I thought there was a Lumber shortage ...

They got plenty !

it's just that you can't afford it!!

If you see some 3/4 inch plywood grab it for me!!

$1.25 a Board Foot for 2x12 's

Just in time for them new checks to get here.

That's cheap. A 16 foot 2x12 around here is $54.

There's a shortage of GOOD lumber!

At the Home Depot or Lowes, true. Mostly crap to pick thru. Common to see a dozen or two boards piled up on top , you have to dig thru the junk to find something decent.

About 10 years ago, my local Home Depot had an incident. A customer decided to climb up to the next pile of lumber to get something good. Probably due to the stuff left was junk and to find an employee was difficult and time consuming.

The customer climbed up and accidentally pulled down the entire pallet worth of lumber. It resulted in his death as he was crushed under the ton or so of lumber.
The result of this was more restrictive actions of the local Home Depot to prevent people from doing the same thing. Not sure of the customer's heirs on whether or not they sued for damages over the guys death. Sad ending for the customer. Never had these types of problems with old school lumberyards. Just modern big box store type of retailers.

My supplier is saying availability good until July for pressure, unknown after that but spruce construction lumber will face a shortage as well as anything engineered such as trusses, joists, primarily due to the expected demand. The boom for building is off the charts here. Costs up about 40% right now.

Over the years I’ve exported 100’s of MBF of spruce/fir logs to stud mills in Quebec, (Maibec,Blanchett, etc) a 40% increase in lumber prices, but little if any increase in the price the mills pay for the logs ?

Squash, I wonder how the loggers by me cut, skid and truck softwood for the prices they receive. They get almost as much money for a load of firewood logs as a trailer of softwood.

I hear you, margins are very thin with softwood logs and pulpwood. Take Hemlock pulp for instance, Finch Paper is paying less per ton today than they did just 5-6 years ago. Yet they are purchasing all they need. White Pine is the only bright spot, not because they pay more, but because it is easier to put up volume of pine logs. Usually because they are larger diameters and scale up faster, than spruce/fir logs.

^^
You guys are talking apples and pineapples when you're comparing saw logs to pulp.
Pulp prices are down everywhere, in big part due to the huge upswing in lumber production. An increase in trees being harvested for lumber creates an increase in chip production (tops, slabs, etc), this material goes into the pulp supply whether there is a demand for it or not.

Do you guys have any idea what the mills there are paying for softwood logs let's say, 7+" and 32' long?
I would be really surprised if it's not considerably more than it was a year ago.

Here's a list of average log prices in Washington for the month of February, following is a list from last July.
Realistically the prices from the middle column (high) are the prices a logger can expect to receive. Also, most logs are now being quoted at a "camp-run" price, not by various grades. The camp-run quotes being thrown around right now basically are what is shown in the charts as #2 saw prices, 7"+ and 36'long average log length (except cedar 32' lengths).
Notice cedar, it has doubled!

Neighbor hauls to Finch, 5 tier load in Dec $900, same load this week $600. He has a bunch of hemlock pulp piled once that is gone, no more till $$ goes up.

Neighbor hauls to Finch, 5 tier load in Dec $900, same load this week $600. He has a bunch of hemlock pulp piled once that is gone, no more till $$ goes up.
16ft WP logs delivered to mill $325/$350 MBF. The mills don't want 8's or 10's. Not much more than the last 5 years.

Lumber Prices Are Soaring. Why Are Tree Growers Miserable?
Sawmill operators harvest gains while Southern landowners struggle with tree surplus; ‘I’m not making anything’

Feb. 24, 2021 9:37 am ET


TWIGGS COUNTY, Ga.—The pandemic delivered an unexpected boon to the lumber industry. Hunkered-down homeowners remodeled en masse and low mortgage rates drove demand for suburban housing. Lumber supplies tightened up and prices smashed records.

“You must be making a lot of money,” an Ace Hardware store manager told timber grower Joe Hopkins, whose family business has about 70,000 acres of slash pine near the Okefenokee Swamp.

“I’m not making anything,” Mr. Hopkins replied.

Timber growers across the U.S. South, where much of the nation’s logs are harvested, have gained nothing from the run-up in prices for finished lumber. It is the region’s sawmills, including many that have been bought up by Canadian firms, that are harvesting the profits.

Sawmills are running as close to capacity as pandemic precautions will allow and are unable to keep up with lumber demand. 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.

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. And it has been incredibly profitable for forest-products companies that have been buying mills in the South. Three Canadian firms— Canfor Corp. CFPZF -1.81% , Interfor Corp. IFP -0.74% and West Fraser Timber Co. WFG 0.61% —control about one-third of the South’s lumber-making capacity. 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.

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.

Meanwhile, it’s a buyer’s market for logs down South, said Don Kayne, Canfor’s chief executive. “We try to be fair,” he said.
Sawmills like the one run by Canfor in Moultrie, Ga., are paying the lowest prices for logs in years.

At their onset, coronavirus lockdowns seemed to derail the housing recovery. Lumber prices plunged in March 2020. Dealers liquidated inventories. Speculators dumped lumber futures and took short positions, betting prices would fall further. Mills sent workers home and curtailed production. By April, roughly 40% of North America’s sawmill capacity was shut down.

Wood was in short supply when the remodeling bonanza began. Then the housing market picked up. Restaurants around the country had to build outdoor decks. Sawmills ramped up to capacity but couldn’t catch up. By last summer, lumber was America’s hottest commodity.
Record prices

Lumber futures, a benchmark for an array of regional and species-specific prices, rose to a record in early August and kept climbing. Futures contracts traded up to $1,000 per thousand board feet, more than 50% above the previous high, set during the 2018 building season.
Diverging Markets
While lumber prices have set records this year, prices of the timber used to make lumber have remained low.


Home builders kept hammering through mild early-winter weather and depleted lumber dealers are stocking up for spring. Lumber futures have hit all-time highs and are more than twice the typical winter price. Spot prices for southern yellow pine set records in January.

None of that has lifted the price of timber, which never recovered from the 2007 housing bust. 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.

“If you put inflation on it, it’s really sad,” said Mr. Hopkins, the Georgia timber grower. Adjusted for inflation, prices for the logs used to make lumber are at their lowest in more than 50 years.

Mr. 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. 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. He said it is like managing a store where he can sell only merchandise from a few shelves.

“We used to be considered wealthy,” he said. “I don’t see wealth. I see tax bills.”
Mr. Hopkins harvests only a small portion of his timber each year, but has to pay taxes on every acre.

Thousands of Southerners’ fortunes depend on timber prices. In Georgia, timberland owned by families and individuals covers roughly one-third of the state.

Georgia, like much of the Southeast, was thick with longleaf pine when British colonists arrived. The crown claimed the big timbers for ship masts. Trees were bled for their gummy sap to make turpentine. After U.S. independence, the Georgia legislature encouraged clearing for farms by offering 500 acres to settlers who built sawmills.

Johnny Bembry’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather got 200 acres near the Ocmulgee River for serving in the Revolutionary War. The family added land over the years and by the 1980s, when the veterinarian took over, there were 1,200 acres.

Cotton and peanuts were too demanding for a practicing vet. Pine trees need little tending. Plus, the federal government was paying landowners to plant trees. 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.

Mr. Bembry was among the droves of Southerners who signed up. He planted mostly slash, a little longleaf, and he added another 800 acres.

The payments and restrictions on logging expired around 2000, just in time for a housing boom that pushed timber prices to highs. Mr. Bembry didn’t cut much of his timber, though.

“I liked looking at it,” he said. “And it was good for wildlife.”

Home prices crashed in 2007. Lumber and timber prices, too. The number of sawmills in the South had already been declining due to consolidation. The collapse in home construction hastened closures of small and less efficient mills. Today the region has about 250, down from more than 400 in 2000, according to TimberMart-South.

West Fraser, the continent’s largest lumber producer, and Canfor had already begun buying Southern mills in the years leading up to the crash. Back home in Canada, their prospects were dimming.

Log supply, which is meted out by Canada’s provincial governments, is threatened by forest fires and wood-boring beetles, which together have laid waste to tens of millions of acres. The lumber companies also have paid billions of dollars in duties on boards sold across the U.S. border, part of a decadeslong trade dispute between the countries.

“Canadian companies have always been on the losing end,” said Eric Miller, president of the Rideau Potomac Strategy Group, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm. “So the logical solution was for them to jump the tariff wall and invest in the U.S.”
Southern ComfortThree Canadian companies with big Southernlumber-making operations are thriving.Share price and index performanceSource: FactSetAs of Feb. 26
%InterforWestFraserTimberCanfor
S&P 500April 2020'210100200300400500600

Sawing in the South allows Canadian firms to avoid tariffs and be closer to top customers in the Sunbelt’s mushrooming housing markets. Labor is cheaper, too.

West Fraser bought mills from Texas to Florida, including 13 from International Paper Co. Canfor started with four in the Carolinas and moved west, adding mills in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas.

Interfor executives circled Georgia and waited for the bottom. The Vancouver, British Columbia, company pounced at the depths of the housing bust in 2013. Within about two years, Interfor owned one mill each in Arkansas and South Carolina and seven in the pinelands south of Atlanta.
‘Tough times’

“Whatever Interfor pays, that’s what everybody else pays,” said Billy Humphries, who advises on timber sales around Macon, Ga., and grows trees himself in Twiggs County. “They moved to the South in pretty tough times. They could be pretty ruthless.”

Because of trees bred to become planks and the computerization of mills, well-managed timberland produces about 50% more wood than it did a generation ago, he said.
Mr. 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.

When Interfor arrived, it studied the surrounding trees, noting ages and diameters, then calibrated mills to accommodate the most common-sized trunks, said Todd Mullis, a former Interfor executive who now works for Mr. Humphries’s firm, Forest Resource Consultants Inc.

There aren’t enough of the oldest, thickest trees to justify scaling mills for them. Many of the biggest trees went from fetching top dollar to being mashed into paper and cardboard for much less money. This was bad news for growers like Mr. Bembry, whose trees were left growing when the housing crash cut off demand for wood.

“When you design a mill, you design it for the masses,” Mr. Mullis said. “The metal matches the wood.”

Off the paved roads in Laurens County, Ga., Charles Hill’s logging crew is loading trucks bound for Interfor and West Fraser mills. Sorting is done by a $500,000 John Deere swing machine. A computer is in the cab. A merchandiser on its arm senses the length and girth of trunks in its grasp, strips away limbs and slices off the tree top to fit the mill.

Interfor urges loggers to use such equipment. The company says it offers long-term supply deals and premiums for mechanically trimmed trunks to ease the financial burden of buying the machines.

“The most important decision you make is the first decision, which is where to cut the log,” said Interfor Chief Executive Ian Fillinger. “The human decision is taken out of it.”

At its mills, Interfor installed scanners that size up logs and position and slice them to maximize board feet and minimize waste. Yields climbed as much as 20% within two years, Mr. Mullis said. Current Interfor executives say the company has invested $300 million making the mills more efficient and productive. Two would have closed had Interfor not bought them, Mr. Mullis said.

“The industry in the Southern U.S. has been relatively backward,” said Mark Wilde, who researches forest products for BMO Capital Markets. Many lumber mills were built by paper companies eager for the sawdust and scraps to pulp. “Canadians going down South is the best thing that’s happened to Southern timber,” he said.

This month, Interfor said it would pay a cardboard maker $59 million for a lumber mill near the port in Charleston, S.C., and would spend $25 million to boost output 60%.
Share Your Thoughts

If you are remodeling or building a home, have lumber shortages or higher prices affected your plans? Join the conversation below.

The average price of timber sold to lumber mills rose to $24.03 a ton in last year’s fourth quarter, according to TimberMart-South. But the increase is little consolation to pine growers. That is the same price as in 2012, when there were half as many homes being built.

Mr. Hopkins worries he might have to sell some of his family’s 70,000 acres near the Florida line, likely to hobby farmers—doctors and dentists from Jacksonville more interested in outdoor recreation than turning profit on timber.
Mr. Hopkins examines new pine growth on his land in Charlton County. He worries he might have to sell some of his family’s 70,000 acres.
Sawmills are running as close to capacity as pandemic precautions will allow and are unable to keep up with lumber demand. Stacks of wood at a Canfor mill.

“If I’m not sustainable, I can’t keep that land,” he said. “Everything is going up except the price of timber.”

Mr. Bembry, the veterinarian, is concerned about passing liability to heirs. He is studying the potential to sell his standing trees into the booming market for carbon offsets, which would pay him not to cut, and has been planting longleaf instead of faster-growing slash, aided by federal habitat restoration programs. When the subsidies expire, the foot-long needles can be raked, baled and sold to garden centers and landscapers.

“The salvation for me has been pine straw,” he said. An acre can annually produce more than $300 worth.

Lee Rhodes wants to cut and restock for the next generation the 10,000 acres of loblolly pine he manages for his family. It wasn’t cut with urgency when prices were high. Now they are so low, and the nearest mill so far, that loggers have turned down jobs on the property northeast of Macon. He wants to hire his son as successor but cannot afford it.

“The first thing I’ve got to have with 10,000 acres is $55,000” for property taxes, he said. “I do wake up some mornings wondering, why am I doing this?”


https://www.wsj.com/articles/lumber-prices-are-soaring-tree-growers-miserable-11614177282

You're dead on about pulp prices. In my lifetime I've seen literally hundreds of thousands of former cotton field and cow pasture planted to improved loblolly. I remember pulp selling in the 25 a cord range (telling my age there with cords) now you can't give it away at 10 a ton.
It's gotten to the point now that the mills are docking you for plantation grown pine saw logs. Fortunately poles are still in demand and increasing in value. We are about to cut almost 100 acres of 40+ yo poles at 50 a ton.

Man that sounds awful!! How much does it cost to cut a ton of poles?

Good read, White!

That's what the cutter/buyer is paying us I don't know what his costs and price at the mill are.
One pole could easily weigh half a ton or more. We figure there's better than 15 poles per acre on this cutting, we are not clear cutting as the rest is young natural regeneration with a good bit in the chip and saw to saw log range.

This is actually the final cut of a clearcut/replant that was done in the early eighties. We're going away from that model of clearcut short rotation as there's no money in pulp or chip and saw. Honestly we're struggling to predict just what the market will be in 20 or so years from now. All we know is quality and diversity seems to be better than property line to property line pulpwood. We've got a good bit of 20yo longleaf on about half the property and are being much more selective on removal of hardwoods and have actually planted hardwoods in the last twenty years.
The biggest takeaway is forget the big paycheck clearcut every decade or so and manage for the spot price market.

Lots of known unknowns ! It seems to me that hardwoods might be the better route as the market for things like cabinet face frames etc likely pay better per bdft and can be usable in much shorter lengths.

Really tough when taxes and equipment etc are ongoing costs.

True, however when the land is paid for and not a primary income source it's overhead is much less. And it doesn't hurt that Alabama's current use ad valorem tax is ridiculously low.

[quote=waggler]^^
You guys are talking apples and pineapples when you're comparing saw logs to pulp.
Pulp prices are down everywhere, in big part due to the huge upswing in lumber production. An increase in trees being harvested for lumber creates an increase in chip production (tops, slabs, etc), this material goes into the pulp supply whether there is a demand for it or not.

Do you guys have any idea what the mills there are paying for softwood logs let's say, 7+" and 32' long?
I would be really surprised if it's not considerably more than it was a year ago.

Here's a list of average log prices in Washington for the month of February, following is a list from last July.
Realistically the prices from the middle column (high) are the prices a logger can expect to receive. Also, most logs are now being quoted at a "camp-run" price, not by various grades. The camp-run quotes being thrown around right now basically are what is shown in the charts as #2 saw prices, 7"+ and 36'long average log length (except cedar 32' lengths).
Notice cedar, it has doubled!



[/quote

You are comparing apple to oranges, big difference between Pacific Northwest softwood and Northeastern softwood prices.

Here in the northeast no one sells spruce fir stud logs 32’ long. Most Canadian stud mills purchase spruce/fir 6” diameter and up, 12’-16’ logs heavy to16 footers. Last I sold it was around $275 - $300 MBF International Rule. 20 years ago the same logs paid $310+ MBF. Red Pine logs around $200MBF, Red Pine poles pay the best depending on length. Local Amish mills pay $275-$300 MBF Doyle for hemlock logs.

^^^^^
Interesting.
When was the last time you sold 12-16 ,foot logs for $275-300?
It would be interesting to know how those short logs would convert to long log volume.
On the west coast you buck logs to a standard length of 40 feet, you try to work the system a little and cut some down as short as 30 feet in order to capture more scalable volume white maintaining a 36 foot average. Under 36 feet and they will ding you on price. This is scribner scale, don't know how that compares to Doyle or international.

In the southeast a log is 16' and half log 8'. Not that they are cut that length in the field but how its called out as in how many logs and half logs in any given tree. Heard more often in relation to hardwood since almost everything is bought and sold by the ton and pine is king.

I just got a flyer from a mill in NW PA. for rough cut hemlock. In Tug Hill NY if I can find anything for less than .80 BDF it's a good deal. I didn't figure his price per board foot out, but his 2x4x8 cost is 2.32 each. I believe he is at .40 or less, on stuff even up to 12" wide, which here would be a premium. I'm going to run down and grab 2000 BF just to sticker and put away.

Last week, I paid $48.97 for ONE sheet of 7/16" CDX plywood, at Home Depot!

Paid $50 each for two treated 12ft 2x12s at Lowe’s yesterday. My wife’s elevated raised bed planter cost me $220 taxes and all! Saw a stack of 8ft 2x4 for $11 each. Blows my mind..

An 8 foot 2x4 for $2.32 is only 44 cents a board foot, that's a steal, better buy a bunch of it before they up the price. Unless there is a catch, like that's the price for economy grade which you can't use for framing.

Wood you believe it.

I agree, here are a couple other prices...1X10X12- $ 4.30...2X4X10- $2.86 It's in Spartanburg, PA if anyone is interested.41957 Glynden Road,16434 I was incorrect on the 2x4x8 price, they are 2.29 and it appears he is at .43 a BF He also has ship lap at some similar prices.

Here in Fla. they're throwing up new 3 story apartment buildings faster than the plumbers and electricians can finish them. I suppose they get a discount on volume but I can't imagine the kind of money they are spending. But then some folks have money to throw away and I suppose some folks need a loss somewhere to balance things out on paper. $1200/month for an apartment is pretty good money though.