Tools for Forest Landowners and Managers: Cost and Revenue Estimates for Timber Harvest Activities.

• Author: Scott, Samuel

In 2022, an estimated 11,500 Montanans worked together to harvest, haul and process nearly 350 million board feet of timber into the finished wood products we rely on. Whether it is stud lumber made from national forest timber, marine-grade plywood sourced from industrial timberland or house logs cut from your neighbor's "back forty," it takes a lot of work from different types of folks to turn a standing tree into a consumer product.

At the University Montana's Forest Industry Research Program (FIRP), we provide a suite of tools for private citizens, wood products professionals and public land management agencies to estimate the costs and revenue of timber harvest activities.

Logging and Hauling Costs

The first step of converting a tree into a board is getting the tree off the stump.

Some professional loggers work for sawmills, but many are independent companies that purchase standing timber and sell logs to sawmills or work on contracts with the sawmills. Logging is costly, and accurate estimates of those costs are necessary for loggers and landowners to enter fair negotiations over the value of standing timber.

Every other year, FIRP surveys loggers across Montana and Idaho to estimate stump-to-truck logging costs for the most common logging methods used in the region. The results are made public on our website: bber.umt.edu/FIR. These figures help inform landowners and loggers of the current costs of logging and allow us to look at trends of these costs over time.

Once the tree has been logged and loaded onto a truck, it is taken to the mill.

In many cases, the log haulers are independent from the loggers and the mills. In years that FIRP does not survey loggers, we survey log haulers and publish those cost estimates online as well. Table 1 shows a selection of 2022 haul costs based on distance to the mill, fuel prices, average speed and fuel consumption per mile.

Delivered Log Prices

Once the log has made it to the mill, it will need to change hands once again before the saws can start turning it into framing lumber or a tabletop.

The sawmill will weigh and evaluate the load of logs as it rolls into the yard, paying according to the species and quality. We call this the delivered log price. Every quarter, we survey mills for their delivered log prices by species across Montana, as well as the U.S. Forest Service's Intermountain Region--which covers southern Idaho, Utah, parts of Wyoming and Colorado. Again, we provide the aggregated...