THE STATE OF MONTANA FORESTRY: U.S. Forest Service Hopes to Improve Forest Health and Reduce Wildfires.

• Author: Smith, Dorian
• Position: Cover story

For decades, Montana's largest manufacturing sector was wood products, as measured by the number of employees. Today that position belongs to fabricated metals, with wood products falling to second and food products close behind. It's a sign of dramatic change for a state known for its ties to the forest industry and its 20 million acres of productive, non-reserved timberland.

In 2000, wood and paper jobs were 28 percent of the state's manufacturing employment and 31 percent of labor income. In 2016, only 13 percent of jobs and 11 percent of income was generated by wood products manufacturing.

The long decline of the wood products industry in Montana began in response to vigorous harvesting from the 1960s through the 1980s. Public campaigns to protect forest habitats, water and soil quality, and endangered species became national news.

In response, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management drastically reduced timber harvests on federal forests nationwide--nearly every western state was affected. Montana's total timber harvests retreated from 1.3 billion board feet in 1987 to less than 300 million board feet in 2016. In the same time period, lumber production fell from 1.6 billion board feet to barely 500 million board feet, and wood product sales declined from $1.8 billion to less than $565 million.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a major shift in timberland ownership in Montana. More than half a million acres of industrial timberland has been sold and transferred to various state, federal and other nongovernmental or private landowners. Some of this timberland is no longer actively managed for timber production.

As a result, Montana has become a net importer of logs. Today, Montana mills are dependent on logs flowing in from adjacent states and struggle to get enough timber to operate at their full capacity, making it difficult to take advantage of the current booming lumber market.

But a new national forest management strategy introduced by the U.S. Forest Service aims to increase timber harvest levels. The agency is increasing the removal of timber as a means to improve forest health and address fuel accumulation in the face of extreme wildfire seasons.

At the national level, the U.S. Forest Services timber harvest trend had been increasing incrementally for several years. But in 2018, their budget was reduced by nearly a billion dollars to $4.9 billion.

Acknowledging that 65 to 80 million acres of federal forests nationwide needed fire hazard reduction treatment and restoration, the current U.S. Forest Service budget...