Going price for poplar

[OneWithWood]

I hear that poplar logs are going real cheap in Southern Indiana these days.  If the price is right I might buy poplar logs to fill out what I need for the sawbarn.
What are yellow poplar logs bringing at the mills in your area?

[Jeff]

I can only offer aspen prices. 100 bucks a cord delivered to the mill for 10 footers.

[etat]

Early last summer I bought quite a bit of yellow poplar.  I specified wanted clean boards, no big knots, straight, 2 by 8's.  No bark, or bad edges, but length could be variable.  I paid 4 hundred dollars per thousand board feet.  I don't know if this is a good price, or not, but I got what I wanted.  I made lap siding out of it.  

[Ron Wenrich]

Depends on your specs.  I think veneer poplar is going for about $800/Mbf.  You should be able to get high quality butts in the $400-500 range.  Low grade would only go for $100-150.

Poplar can be used as dimension stock, but after it dries, it can get to be pretty hard.   Oldtimers used to come to the mill and want poplar, but not hickory poplar.  Evidently, some of it dries as hard as hickory.  Also, watch for spiral grain.  

I cut close to 1 MMbf of that stuff every year.  The butts can give you some really nice wood.

[SwampDonkey]

Ron:

Is that Tulip tree or aspen prices. We have a poplar veneer plant that burned 2 years ago and they paid $140/cord CND. They are reconstructing it again. They set up a local wood yard so we only had to haul it 30 miles, and the company trucked it to the mill which was 4 hours drive away. It was better than pulp price, but nothing outstanding. GP has a wood yard 4 miles from home here, in Bridgewater Maine and they were taking mixed tree length loads for $143 USD a cord. By mixed I mean mixed species of hardwood and birch. I guess they sort the birch out themselves. The hardwood kraft mill only pays $105/cord CDN poplar and $110/cord CDN hardwood and birch. Its getting so that you have to pay the truckers about 40% of the value of the load, when you have to pay the crew 50 % of the value it doesn't leave much profit for the owner of the wood. Our prices haven't done much here in 15 years because crown wood is so cheap. Pulp is best left standing, no wonder there's high grading or buncher clearcuts.  :-/

[Ron Wenrich]

Veneer prices are for tulip poplar.  Veneer usually has to have 1/3 sapwood.  Its hard to find poplar with any more than that in our area.  

I talked to a German buyer many years ago who said they would cut the veneer and impregnate with different color of dyes.  Tulip poplar takes stain really well.  They used orange, yellow, green and blue, maybe some others.  Then they would stack the different colors together and make moldings.  This is used in some furniture lines, and is very popular there.

We have very little aspen.  I see only a few logs each year.  It goes into pallet stock.

Going prices for pulpwood is $25/ton.  We have several alternatives to the pulp markets.  Firewood, animal bedding and scragg mills.  

Scragg mills will take anything that's long and straight.  They prefer oak and are paying about $40/ton.  

Firewood is seasonal, but with the rise in heating oil, some of these guys are starting to stockpile their split wood.  We can use any dense hardwood and we cut and split and deliver by the trailerload to the metropolitan areas.  It has been a good way to get rid of the stuff.

The softer hardwoods have a bedding market.  We have one company that produces poultry bedding.  They make shavings.  We have a lot of poultry houses.  They are priced about the same as pulpwood, so it depends where they are logging.

The pulpwood market is just a catch-all for everything else.  A guy with a chipper has some other markets available like power production, particleboard production, and mulch.

Pulp is not that big a thing in my area.  Guys will leave it stand and convince themselves and landowners that it is their next forest, and shouldn't be cut.  Unfortunately, the stuff is junk and I've been watching as the quality of the forests decline.  Foresters, who should know better, are just as guilty as loggers.  High grading and diameter limit cuts are more the norm.

[SwampDonkey]

Yes, much the same market as here. Only, we don't have any big market for animal bedding. I guess I should have given my prices per tonne , as that is what units the mills use here. Its just that a producer likes to know cords. 100 inch Aspen, hardwood and birch is $44/tonne CDN (average price) at the kraft mill. There are 4 zones and prices which are set up for distance from the mill. I just took this from the marketing board site. Usually this mill has a separate pricing for poplar, this is new. So basically, as I look at their current pricing, I see aspen has increased and hardwood stayed the same last year.

Treelength is $46.97/ton CDN aspen at GP and $47.95/ton CDN aspen, $32.29 CDN hwd at LP in Maine. So, I guess our price isn't that bad compared to down south. But, still the owner is getting squeezed quite bad. I find that in order to avoid high grading, a site has to have better than 24 cord/acre. A contractor just can't afford to operate in low volume stands here unless its a clearcut. And I agree we are high grading alot of woodland, even up here. Some contractors believe that leaving those suppressed hardwood trees behind is some form of selection system.

On the other hand there is a perception that you can make a stand of crapola into something manificant. This is due to the fact that alot of our ridges are poor quality to begin with. I've seen alot of large diameter hardwood stands that are pretty much crapola. And when you thin through them, your still left will crapola. And you get somebody coming along and he looks at the job and accuses the cutter of high grading. If they only saw the before cut condition before leaping of a stump at ya. But, there's no way of convincing the do gooders that you did the best you could with what you had. It wasn't long ago when hardwood was worthless.

You can look here at our prices:

http://www.cvwpa.ca/search-form-by-mill.asp