Decreased demand for the high-quality pine timber that is so abundant in south Louisiana is causing a hardship for the area’s timber farmers. Exacerbating the problem is a dearth of timber mills, as several mills in southeast Louisiana and southwest Mississippi have shut down in recent years.
“We don’t have enough mills here to create sufficient competition and the mills we do have are not seeking the larger, high grade trees like they once did,” says Warren Peters, owner of Peters Forest Resources, which services the forest industry. “I tell landowners two or three times a week now not to cut their timber this year. There is no place to take it.”
Behind the decreased demand for timber is a slowdown in the housing market. Though new home construction has recovered somewhat in recent years from the recession of 2008 and 2009, housing starts are still half of what they were before the recession. In 2007, more than 2 million new housing units were built. After bottoming out at 500,000 or so during the recession, the number is back up—but only to around 1 million new units per year.
“We really need to get to about 1.5 million a year, which is a healthy average,” says Buck Vandersteen, executive director of the Louisiana Forestry Association.
Additionally, demand overseas for American timber has decreased as countries like China have seen a slowdown in their economic growth. Two years ago, an Amite logger, Ralph Stewart Logging, opened an export facility in Port Allen to capitalize on the then-vibrant Asian market. But the company folded before its first shipment even made it out of the Port of Baton Rouge, and no one has moved in to take Stewart’s place as demand has fallen off, Vandersteen says.
Also, new technology in wood products has increased demand for smaller, cheaper timber that can be processed into wood pellets for pressboard and plywood.
“They are really focusing on producing smaller size lumber,” Peters says. “They can sell two-by-fours all day long but they cannot sell as many of the larger pieces ”
The problem has gotten so bad Peters and other industry leaders met last week to brainstorm potential solutions to help timber farmers. Vandersteen led the meeting and says there aren’t any immediate answers.
“Ideally, what we need is another mill that could take some of this product,” Vandersteen says. “But there’s not demand for another mill right now. You can’t encourage someone to build something when there’s an oversupply.”
—Stephanie Riegel
