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From the gateway on Half Moon Road, F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber looks a lot like it did in 1923. About 200 truckloads of logs roll through every week. They get dumped in muddy yards, awaiting their time in the sawmills. The roar makes it hard to talk, even outside the big metal sheds.

“It looks the same on the outside, but we work really hard to be competitive on the inside,” Stoltze resource manager Paul McKenzie said on a recent tour of the 120-acre mill site. “We use our brains more and our backs less. There’s a lot fewer injuries.”

Optical scanners have replaced the green chain and the crew of 20 struggling with the entry-level task of pulling planks by hand into sorting bins. Mill electricians used to wire motors — now they program software. “But there’s not much difference in the wood input and output,” McKenzie continued. “The mill produces about as much lumber in one shift today as it did with two shifts in the 1970s.”

Logs were bigger then. Stoltze didn’t bother with trees less than 17 inches what is termed “diameter at breast height,” or DBH. When Montana’s big old-growth trees started to run out in the late ’70s, it modified one of its saw lines to accept logs as small as 5 inches DBH.

In the past 25 years, Montana has lost two-thirds of its large timber mills. The giants like Champion International, Crown Zellerbach, Georgia-Pacific, St. Regis Paper and Stimson Lumber merged and left the state. Plum Creek Timber Co. was the final national corporation in Montana before it was bought by Weyerhaeuser Corp. last February.

From the Montana Standard: http://mtstandard.com/natural-resources/montana-s-small-mills-ponder-future-of-timber-industry/article_1ae29ee5-d47a-5c6d-9aa8-25ffca5dcdf3.html