maple clumps tend to take the form of apple trees. There's a few decent ones, but no need in leaving crooked maples. Sugar maple does not sucker much unless young. Where as red maple will sucker at any age. A lot of them maples in the past had to be left to fill post assessment criteria. They wanted less than 60% aspen, it was easiest to just cut them down. And to be quite honest, I never saw an aspen dominated site that emerged from a clearcut to be very healthy in these parts. I can show anyone where it is dying off where it should grow to be at least twice as old before falling down.
No WO here but after the past few years of high maple log prices and all the industrial syrup operations going in it is going to be a rare person that has nice veneer sugar maple anywhere around here in 10yrs.
Quote from: mike_belben on February 23, 2024, 10:21:09 AMIm exagerating a bit about extincting white oak as a species.. the reality is already prettt much here, and its that we highgraded any walnut first, and now all the fat white oak that can make plywhood or barrels isnt in the forest because its in the parking lots of mills. Whats left in the woods is there cuz it cant make a barrel. Consecutive diameter limit harvesting takes all the fast growers and keeps all the 90 yr old mossy 8 inch spindles standing, which never get better or bigger. They fall over to be replaced by some other shade tolerant or just vines and ivy.
Then the forest comes out of production and goes to subdivision. The ultimate cha-ching.
Anyone with young fast growing tall clear straight white oak should be releasing the heck out of it and protecting it like a prize. Alcohol consumption is never going away and doesnt have some other undiscovered supply of raw materials to choose from. Nor will another species or a plastic ever replace the white oak barrel. It will become a name your price situation for those who hold the right timber in the next generation.
It wont be easy, you cant harvest a 28" veneer without not harvesting it as a 16, 18, 20, 24, 26. This generations inflation problem is causing a mass harvest thatll lead to an endangered species in that log class. Making them almost priceless.
Maybe WO plantations will become a thing. I have seen row planted walnut a few times but not WO.
I think you've about got it nailed there Mike. TN in particular has seen a dramatic decline in WO growing stocks. It's down 36% and as you say that means that the big stuff is gone and what big is left is likely to be junk passed up in 5 prior harvest (hollow, scared, full of cat faces). If a real national timber inventory took place that actually graded the quality of WO and ignored parcels and areas that are not harvestable (powerlines, suburb homeowner protected areas, wetlands, fences, etc) then we would see an inventory pointing to the dearth of merchantable WO that we see on the ground. The national surveys do not take this into account and the survey plots are not statistically oriented to show actual merchantable timber.
Most of the good WO we see is in suburbs or too close to homes to be harvestable.
Last little white oak bush I only cut 72 white oak, the other 28 trees were mainly white pine , few cherry and soft maple. That was on 30 plus acres and mainly all white oak , there is a fair amount of white oak here and will be the way the tree bylaw works . There is even enough walnut around that most would not think here , White oak is very high for here but walnut is higher in price
One thing I do see as I think I posted it before is for every tree that gets cut here 3 or 4 die of old age or disease , the new tree bylaw has new rules that a certain number of big trees has to be left per basal area and were not talking like 18 inch DBH , its alot bigger than that , When I walk threw a bush and I start seeing quite a few 40 plus inch oak left or none of those marked thats a problem cause they will not live to the next harvest and with those big trees growing nothing will grow under or around their area , take some of them out and get the bush growing again
I've got one white oak here. :D It's not burr oak either. But it's only about 40 years old. ffwave So they can definitely survive NB climate. Walnut on the other hand are not as hardy here. But butternut grows like weeds around here. But they have that disease now, so only a matter of time.
What we have of clean WO is tiny and wont be left long enough to get fat. I dont like govt, but a free for all grabs the best and leaves the rest. Ignorant/unable/unconcerned ownership leaves it to nature to sort out. Which it does, with replacement by red maple beech sourwood and black gum.
I am for shelterwood clearcuts in general. No one size fits all but hard to say its not an improvement over current "management" most of the time.
Cull heavy, make sporadic front yard sized clear openings at the minimum wherever you are taking out a prime tree so that its seedlings are stimulated to replace it tall and straight in an even age race. release anything good, and especially target big ugly firewood trees that are really hogging resources and dont shed a mast crop. A big oak that spreads a ton of acorn i will generally keep around for fall fats. Mammals arent fertile without fat.
Our logtrucks often look like theyre hauling some pile of european hardwood. 11 -13" diameter. Why bother?
Abundant natural gas makes the firewood business not work financially, which would naturally police the woods of cull classes a lot better if it did. Most "woods" i see are simply a collection of culls and nothing else at all. 100% culls. We are surrounded by sawmills and desperate people with saws.
To get the white oaks you really need to first check to see if there are any seedling already regenerated in the understory. If so then it is game on in terms of growing the new oak forests and just give them some sun, cut the junk, harvest as you need.
If not then it will require a heavy shelterwood process but you'll want to retain the best genetics, best form, straightest, etc. You are exactly correct in terms of removing the undesirable trees and that includes the blackgum and red maples. Drop them and leave them. White oak bumper crops are irregular and it is really the WO bumper crops that produce the over abundant mast supplies, tricky situation. You have to retain quite a lot of WO to get a new WO forests or you need the WO regeneration to be there. Seedling will stay below knee high for up to 30 years just slowly poking along, getting browsed and regrowing. Just waiting to explode in the sun.
We've got one stand now that looks like it has cabbage growing the oaks are so thick.
My observation has been that any WO above the browse line but under a closed canopy is already split into a multi leader umbrella reaching sideways and twisting around for little patches of sun, that i dont see much future in. I just dozer cull the whole patch so that soil distubance brings up a thicket of all species at once in order to feed the deer and maybe let a few oaks slip by. Oak doesnt seem to be a first choice in cervids if theres a wide variety of brush. Really bushy regen can get more good WO starts above the browse line. I push multiple tops into these patches to make it harder for them to clean it out. Sapplings will come up through the obstruction.
Just drive over the seedling or hit them with some fire or whack them. They will quickly express apical dominance.
have to see how bad this rain is going to be but most likely will go once I see what the ground is like and start cutting this junk beech
I agree with what Mike said about the firewood business being good for the health of the woods. I have a firewood processor to feed and I try to give it a steady diet of cull trees. There seems to be plenty and I can't get em all cut and still feed my family but I do put a dent in em when I'm logging out the good quality trees.
That's all I cut when thinning is junk and trail wood for firewood and corduroy rails. I need to get more light in to, the undergrowth is nil, not even a hazel bush.
I tried to work with a couple new buyers this year because trucking was a big issue. We could not make it work on either end but they were nice guys and hope to do business in the future. Thankfully got hooked up with another good trucker, I want to keep this guy and the one with the lowboy happy for sure :thumbsup:
Would any of y'all venture to guess what white oak will do for the rest of the year?
It will be good, normally would drop in the summer months from heat but it might drop abit but just the same it could easily go up more, your on good ground so your white oak should be fairly close to mine in growth but not in color as I'm on pretty white sand . No one has any good stuff , the veneer mills in the USA are screaming at us to produce more here , if your cutting good stuff news travels fast and they will find you
they should be beating OH Logger door down on his house wanting his stuff , its quite bad , they got the orders to fill but no product to fill the orders
They'll take all I can cut. Sawmill inventory is low around here too. We're in the middle of farm country here and most all woodlots were pastured at one time. So some lots have a decent amount of staining in the wood. But in the right area with a little bit of roll to the ground they get way better. White oak sure don't seem to wanna regenerate though
We got a fair bit of white oak here but to get the right to cut them seems to be harder than most places , lots of it will die here which is a shame
I think white oak prices have achieved a point of being driven not by weather or work ethic but simple scarcity. Theres no more hidden hollars without cel acess holding thousands of acres of it just waiting to be discovered by out of state revenuers.
The regions that grow it best are picked clean. Whoever still has it either doesnt need the money or until recently hasnt had enough volume to get the equipment moved in. But now single trees are worth buying, because finding one is better than none.
I have a veneer buyer coming monday to look at one tree. 2 guys stopped by this morning that are cutting about 2 acres for my neighbor who wants to extend pasture into some junk woods. They brought in a skidder and knuckleboom for nothing but pallet wood at $40/ton. I said how you making any money on that. They said we arent. id told her id push it over and burn it for $125/hr but am busy for a few months. She found 2 guys foolish enough to pay her. If she wants it stumped now its gonna cost 2x as much.
Starting a pole job next week. Been quite a process. They don't typically mark poles anymore since everything went mechanized and the computer lets them know if it qualifies or not so I followed the pole buyer around and hugged a bunch of them trying to see what he was seeing. Thinking I'm on the same page but he's going to come out after I get a load decked and give them a look see and mark some more. These are 100 year old Doug fir and some will be 105-125' so waiting on the truck owner to do a site inspection to see how he wants them decked etc. $1400 segment scale. Got some pics in my gallery cutting one down but can't seem to get it on here. Really have to approach cutting these differently and treat them like eggs
Here's one (blob:https://forestryforum.com/402b97e3-6b83-4376-ab66-8a62ebd9b2c9)
These were cull trees I cut a while back but a good representation of the stand (blob:https://forestryforum.com/feb1ac32-b008-427b-b66d-960e7aa10710)
I should add that these pay about $5-600 per thousand better than the top dollar export markets so worth the trouble
Getting back to the subject of mills buying in front of loggers.. they sold the boundary i was telling you guys about. About 55 acres that had been high graded in the center of it, a lot of beech and hickory left. The way I looked at it I thought there would be 15-17 acres of good timber with a lot of big white oak scattered though it, not much had been cut out of it. The rest, like I said was hickory, beech, hard maple with WO and ash scattered in it. It brought $300k. A mill bought it.
Good log prices keep going higher but that should stop here shortly , veneer buyers are coming from everywhere looking to buy logs but I do not cut great stuff so not looking for me , 3 bushes sold here last week for over $300,000 and not very many trees , one was only 70 trees and went for $326,000 and NO I didnot even look at any of them . With the market the way it is I try to stay $100,000 or less incase she crashes so I'm happy cutting this lesser great stuff and keeping the heat , lights on and everyone belly full of food
Geeezzz! 326,00 for 70 trees??!! Wow, that has never happened in my area. Yall's timber must be worth a lot more than we have. If you cut some decent white oak, could you take a picture of the wood? I would like to see if I can see the difference in the timber..
@ehp Do you know how many feet were in the 70 trees?
That comes out to about 2X per tree more than folks get per acre here....and that's a clear cut.
Before the big crash here around 2005, when things were flying high, some stumpage was going for $2000/acre up here. That was for woodlots 50 acres and more in size not little 10 acre building lots. That is lump sum and was up to the logger to get the most out of his wood. Normal stumpage at the time was around $500-600/acre. The frenzie was about 2 years long. Nothing ever since that came close to that.
Those 70 trees were walnut and some had 800 ft of veneer in them , count on 10 grand a tree but may not get that , I have cut walnut worth that before just not at that amount of trees , white oak here is averaging $5/ft for veneer in USA coin, , I do cut a few veneer each week , I'm old and slow and work by myself and I'm not pushing myself hardly at all
I pay on normal timber that is not white oak, hard maple, walnut or big white pine about $1500 to $3000 per acre on very select cut , On clear cuts that I have done you get some pretty good numbers per acre , 20 to 25 grand per acre is not out of the question and if good timber its more than that
That's amazing
Competition also must be fierce because white oak and walnut grow in a pretty large tract of land. And those in charge are very select in who gets to cut wood. In some places in that tract you are either restricted by what and where you can cut where as other areas are likely high graded or younger wood and nobody cares how it is cut. Where one fetches the bigger money here is figured wood. I've seen $2000 birdseye logs, and only 14" top at 16'. But your not going to find 70 trees on a hundred acres worth that, in good birdseye ground on crown land, possibly 10. On most woodlots here you will find one or none. An ordinary maple log with 16" top, 8' length around here is worth about $40 bucks, as veneer maybe $180 bucks if you're lucky and that's the high end. The big wood is mostly gone now so your into pulpwood. There are very few hardwood saw mills in the area at all. They exist 100% on a crown wood license not off private wood. They could care less if they ever saw a stick of wood off a woodlot.
This is exactly how corporate blueberry growers are here, they get a chunk of crownland or they don't build a blueberry plant. They are not going to be in a position where other growers effect purchase price of those berries.
How is it that so many mills are crying and some are even closing, yet others are able to pay that kind of money for tracts of timber? Most of the big mills in my area are spending big coin on more modern equipment. They are trying to automate as much as they can to minimize the need for hired help. The West Frazier mill in Dudley, GA. spent 250 million a few years back. The whole mill is in a air conditioned building. The only part outside is where they store the logs.
Quote from: customsawyer on March 10, 2024, 06:24:09 AMHow is it that so many mills are crying and some are even closing, yet others are able to pay that kind of money for tracts of timber? Most of the big mills in my area are spending big coin on more modern equipment. They are trying to automate as much as they can to minimize the need for hired help. The West Frazier mill in Dudley, GA. spent 250 million a few years back. The whole mill is in a air conditioned building. The only part outside is where they store the logs.
Management. I knew the owner of the mill down the road from me. He died a few years ago. He and his partner couldn't stop making money. they put in a pellet mill in 2009 when the banks weren't lending with cash on hand. Secured a contract to send bagged horse bedding pellets to Dubai and paid for the mill in 180 days. It runs with 3 people. One in the control room, 1 loading logs in one end and one moving pallets out the other end. Everything else is machinery and robots.
Huber in Easton, Maine have been there over 30 years by now. Have never heard they cry over money or ask for bailouts. The Irvings seem to do pretty well to on family money, no share holders other than family. Sometimes they buy defunct mills and shutter them, but they have grown the land base. In their big softwood sawmills, they installed computer graders 30 years ago. I'm sure they are adding new technology as it comes along. Also Irving helps to develop and improve the technology, they have their tentacles into everything.
Not sure we really discussed it but when AWP shut down they were the 3rd largest hardwood mill company in the USA with most of the capacity and sourcing from WV.
RO and HM pricing really hurt them in the last 2 years.
Thing is our hard maple price is almost as high as it ever was , Been averaging $6.80/ft usa money all winter long on veneer so thats pretty good . I get some butts at $8/ft which is the highest I have ever gotten, remember those logs go for a long truck ride and that drives our price down abit , as far as white oak goes when I cut a tree if its got no limbs,knots or marks its going for veneer so not uncommon to get 30 to 35 feet out of a tree of veneer so that is very good for here and price is as high as ever seen , Sawlog price is also high as ever seen for here
Barge told me when he gets back to making real money logging I can come down and try to see if I can cut some of his big timber . I got one 500i setup running a 36 inch bar set up so Im sure I'm good for a stump over 8 ft in diameter
Think it'll cut this 14 foot dbh tree? :thumbsup:
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/11009/SD_WesternRedCedar.jpg) (https://forestryforum.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=18250)
I have seen bigger , I use to help run a sawmill out west coast , Biggest I seen was 17 ft 6 inches in diameter on the head saw , the carriage was really not built to handle that big so had to use the kickers to hold log as it went threw the head saw , Just lower a kicker as log went by the head saw then put it back up to hold the log until we got a flat spot to hold log steady
There's certainly big wood out there. Saw lots of 8' diameter Sitka's. Not a lot of real big cedar like this one left though. Might be some around Vancouver Is or lower Fraser. Sitka deer are hard on cedar regen. This was way north of there on Haida Gwai Islands. Still grew big tall timber up there. Old growth spruce was 225-250 feet tall around the area I cruised on.
Wow I just looked up the footage on a 17"6' log 16 ft long 38,487 board ft that's crazy to me its hard to imagine ( I could be wrong on the calculations please correct if i am)
I believe that log was 60 ft long , Lots of 40 ft stuff there . Biggest thing was not much big wide boards cut , Hardly much over 2 inch by 10 inch ever cut , We only cut hardwood which was oak that was trucked in maybe 1 or 2 days a year , Mainly all softwood which went to Japan , Some cedar that went to calf. but not a lot of that either . I was head chef and bottle washer ffcheesy, I liked the job but quite demanding as I ended up doing double shift pretty much every day to make sure both shifts had zero problems and I was a guy that ran the planer and filer and mill wright for everything else, if something broke guess who was fixing it . Now back to wood , the softwood was high end stuff , zero junk and Japan paid huge price for it , Cut alot of 3 inch by 4 inch by 24 ft long stuff and was allowed 1 closed bark pocket of 1/16th of a inch , Zero knots or worm holes ,
When I was out there all the yellow cedar of good quality went to Japan, big money. Men got good money making shakes in remote areas from yellow and red cedar. Heli-lifted from woods to shore. Paid by the stacked cubic meter forget the $$/m3 now. I never saw any yellow cedar on the domestic market, all I saw was red cedar. Of course spruce and fir had domestic market. A lot of veneer wood, no limbs for several feet up. Many of the cruised stands of spruce were not cut, DNR would decide to leave them for whatever reason. Cruised lots of yellow cedar. I seen some big stuff that was sampled for growth and yield and left to lay and rot. But yellow cedar is very rot resistant. But much of the yellow cedar was not huge wood, red cedar was way bigger.
Cut some pretty big old growth yellow cedar back in the eighties. It stinks as bad as cotton wood. I thought it was going to china not Japan. Told us they used it for door trim and it had some sort of meaning to them. Same job we were cutting huge yew wood they were hauling it off in dump trucks for the bark as a cancer treatment if I remember correctly
If you do an internet search "yellow cedar exported to Japan" , there's article upon article about exporting yellow cedar to Japan. Search for Chinese export and not much comes up. It's similar to the sacred Hinoki False Cypress, which is highly prized by the Japanese for use in their temples.
Well, it was the eighties. This can't be right but I think I remember the yellow cedar going for $3000 per thousand. At the time our old growth fir was running around $350-400. I'm guessing that was just rumors as we never knew what actual prices were, we just cut it
We had another name for yellow cedar that started with p and has 2 s at the end , not very nice to smell, we cut far more hemlock and I mean pretty much our man tree . Hemlock out there is totally different than here , I find it alot closer to spruce here . As far as price you better times that by at least 3 just for the shorter stuff used to make window frames in Japan , longer stuff was higher than that . When I was out there we never shipped anything I knew of to China , Japan was the main place , some to southern western USA but not alot , maybe a week a year or so . We shipped to Germany which everyone said was the hardest to grade lumber for but it was a fair bit easier than Japan , Japan was quite tough but they paid for that good stuff . Did ship bit to Britain and it was also quite strict but samething , strict rules but paid very well for it . The odd time we shipped just regular lumber to the USA but the problem was we were so use to very strict guide lines it was very hard to drop down to what the USA buyer would take in their orders
Well Barge told me I'm to small minded in my thinking so not really sure why but I bid on a county bush thats to the east of me abit and they phoned this morning telling me they wanted my money but I cannot cut unless dry and after Sep 1st . Not a big huge bush but just over 155 trees with a 800 ft per tree average , yes I know Barge your tigercat can skid that whole bush in one hitch but if I use my old 230A its going to be 1 tree at a time but the skid is very short
BC loggers and MOF foresters where I worked called yellow cedar, yellow cypress. I thought it smelled like peeled parsnip or carrots, not all that bad at all to me.
Chamaecyparis nootkatensis when I went to college, but has been renamed to Callitropsis nootkatensis and that was renamed from Cupressus nootkatensis. They don't know what to call it. :D :D
looks like my average price was up quite a bit this year even with worse logs, will try to remember to dig up the #s and post a comparison
Starting the pole job tomorrow. I don't believe we currently have a better market around here. Markets down a bit and the pole yards are plugged but they're honoring the po agreement. Truck can haul up to 125' logs with a 16 ton loader on it , 105,500 gross.
I think I may go start a small walnut job, nothing great but it is walnut . no worry there is no $10,000 trees on this cut , I did not see many if any that will get $1,000 a tree . I'm sure there are a few and their bigger than they look once I get them to the landing but not a lot of trees and lots of smaller trees
As to yellow cypress, the Caren Range, at the mouth of Clowhom River and NW of Vancouver, British Columbia is home to the oldest yellow cypress specimens in the world, with one specimen found to be 1,834 years old; some specimens may be over 3,000 years old.
That yellow cedar we cut out of Randall Washington was probably pretty old. If I'm remembering correctly the bigger ones were around 5'. I definitely remember the ground was steep and broke up and having to fall one across a deep little draw and praying it would break so I could buck it but it didn't. It was stinky and tough. Had to make a couple shorties to break it down where I could reach it.
Been cutting walnut for a couple days , Nothing great but it is walnut , Sent 3 loads on Thurs and price was ok, I'm happy with it . Got close to 5 more loads to go now , only got I think 15 or so to cut then I'm done
Land owner asked me to count the rings on some of these walnut cause she thinks her Father planted them , turns out most of these walnut planted themselves as most were 44 to 62 years old and her father planted close to 90 years ago Land owner is 84 years old and her dad planted before she was born, There were a few bigger trees which I sure were the ones he planted but they all gotten rotten centers now , Trees grow fast here but die fast as well
Not sure how long walnut live, but butternut doesn't live as long as some aspen. 70-80 years, where aspen can go 150 years. But most aspen here now is suckers and do well to get to 40. The last of my old growth aspen fell over not long ago and where 36-40" at breast height and nearly 100 feet. Fire origin from around 1905. That's a rough date as my grandmother was born in 1900 and the fire happened when she was quite young. I've never seen any old butternut bigger than 30", and very few that size. I remember the woods around here before the big clear cut craze began 40 years ago on woodlots.
I know we are getting a little off topic, but this tree age conversation is interesting to me.
Our little section of woods was pillaged about 20 years ago. The previous owner knew they were going to sell so took what they could and didn't care what they left. Just about anything with value was cut.
This is the first year I've cut anything of any size out of there. I cut a dead standing pignut hickory, 20" bdh & 100ish years old. I also cut a beech with the top blown out that was 22" dbh & 120ish years old.
Part of the property adjacent to ours was planted to mixed hardwoods in around 1988. There max. tree size right now is around 10-12", granted they have not done any thinning which would is greatly needed. They mainly planted white oak, ash, walnut, and hard maple I believe.
In S. West Ohio,..... has the price for veneer grade Walnut fallen?
On walnut, nope. It's getting to be the end of the high end walnut sales though. So, if not selling in the next week or so better wait til October if you can at all manage.
Quote from: Tom K on April 03, 2024, 07:23:47 AMI know we are getting a little off topic, but this tree age conversation is interesting to me.
Our little section of woods was pillaged about 20 years ago. The previous owner knew they were going to sell so took what they could and didn't care what they left. Just about anything with value was cut.
This is the first year I've cut anything of any size out of there. I cut a dead standing pignut hickory, 20" bdh & 100ish years old. I also cut a beech with the top blown out that was 22" dbh & 120ish years old.
Part of the property adjacent to ours was planted to mixed hardwoods in around 1988. There max. tree size right now is around 10-12", granted they have not done any thinning which would is greatly needed. They mainly planted white oak, ash, walnut, and hard maple I believe.
your tree spacing was driving the DBH, hardwoods need wide spacing to achieve optimal DBH. Beech is funny because it grows as a shade tolerant tree under fully mature hardwoods, and then explodes into fast growth when the dominant canopy dies out.
too much nowadays if you ask me.
Quote from: Freedy201 on April 05, 2024, 04:26:12 PMtoo much nowadays if you ask me.
I guess you are a buyer? ffcheesy
Have not cut a walnut sense Monday morning cause of the clay and raining everyday but did send 8 loads total and it sold pretty well , Everything is showing prices are going to drop here soon and that includes white oak
Finished yesterday as it finally got dry enough to skid he rest of the walnut , am suppose to do another small walnut cut here . So what is everyone else been hearing to do with the summer logging ? Mills here donot want much or any lower grade logs like pallet .
HM veneer price for me has been very good this winter well everything veneer has been good , WO has been way better than I could ever think , they took stuff a year ago I could not sell for a number 1 sawlog
Well , just finished 3 1/2 days of rain and its to start again tomorrow , you need a boat pretty much around here right now , it is very wet but the grass and lavf growth is not started so that will suck up a fair bit of water
can anyone fill me in on Aspen pricing? How fast does it grow? Will a 20 year old Aspen be worth anything other than pulp?
Aspen here right now is pretty much a dirty word , It's on the very low end on log pricing and not many mills want it which I donot understand as most is made into trim which they get paid very good money for so they are making good coin on it . As far as logs it's pretty much same rules as other logs but the mill does like 10 ft 6inch or 16 ft 6 inch for length. It grows fast here but so does everything else and we donot have a pulp market here at all, the biggest problem is we get from $250 to $400/1000 for it at the mill for logs , the land owner thinks its worth $165/1000 standing then you got to cut ,skid, truck to their mill so you loose money cutting it . Time you figure out your logging cost plus the rest you make more money walking past it which I do alot
About the same here, one small steady buyer with very low pricing. I pushed a bunch of it up into a pile to rot on last lot clearing job because it didn't pencil out to haul. Probably only the chip crews will cut much of it in this neck of the woods.
I have said it before with logging cost this high and land owners wanting so much for their standing timber that the about breaking point is $700/1000 so any timber worth less than that you loose money cutting it and until things change that will be the outcome , there is getting fewer loggers in my area every month cause most cannot make any coin at the job , most cannot add 2 +2 and come up with the correct answer so once they break something huge on their equipment or not pay for the timber their logging days are numbered , If I'm going to go log knowing I'm going to loose coin I will sit at home and fight with the dog on what we watch on TV and not wear my equipment out . Logging these days you need to think and plan every move out or its not going to end up good for you
I burn aspen here for firewood, I don't sell pulp. Used to be a veneer market, but wasn't much more money than pulpwood. They make berry boxes here from aspen. I don't know of any other berry market using aspen boxes. Cheap and no end in site. They cut aspen up here every 30-40 years. It can grow up to 40" dbh here, but that's 90 years. You won't get the suckered aspen living that long or growing that big in these parts. That's why it's cut every 30 years or so. Aspen after a fire grows bigger and older around here.
If we didn't have aspen we wouldn't have a timber industry in northern MN. OSB, paper, and cellulosic fiber all use aspen for their main feed stock in our mills, and a lot of it goes for pallet production too.
Aspen plywood too.
It's just like red pine that does not make poles , around here we can hardly cut it as its pays very low but 400 miles away they pay not to bad for it but the trucking will kill you
And right now here there is no pallet market , they cannot sell the low grade lumber
march 2023 white ash pallet $300/mbf
march 2024 white ash pallet $200/mbf
prime, select and #2 all went the other direction :thumbsup:
Where do the pallets come from? Imported? With all the moving of goods, southern Ontario should have high demand for pallets. In my neck of the woods, bagged or box potatoes are stacked on pallets. And the truckers are real fussy on them, but they don't mind leaving their broken ones and take the good ones from ya without paying for them. I couldn't count how many broken ones that was left that we had to replace with brand new ones. The Canadian truckers would make you stack aside their new ones, then put back on the truck. Never ran into that with American truckers. What was the point of hauling empty pallets around? ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy
One of my friends had a pallet making place and closed the doors as zero money to be made making pallets , At $300/1000 there is no way in this country you can make money making pallets and for real sure no logging crews can make money at $300/1000 cutting pallet timber , You have to pay for the standing timber, cut, skid , buck up and pile then truck to the mill and remember everything is falling by hand and skidded by smaller cable skidders , if your in a planted red pine or scotch pine place you can use machines to do the work but not out in the hardwoods. I watch very close on what jobs I take , I turned down 3 jobs just yesterday cause there was no way to make money , the timber standing price was just way to high and I'm to old to work loosing money on every tree . Here pretty much most jobs are on private ground and the gotv does not own or run the mills
Give me walnut, real white oak, big white pine and good hard maple am I'm happy
We've never cut pallet wood here, never knew of anyone who did. No pallet plants here, but there was or is one just across the border in Maine. I assume mills here always get lower grade among the good stuff. They certainly get high end figured stuff. There are lots of surprises once a log is opened up. Philosophy behind forestry in the province was always best end use, everything is marketable. But these days with cost through the roof, it's hard to justify cutting wood for a lot of markets. The wheels are spinning but the margins are thin. I'd never cut wood for pulpwood, I'd rather burn it. ffwave
Our market is kind of inverted. Rather than having grade hardwood mills that produce pallet lumber as a byproduct, we have a pallet producer that produces grade hardwood lumber as a byproduct.
This is mostly due to the fact that we have limited good quality hardwoods. It is out there, but not on a scale to support any large hardwood mills. So the pallet mill gets a lot of high quality logs, because they are the only player.
Our hardwood markets are pulp, firewood and pallet and the economics are such that is definitely worth sorting for pallet.
It's bad enough here that the mill has lifts of low grade lumber out at the head office for sale to people driving down the road , You can buy a whole lift for $50 to $75 depending on the lift and there all over a 1000 ft of lumber
Sounds like an opportunity for someone to start a small custom hw floor biz maybe?? Something else for you to do when it is raining ffcheesy
Quote from: ehp on April 16, 2024, 06:27:38 PMIt's bad enough here that the mill has lifts of low grade lumber out at the head office for sale to people driving down the road , You can buy a whole lift for $50 to $75 depending on the lift and there all over a 1000 ft of lumber
If you're referring to who I think you are, than I picked up 4 lifts from there and it cost me $500 delivered to my shop. 1 was nothing but thins (<1/2") but the rest were mixed hardwood and about 1/2 a lift of spruce.
Nope , No spruce at this mill I donot believe ever
and 1 inch thick hardwood , I think they sold pretty much everything in a very short time .
The trucking alone would cost over half that to get to Woodstock
I see a fair bit of pallets between peanut and grain products that come into the farm for chicken and pig food, the quality of pallets has gone way, way, down over the past year or so. To the point they are basically single use and then you need to fix them to reuse.