Log prices

[Hogdaddy]

There's a place at somerset that buys beech for toothpicks. Last I heard, the logs had to be nearly veener quailty, 14" and up, they were paying .80-1.00 a year ago. I heard that from the log buyer, but i've never sold any logs to them. About 80 miles east of where I'm at.

[OH logger]

I used to sell real good beech for rotary veneer. That was a good deal and it was around for awhile but about a year or two ago they lost that order. Back to the pallet mill they go!! 👎

[nativewolf]

Somebody is still peeling beech for veneer, they still sell it.  I should look into that myself.

[Kodiakmac]

" ... but those are state contracts where you need to be certified to even touch a tree.  They register your chainsaw into a database as well as you tree felling cert.  What happen to the days where you didn't need all that crap, most guys don't touch bids but money could be good.. tough choice."

We've had this kind of silliness here for some time.   About fifteen years ago the County wanted some of their spruce/pine plantations thinned and I had looked into it.  They wanted skidders steam-cleaned prior to entry, more certifications than I ever knew existed, and a ridiculous amount of administrative reporting.

So I quickly stroked that off my list.  Judging by the looks of their plantations, so did every other logger.

[mike_belben]

hardwood pallet logs in northern middle TN are paying $60/ton and due to drop next week. which is surprising given its deer season. we have had a good fall weather wise.

[mike_belben]

I just checked some scribble notes.  I guess it was 2018. i hauled 1 load of pulp that paid $19/ton and said to heck with that.  At the time pallet was way more stringent and paid less ao i never went to the pallet mill.  Just called the one i sold pulp to and theyre up to $30/ton and like i said pallet mill is at $60.  I bet pallet was like $12/ton back then so look at the change.. Wow.  West rock, rocktenn, and bowater were between $27-32/t back then based on distance but i couldnt ebter their yard with a 2 ton and under 1million truck policy.  

The calc says red oak is 5.7T per cord so thats about $340 a cord.  Three 16inch face cords makes a true cord and brings $150 around here after you break your butt splitting it.  


I guess deer season can wait.  

[PoginyHill]

Somebody is still peeling beech for veneer, they still sell it.  I should look into that myself.

No producers in the US or Canada that I'm aware of - at least significant volumes. European beech (may be referred to as steamed beech) is still a thing in veneer, but - obviously - comes from Europe. I have some drawer sides made from European beech plywood.

[mike_belben]

Can someone check my math on this please? $60/ton will come out around $500/mbf using doyle scale on red oak.. No?   

[Kodiakmac]

...  Three 16inch face cords makes a true cord and brings $150 around here after you break your butt splitting it.  


I guess deer season can wait.  

$85 CDN ($67 USD) per face cord in these parts.  Like my brother says, "You're either getting paid for your wood, or you're being paid for your labour, but you're bloody well not being paid for both."
So I figure heck, I'm slowly going broke every day I work in the bush,  so I may as well go deer hunting.and slow down the process.

[SwampDonkey]

The calc says red oak is 5.7T per cord so thats about $340 a cord.  Three 16inch face cords makes a true cord and brings $150 around here after you break your butt splitting it.  

Check that Mike, should be around 2.8 ton per cord. I've bought a few firewood logs on tonnage in the past. Local standard cord of hard maple here is 2.5 green metric tonne for 128 cu feet of wood and air spaces (Forest Products Marketing Board). 2.5 GMT = 2.74 green ton, oak is a little heavier when green.

[mike_belben]

youre right... phew, glad you caught me swampdonkey.  the toolbox said a cord is 5700 lbs and in my rush i glanced at it and punched in 5.7T, forgetting to divide it in half.  

ive been meaning to open up a few segments.. waffling on it in reluctance really, and went out and did it.  for a few minutes it hurt losing all those trees i thinned around, but every one that came down showed it was poor, slow growing, stained or doaty, etc.  every okayish looking tree i had previously saved has been released yet showed no signs of extra growth in the recent rings. when the tops hit the ground they were all rougher than i thought.  i made up my mind that no matter what the price, i could have an apple orchard someday or a bunch of dying oaks forever, and im glad i did it.  its really a good thing i got the price wrong because that was the push the helped me say today is the day, just do it.   with pulp and pallet at a peak i can feel like a finally nailed the timing on something in my life.  4 acres will grow a lot more tomatoes than timbers, and a lot faster to boot.

$170 a cord and no labor is absolutely perfect to me!  

[stavebuyer]

Averages obviously vary; but a good rule of thumb on upland oak/hickory type forest is 200'/acre/year(Doyle) is an average growth rate. I have some north slope drains heavy to poplar and red oak doing 600-800' but that is an exceptional site index and also the reason excellent timber sites are often farmed. It just doesn't pay as much to grow hardwood timber as other crops on sites where you have options.

[mike_belben]

 diameter limit cuts from 1962 until subdivision in 95 converted all these parcels to the slowest growers that never got into the cut class.  at a glance it took 20 years to gain 1.5" diameter on what i cut today. 

a few weeks ago i discovered a satelite GPS app from Uc davis that puts the usda soil survey overlay on your parcel and it turns out i have 1.5 or maybe 2 acres of "all areas prime farmland" on this parcel, and about the same on the other.  this class makes up a very small portion of my region overall.  there are only specs of it on the high ground, as the slopes seems to wash it off.  

counting my blessings. 

[stavebuyer]

It can also be a little misleading to do ring counts on what amounts to a left behind mid-story. Even the best of that won't respond or grow at the rate of trees that were never suppressed. My degree is from the school of hard knocks and actually cutting 10's of thousands of trees and observing. Knowing what is inside the tree before it is cut is a valuable skillset.

[mike_belben]

im getting better at it little by little but have a long way to go. 

[SwampDonkey]

Some species do respond well to a release, and can be age dependent as well. 50 year old suppressed stunted balsam fir is junk even if it picked up growth in full sun, and it will. The damage is already well underway in the stem. Red spruce on the other hand, after about 3 years will grow like the dickens and be chalk white. (not saying they all are chalk white). But it has a very long life span, over 400 years, where as fir is pretty much dead in 90, further south of here, 50 if you're lucky. You can find old 'overstory removal' jobs around here where the fir is 50 years old underneath and 10 feet tall and the aspen is 30 years old and 70 feet tall. :D

Back in 2007, I did a volume inventory in my plantation, used fixed area plots. It averaged 2.5 cord/acre, the stand was 10 years old. Numbers are in my 'Tending your piece of earth' thread. That included wild trees and it had been thinned 2 years before. I am cutting 16 cord per acre, removed not total volume, now 13 years after in a second thinning. That is 1.23 cord/acre/year. Difficult for me to say board footage, too me that assumes every bf produced is lumber. I've never seen that play out. :D You can not predict the unseen all that well, never could. (ie under the bark and up the stem inside). You can increase your chances by looking at signs on the tree stem, but never a sure thing. :D  But there is 2 cords in 1000 bf as a rule of thumb, so at the stated 1.23 cord/acre/year, I have 615 bf/year. Which is actually much higher than that since that figure is based on volume extracted, not total. But don't expect that in real lumber. :D There will be a lot of pulpwood. Pulpwood is $$ though, just the same. So isn't firewood, as in saving me $2200/year. :D  You can get a lot of wood in a mixed stand of very shade tolerant species and some shade intolerance species that are ahead of them. ;)

These volumes are from thinning, thinning, thinning your ground. If not, expect 0.4 to 0.7 cord/acre/year in data I've collected over the years. Most land owners do not thin ground up here more than once. After age 12-15 years it's never touched until the next clear cut.

[stavebuyer]

Some species do respond well to a release, and can be age dependent as well. 50 year old suppressed stunted balsam fir is junk even if it picked up growth in full sun, and it will. The damage is already well underway in the stem. Red spruce on the other hand, after about 3 years will grow like the dickens and be chalk white. (not saying they all are chalk white). But it has a very long life span, over 400 years, where as fir is pretty much dead in 90, further south of here, 50 if you're lucky. You can find old 'overstory removal' jobs around here where the fir is 50 years old underneath and 10 feet tall and the aspen is 30 years old and 70 feet tall. :D

Back in 2007, I did a volume inventory in my plantation, used fixed area plots. It averaged 2.5 cord/acre, the stand was 10 years old. Numbers are in my 'Tending your piece of earth' thread. That included wild trees and it had been thinned 2 years before. I am cutting 16 cord per acre, removed not total volume, now 13 years after in a second thinning. That is 1.23 cord/acre/year. Difficult for me to say board footage, too me that assumes every bf produced is lumber. I've never seen that play out. :D You can not predict the unseen all that well, never could. (ie under the bark and up the stem inside). You can increase your chances by looking at signs on the tree stem, but never a sure thing. :D  But there is 2 cords in 1000 bf as a rule of thumb, so at the stated 1.23 cord/acre/year, I have 615 bf/year. Which is actually much higher than that since that figure is based on volume extracted, not total. But don't expect that in real lumber. :D There will be a lot of pulpwood. Pulpwood is $$ though, just the same. So isn't firewood, as in saving me $2200/year. :D  You can get a lot of wood in a mixed stand of very shade tolerant species and some shade intolerance species that are ahead of them. ;)

These volumes are from thinning, thinning, thinning your ground. If not, expect 0.4 to 0.7 cord/acre/year in data I've collected over the years. Most land owners do not thin ground up here more than once. After age 12-15 years it's never touched until the next clear cut.

Converting cords of firewood harvested including tops and limbs is only indicative of the amount of firewood grown. 10"dbh crooked maple or hollow beech contain "0" bd/ft of sawlogs (especially on Doyles rule) but yield a great deal of firewood that would only be realized by a homeowner cutting their own fuel or a whole tree chipper selling biomass.
I never claimed x-ray vision; but I will say they are people who can look at a log and tell you exactly what area it was cut from by the color and texture of the wood. There are also people who can walk through a tract and tell you what it will cut per acre in both dollars and volume and never needing to stop and tally at tree. They are related to the guys who sit in a sale barn and can tell you how much a steer weighs before it crosses the scale. Then of course there are others who never learn.

[mike_belben]

Averages obviously vary; but a good rule of thumb on upland oak/hickory type forest is 200'/acre/year(Doyle) is an average growth rate. I have some north slope drains heavy to poplar and red oak doing 600-800' but that is an exceptional site index and also the reason excellent timber sites are often farmed. It just doesn't pay as much to grow hardwood timber as other crops on sites where you have options.

im just thinking about this annual growth concept more today.  200bd ft doyle per acre per year with rough logs in a normal market is about $300/mbf or 30 cents a bd ft in tie logs.  thats $60 a YEAR for keeping an acre in crappy woods, then half goes to the logger and another chunk to the IRS.  if it were managed for several generations by culling firewood to produce either successive or climax harvest of veneer, stave and prime sawlog grades, i bet one could average $1-$2 a bd ft depending on site quality.  in a poor site that might mean $200 per year or on a great site that might mean $1200 per year per acre. respectively using figures of 200ft annual growth per year times $1bd/ft, and 600ft growth x $2/bd/ft.  here pasture leases are about $50/acre and crop land brings $100-ish, for comparison.  a prime forest can potentially out earn crop leasing if managed right for the long haul. out here this holds particularly true of bottoms and bluffs that would never be leased for either.  they hold the finest timber.


i guess as always i am thinking outloud in hopes it helps someone passing through realize that by harvesting your best trees in a diameter limit or high grade thinning you are reducing the annual equity growth potential of land.  that is management by logger.   by harvesting firewood from around beautiful trees in a management by farmer/owner format, a little bit at a time, you are not only increasing the equity growth rate in terms of fiber but also in terms of market value from aesthetics.  i would like to think this would show up in the bottom line of an appraisal in terms of equity lending in the event of an emergency, something that can be accessed without selling out. 

i have saved my largest scarlet oaks knowing they will be doaty and shaky, because they have huge royal crowns, they provide beautiful thick blocks of shade that move across a field all day for livestock relief, and in the fall they are the kind of magnificent deep red that you want to see off the front porch when the neighbors woods looks like a brown ball of crap.  value has a lot of factors to consider.  white oaks bring good money, turn brown and wreck the fall foliage and look ugly when theyre bare so i am telling a lot of them goodbye.  


part of me said but but but.. youll need logs to saw for the frame of your house.  i realized my stand is entirely trash and trash is paying excellent right now.  sell mine to get something for it now, and when the market surely crashes and i have a good bandmill built, i will just go buy cheap stumpage to build the house out of, when someone desperate is begging for a check.  buy low sell high right?

so many decisions to navigate takes all the fun out of adulting.

[SwampDonkey]

Converting cords of firewood harvested including tops and limbs is only indicative of the amount of firewood grown. 10"dbh crooked maple or hollow beech contain "0" bd/ft of sawlogs (especially on Doyles rule) but yield a great deal of firewood that would only be realized by a homeowner cutting their own fuel or a whole tree chipper selling biomass.

Never claimed anything different than total volume. We take wood down to 1-1/2" diameter for tree length up here. So weather firewood or pulp it all has value. Just like the pulp mill, rotten firewood isn't worth anything and doesn't count in the volume tally. But to tell me how many board feet standing of saw log quality before a saw is in it is nothing but a guess, a well educated guess maybe, based on past experience. A proper cruise is not a guess, it is an estimate based on sampling and a model (volume table, equation). A sloppy cruise can be more of a guess. Moving the prism around the plot for instance instead of over a point, is pretty shotty work. And I've seen some jilpokes do it. Trust me I've seen lot of 'claims' over the years. Some are good guessers for sure and some are very bad ones. I often get some feedback from loggers on what they thought was there and what they cut, some way surprised there was way more. Others disappointed and were sure there was more. :D

Not a single mill here buys sawlog or veneer volume based on standing trees, not one. Not off crown land, not off woodlots. If wood is not cut and bucked for grade on a yard where they inspect and scale it, good luck selling it. Either your yard or their yard. We've had both American and Canadian buyers here. I've seen third parties pick up wood, what someone thought was veneer, and it got turned down, the wood went to firewood or pulp. Mostly firewood in the trucker's yard because most people aren't going to go pick up 2 or maybe 6 firewood logs.

We live in two different worlds for sure. ;)

[mike_belben]

how does something go from i think its veneer to its firewood?  that sounds like a pretty clueless error. 

[SwampDonkey]

Not really, if it's borderline spec. for veneer and it turns out to be saw grade. It's sitting in a trucker's yard who hauls veneer logs. No one is going to move a puckle of wood worth, say $350/th $500 at most. No self loader going to bring you your 2 logs back. Now, are you going to bring your farm tractor and straight truck to collect them? If so, you can certainly have them. You have 20 miles to come get them. ;)  They (owner of the wood) wouldn't even get their own wood from the marketing board yard when the opportunity presented itself. They'd (marketing board) have firewood days after it sat their long enough to spoil. We have 3 hardwood sawmills and one veneer mill in a 30 mile radius.

[stavebuyer]

200 bd/ft acre growth at $.30 per ft stumpage is indeed $60 per acre per year and that includes the good/bad/ugly. Better timber with a veneer component will bring more. A north slope with a nice drain that is too rough to farm is about an ideal site. A south bluff with post oak, scarlet oak, and blackjack oak is better to let someone else pay the tax bill.

If you manage the timber yourself it certainly helps to maximize the potential. The main drawbacks is while you rent pasture or sell livestock every year the timber is only going to pay every couple of decades. It is also very difficult or impractical to effectively market specialty logs on a small scale. The veneer buyer won't come for a half dozen trees unless he needs them to finish out a load he bought down the road; so even if you up the quality it may not help the sales average.

[stavebuyer]

Buying veneer standing is a fairly common practice in the US and actually has been demonstrated to have better yield results than cut logs for a number of reasons. I have bought it both as a salaried employee and now as contract supplier who ships logs on a cost plus basis. Every log tagged and branded; each individual slice of veneer bar coded and tracked back to the buyer/date/supplier and location. Nowhere to hide if your wrong. A few prosper and the rest change hats about once a year.

[SwampDonkey]

Buying veneer standing is a fairly common practice in the US and actually has been demonstrated to have better yield results than cut logs for a number of reasons.

One being scale system, Doyle versus International for instance. For us up here Doyle always favours the buyer because our average size is smaller. So we use the New Brunswick log rule or Bangor rule depending on the buyer, which has been found to be much more fair in our situation.
All veneer we have sold has been scaled, stamped and bar coded and we go even further, all wood moved by truck of any kind requires a transportation certificate for that load of wood (location, property ID#, owner), which can be audited at any time. Even firewood on a pick up truck can be stopped by DNR to confirm it's source. At year end the book of certificates are forwarded to the local marketing boards and then Dept of Natural Resources. This also helps forecast wood supply. This has been the case for more than 20 years. We have had a big theft problem of wood over the years, we had to find ways to impede that.
Just the way it is up this way.

[moodnacreek]

Converting cords of firewood harvested including tops and limbs is only indicative of the amount of firewood grown. 10"dbh crooked maple or hollow beech contain "0" bd/ft of sawlogs (especially on Doyles rule) but yield a great deal of firewood that would only be realized by a homeowner cutting their own fuel or a whole tree chipper selling biomass.

Never claimed anything different than total volume. We take wood down to 1-1/2" diameter for tree length up here. So weather firewood or pulp it all has value. Just like the pulp mill, rotten firewood isn't worth anything and doesn't count in the volume tally. But to tell me how many board feet standing of saw log quality before a saw is in it is nothing but a guess, a well educated guess maybe, based on past experience. A proper cruise is not a guess, it is an estimate based on sampling and a model (volume table, equation). A sloppy cruise can be more of a guess. Moving the prism around the plot for instance instead of over a point, is pretty shotty work. And I've seen some jilpokes do it. Trust me I've seen lot of 'claims' over the years. Some are good guessers for sure and some are very bad ones. I often get some feedback from loggers on what they thought was there and what they cut, some way surprised there was way more. Others disappointed and were sure there was more. :D

Not a single mill here buys sawlog or veneer volume based on standing trees, not one. Not off crown land, not off woodlots. If wood is not cut and bucked for grade on a yard where they inspect and scale it, good luck selling it. Either your yard or their yard. We've had both American and Canadian buyers here. I've seen third parties pick up wood, what someone thought was veneer, and it got turned down, the wood went to firewood or pulp. Mostly firewood in the trucker's yard because most people aren't going to go pick up 2 or maybe 6 firewood logs.

We live in two different worlds for sure. ;)

I often wonder if we have anyone left who can actually buck sawlogs.