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Betsy Bates

Housing’s Modest Improvement Pushing Big Tree Prices Higher

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The slowly recovering home construction industry is resulting in long-awaited improvement in demand and prices for large pine logs across the southern pine belt, one of the nation’s largest forestry consulting firms reports.

Marshall Thomas, president of F&W Forestry Services, Inc. based in Albany, Ga., that provides management services to forest landowners in much of the nation’s commercial tree-growing regions, reports in his firm’s newsletter that prices for pine sawtimber used for manufacturing lumber have been up modestly for three consecutive years.

“For the last three years southern pine sawtimber stumpage prices (paid landowners) have increased at a steady rate of about $2 (per ton) per year—from $23/T in 2012 to $25/T in 2013/T and all the way to $27/T in 2014,” Thomas writes in the winter 2014-15 edition of the F&W Forestry Report. “While those aren’t the kinds of gains we saw in the 1990’s, they are steady and going in the right direction for the first time in a long time.”

Thomas says he expects the timber price gains to continue as new home continues to gather steam as most economists predict.

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Betsy Bates

Tree Planting Up In Southern Pine Belt; Down Somewhat In Other Regions

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A new survey by the U.S. Forest Service reports that tree planting across the southern pine region of the nation was up 5 percent in the 2012-13 planting season but down slightly in most other forested areas of the nation.

The estimated number of acres planted to conifer species—mostly a variety of trees, largely pine, that produce needles—totaled some 2.1 million during the fall to spring 2012/13 planting season.  That was down by about three percent from the estimated seedlings planted during the prior 2011/12 season.

But while the tree-planting numbers overall  were down narrowly nationwide, they were up significantly in the two groups of states that together comprise what is generally referred to as the nation’s pine belt: 13 states in the southeast and south central areas.  Together, these two groups of states accounted for 76 percent of tree seedlings planted in 2012 and 82 percent in 2013.

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Betsy Bates

Judge Dismisses Forest Road Legal Action

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A U.S. District Judge in Oregon appears to have put an official end to the eight year legal action brought by an environmental group seeking to require Environmental Protection Agency permits for forest road work.

 

Judge Anna Brown ruled against a request by the Northwest Environmental Defense Center (NEDC) seeking to amend its original lawsuit aimed at forest roads used for logging and related purposes to apply to forest roads accessing gravel pits.

 

The U.S. forest industry and timberland owners across the nation mounted an unprecedented legal, political, and legislative effort against the NEDC court suit that included legislation attached to the new Farm Bill that hopefully will deter similar legal actions in the future.

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