TALL PINE ECONOMICS

             Over the weekend, daughter-in-law Sheri and I did a marketing school for the Back to Your Roots conference near Shreveport, Louisiana.  This is tall pine country, but it has become a monoculture rather than a polyculture due to the last half century of forestry management.

             Our hosts had a multi-generational large property that has been managed in the traditional way for a couple of generations.  Like so many commodities, the price has fluctuated dramatically based on local and world conditions.  In the last 10 years, the prices have collapsed, mills have closed, and it's a depressed situation.

             Farmers who planted pine plantations 30 years ago have watched the per acre harvest income go from $8,000 an acre down to $900.  How would you like a 401(k) that had that kind of trajectory?  Imagine the pressure on these farmers, emotionally and financially, under these conditions.

             But rather than being aware of this, the business news only concentrates on Silicon Valley and technology.  I remember a few years ago watching sawmills in British Columbia milling pine into lumber from logs that on our farm we would run through our chipper for compost.  I asked my host how they could afford to mill such tiny logs, and the answer is technology.  With laser beams and computer-driven mill heads and saws with a smaller kerf (the amount of wood removed by a cutting instrument) they can mill small dimension wood.

             The BC pine die-off from a beetle flooded the market with low-priced salvage material that further depressed the Louisiana market.  Of course, Louisiana agriculture officials push exports but do not talk about how much their state imports.  That a state awash in so much lumber can't use it locally due to cheap import displacement speaks volumes to all the dysfunctions and misallocations within the greater industrial agriculture community.

             It reminds me of an interesting observation by a fellow speaker at an Australian conference a year ago:  no truly local market exists; we're all competing globally.  French cheese, Spanish wine . . . everything is up for grabs.

             Interestingly, this monoculture pine management is ecologically fragile as well as economically fragile.  What used to be mixed hardwoods and pine (pre-European) is now a monoculture of short rotation singe species.  That opens the door to more aggressive pest infestation and damage from hurricanes and other weather events.  It doesn't have as much resilience.

             Like other forward-thinking farmers, our hosts invested in a band saw mill so they can harvest and mill their own lumber.  That is what we do on our farm in Virginia as well.  In our Augusta County, we export lumber around the world but don't use it to build even a single house in our county.  Instead, builders buy salvage imports from BC or from Louisiana and our own forests gets disrespected economically and emotionally.

             In the local food movement, we've gotten some traction on what we ingest, but we've not added that traction to fiber.

             If you've bought lumber in the last 5 years, have you searched for a local option before buying from the industrial lumber yard?