The payments and restrictions on logging expired around 2000, just in time for a housing boom that pushed timber prices to highs. He planted mostly slash, a little longleaf, and he added another 800 acres. Bembry was among the droves of Southerners who signed up. Forestation initiatives meant to stop erosion and lift crop prices, such as the Conservation Reserve Program, promised annual payments for every farm acre planted over with trees.
Plus, the federal government was paying landowners to plant trees. The family added land over the years and by the 1980s, when the veterinarian took over, there were 1,200 acres.Ĭotton and peanuts were too demanding for a practicing vet. Great-great-great-great-great-grandfather got 200 acres near the Ocmulgee River for serving in the Revolutionary War. independence, the Georgia legislature encouraged clearing for farms by offering 500 acres to settlers who built sawmills. Trees were bled for their gummy sap to make turpentine. The crown claimed the big timbers for ship masts. Georgia, like much of the Southeast, was thick with longleaf pine when British colonists arrived. In Georgia, timberland owned by families and individuals covers roughly one-third of the state. Thousands of Southerners’ fortunes depend on timber prices. Hopkins harvests only a small portion of his timber each year, but has to pay taxes on every acre. “We used to be considered wealthy,” he said. He said it is like managing a store where he can sell only merchandise from a few shelves. Because the pines take about a quarter-century to be suitable for lumber, just 4% of the land produces income each year, though taxes are owed on every acre. Hopkins raises timber on a 25-year rotation to support himself and make payments to more than a dozen shareholders in the 109-year-old family business. Adjusted for inflation, prices for the logs used to make lumber are at their lowest in more than 50 years. “If you put inflation on it, it’s really sad,” said Mr. Logs for softwood lumber averaged $22.50 a ton across the South last summer, the least since 1992, according to TimberMart-South, a pricing service affiliated with the University of Georgia’s forestry school. None of that has lifted the price of timber, which never recovered from the 2007 housing bust. Spot prices for southern yellow pine set records in January. Lumber futures have hit all-time highs and are more than twice the typical winter price. Home builders kept hammering through mild early-winter weather and depleted lumber dealers are stocking up for spring. Futures contracts traded up to $1,000 per thousand board feet, more than 50% above the previous high, set during the 2018 building season. Lumber futures, a benchmark for an array of regional and species-specific prices, rose to a record in early August and kept climbing. By last summer, lumber was America’s hottest commodity. Sawmills ramped up to capacity but couldn’t catch up. Restaurants around the country had to build outdoor decks. Wood was in short supply when the remodeling bonanza began. By April, roughly 40% of North America’s sawmill capacity was shut down.
Mills sent workers home and curtailed production. Speculators dumped lumber futures and took short positions, betting prices would fall further. Sawmills like the one run by Canfor in Moultrie, Ga., are paying the lowest prices for logs in years.Īt their onset, coronavirus lockdowns seemed to derail the housing recovery. Meanwhile, it’s a buyer’s market for logs down South, saidĬanfor’s chief executive. The surplus of standing pine is such that growers, foresters and mill executives expect that even with mills sawing at capacity and new facilities coming online, it could be another decade, maybe two, before enough trees are felled to balance supply with demand. Since bottoming out last March, shares of the Canadian sawyers have risen more than 300%, compared with a 75% climb of the S&P 500 index. control about one-third of the South’s lumber-making capacity. And it has been incredibly profitable for forest-products companies that have been buying mills in the South. The log-lumber divergence has been painful for thousands of Southerners who are counting on pine trees for income and as a way to hold on to family land. The problem for timber growers is that so many trees have been planted between the Carolinas and Texas that mills are paying the lowest prices in decades for logs. Sawmills are running as close to capacity as pandemic precautions will allow and are unable to keep up with lumber demand. It is the region’s sawmills, including many that have been bought up by Canadian firms, that are harvesting the profits. South, where much of the nation’s logs are harvested, have gained nothing from the run-up in prices for finished lumber.
0 kommentar(er)
