July 2026

The preceding issue of Timber Processing (June) focused on the results of the annual U.S. Sawmill Operations & Capital Expenditure Survey. If you’ll recall, when asked to forecast their lumber business situation for 2026-2027, softwood lumbermen painted a fairly soft picture, with 56% saying “fair,” 36% saying “good,” 2% saying “excellent,” and 6% saying “poor.” The question was but one of two dozen asked in the annual survey.

Speaking of annual surveys, our affiliate magazine, Timber Harvesting, which some of you (especially those with company logging crews) probably also receive, recently completed its annual Logger Survey.

The relationship between loggers and mills has always made for lively discussion. But whether the relationship is like the Hatfields and the McCoys, or more like kissin’ cousins, one thing is for certain—one doesn’t exist without the other.

However, logger-mill relationships wasn’t really the focus of the annual logger survey, though some of the results might shed a little light on those relationships. For example, when asked what best describes their compensation and work availability trends during the past two years, 23% of the loggers pointed to rate reductions, while 44% said tighter quotas. And when asked to check off any or all of a list of issues having the biggest impact on their businesses, 68% said limited markets, 58% said load quotas and 49% said compensation (though insurance topped the list at 75%).

While half of the logging force lost money or broke even in 2025, more than a third said their company’s financial health was in good or very good shape, while 30% said it was poor or very poor, and the remaining 36% saying they were in fair shape financially.

A significant 36% of the loggers said they had downsized their business in the past two years, while only 6% had expanded and 58% had remained about the same. Only a quarter of the loggers were currently operating at 90% or more capacity. And 46% of the loggers had taken an owner’s pay cut to help reduce costs in the past two years, and 42% had sold off equipment.

It remains an older workforce, as 45% of the loggers who responded are over age 60. And 40% said they are likely to be out of the business within five years, with most of them planning to simply sell or auction off their equipment when they get out.

So the bottom line, at least according to the survey, is that the logging industry is in danger of going off the tracks, and some of it already has especially in those dozen or so pulp & paper markets that have ceased to exist in the past couple of years.

That’s why you hear more and more conversation about potential markets involving woody biomass—that is, pulpwood logs and/or chips. At a recent conference on wood bioenergy, a forester from Georgia said that a single data center requiring 1.2 gigawatts (or 1,200 megawatts) could be supplied by 12 100 megawatt biomass power (electricity) plants, each using 1.2 million tons of wood chips annually.

Such projections are a big leap of faith for a struggling logging force to take, so just a little piece of it might go a long way. As we all know, loggers have always finished first when it comes to resiliency.