Timber Was Gold in the South–Until a Market Collapse Crushed the Forest Economy

SAVANNAH, Ga.—Bill Howard’s family has earned a living from the piney woods of southeast Georgia since 1898, when his great-grandfather and seven great-great uncles started cutting lumber with a portable sawmill.

Over four generations, the Howards built a permanent mill in Statesboro, Ga., and added timberland to feed it. Today the family employs roughly 300 people between the sawmill, two other plants and three builder-supply yards.

The collapse of pulpwood markets in the region is threatening the prospects of a fifth generation working the woods.

The South, and Georgia in particular, have borne the brunt of a historic run of pulp and paper-mill closures as recycled boxes, cheap imported pulp and more thrifty packing by e-commerce giants, including Amazon.com, have hit demand. Last year, the U.S. shed roughly 10% of its capacity to produce containerboard, the thick paper used to make shipping and moving boxes.

Demand for pulpwood—trees unfit for making lumber but fine for cardboard and paper—plummeted. So did demand for wood chips, sawdust and other byproducts that are crucial to the bottom lines of sawyers like the Howards. Prices across the South are at the lowest level in nearly 40 years before factoring in inflation. In some parts, there’s essentially no market. Some growers are, for the first time, having to pay to have their pulpwood removed.

The Howard family lost important buyers for its pulpwood, as well as for the residuals from its sawmill, when International Paper IP -3.65%decrease; down pointing triangle closed an 89-year-old containerboard mill in Savannah and another south of the city last year.

“We went from the best pulpwood market in the nation to the pits,” Howard said. “$16 a ton for it last year—that’s the number everyone talks about at the breakfast club. Now, it’s zero to $5.”

Adding to the worries about his bottom line is the existential threat that poor prices will discourage growers from replanting pine.

“If they’re not planting trees,” said Howard, “I’m not going to have anything to cut.”

It could reshape the South’s rural economy—not to mention its landscape.

The region’s original longleaf forest was mostly logged out by the 1930s when a scientist in Savannah named Charles Herty discovered how to make paper from the young loblolly and slash pine sprouting on the cutover. The breakthrough transformed the South.

Paper mills, which couldn’t chase after the receding forest like Howard’s ancestors and other lumber producers had done with ox-drawn peckerwood mills, started to promote timber as a crop to be replanted rather than a quarry to be mined.

With the boll weevil finishing off King Cotton, paper producers’ “plant ’em thick, cut ’em quick” approach spread.

From Virginia to north Florida and west to Texas, tens of millions of denuded acres were planted with rows of pine, restoring the region’s canopy and creating a new asset class. Not since Eli Whitney’s cotton gin had the Southern economy and its terrain been so changed.

Raising pine trees helped families hold on to land without more intensive farming and it helped propel forestry and related manufacturing into the rural South’s dominant industries. The federal government encouraged pine planting with annual payments to landowners through programs meant to reduce erosion and support crop prices by converting worn-out farmland.

For nearly 100 years the industry’s growth put more people in the tree business and helped those already in it to expand. A paper company gave the Howards a wood chipper for their sawmill in the 1960s, and they began supplying pulp mills on the coast. In the 1970s the Howards, like many Southerners, planted pine on eroded cropland.

Even after a quarter-century of declining paper markets, forestry and related manufacturing remain among the region’s largest industries and employers. There are more than six million owners with at least 10 wooded acres in the South, academics and forestry consultants have estimated. In Georgia, the top U.S. timber-industry state, 88% of woodlands are owned by individuals and businesses.

But trees are now growing faster than wood is being harvested.

Pine plantations are started with several hundred seedlings an acre. Dense planting forces the trees to grow straight without many branches, reducing knots in lumber. At some point, though, the overcrowding stunts growth. Stressed trees become susceptible to insects and disease.

Thinning the pine is traditionally the first big payday for growers after years of expenses, making it easier to wait the 25 to 30 years it takes for a tree to grow into more valuable products like two-by-fours and utility poles. Now, for some timberland owners, it’s just one more bill as they’re being forced to pay to have the trees removed.

Some timberland owners, worried that planting could saddle their heirs with trees they won’t be able to sell, are rethinking the future.

Howard is planting fewer seedlings per acre to reduce upfront costs and thinning. Others have leased land for solar farms. ArborGen, one of the world’s largest suppliers of loblolly seedlings, said sales volume in the South has dropped more than 20% over its past two fiscal years.

Joe Hopkins, who manages 75,000 acres of pine owned by his family and others in southeast Georgia, still has a market for his pulpwood. But the price has been depressed by a flood of fiber from adjacent areas where mills have closed.

He struggles to net a 1% return for shareholders in the timberland operations his great uncle and grandfather established. Selling parcels for weekend homes and ranchettes is tempting given how land values have risen relative to what timber earns.

“The day a forest landowner becomes wealthy is the day he quits being a forest landowner,” Hopkins said. “That’s the day I call a stockbroker and say, ‘Hey, I’m good with 6%—that’s 600% more than I’ve been getting.’”

Across the Okefenokee Swamp, family-owned forestry company Superior Pine Products has replaced some of the timber on its 110,000 acres with blueberries, growing Southern highbush varieties that arrive at supermarkets between crops from Florida and northern states.

Chief Executive Scott Griffin is also looking into solar and carbon markets. To mitigate natural-disaster risk, Superior bought timberland in other states, but market forces have been hard to outflank. An Arkansas thinning cost him $1.50 a ton.

“There’s only so much you can diversify,” he said. “Timber has been our bread and butter for 100 years.”

A search is on to create new sources of demand. Weyerhaeuser, the South’s largest timberland owner with about 6.6 million acres in 11 states, is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build facilities in Arkansas and Mississippi to turn pulpwood surpluses into engineered lumber and an alternative to metallurgical coal, respectively.

Lobbyists are pushing for laws to encourage burning wood pellets to generate electricity. Cellulose-based jet fuel, battery materials and fabrics are all being touted. There is hope that a resurgent housing market will boost demand for engineered wood panels used for roofs and floors.

“It’s an industry in crisis,” said Frank Peeples.

Peeples, whose grandfather entered the timber business in South Carolina in the 1950s, remembers a time when pulpwood was so profitable it didn’t pay to wait for lumber, and young trees were clear-cut. He now runs a bulk-shipping terminal down river from the closed Savannah mill that in an earlier era was where barrels of turpentine, extracted from pine trees, were exported.

Next month, he and others in timber and state and federal government will host European Union officials in hopes of convincing the trade bloc to lift its ban on sulfuryl fluoride, a fumigant, which would enable wood chips to be exported to the EU.

“Without a pulpwood market,” Peeples said, “there is a real question about the long-term viability of our forest industry in the U.S. South.”

Union Bag & Paper—later Union Camp—opened its Savannah mill in 1936. It became the world’s largest paper mill for a time and lorded over the city, where it employed more than 5,000 in its heyday. Residents of Savannah, now a tourist mecca known for its moss-draped squares and antebellum architecture, tolerated the river pollution and dismissed the mill’s rotten odor as “the smell of money.”

The goodwill extended far into the hinterlands, where Union encouraged and counseled pine planters.

Lynda Beam’s father had a casual approach to timber on the family land northwest of Savannah. He ran a lumber and millwork business in the city and used the country place mostly for hunting and gatherings.

“If he had a big bill, he’d go cut some,” Beam said.

She pestered him to manage the property for timber production and eventually he relented. With advice from Union and the University of Georgia county extension office, she began raising pine.

Loggers were on the property last summer thinning a patch when she and her grandson, Will Wheat, learned that International Paper was closing the Savannah mill, as well as its smaller containerboard mill in rural Riceboro. The closures cost the U.S. about 3% of its containerboard capacity—and the family its pulpwood buyer.

The digital age has crushed demand for newsprint and office paper, but e-commerce promised a golden era for corrugated boxes. The Savannah mill had already shifted from paper bags to containerboard by the time International Paper bought Union in 1999.

U.S. box shipments surged to a record in 2021 during the pandemic-fueled stay-at-home shopping spree. Yet on a per-capita basis, demand peaked in 1999, according to Sakonnet Research.

Shippers like Amazon made strides sending items in the smallest box possible and eliminating boxes packed inside other boxes. Plastic mailers and paper envelopes took market share. New containerboard mills process recycled boxes, not wood pulp. Cheaper, faster-growing eucalyptus from Brazil, excluded from recent tariffs, has displaced domestic pulp.

The aging Savannah plant had become uncompetitive with other mills and the containerboard it produced was being shipped into less profitable overseas markets rather than to International Paper’s box plants, which are the packaging company’s focus, executives said. Rather than spend $300 million on a new roof and other repairs needed to keep the mill running, the Memphis company invested $250 million in a more modern facility in Selma, Ala., to boost production of lightweight containerboard popular with shippers looking to trim fuel costs.

International Paper has listed the roughly 735-acre Savannah River site and its Riceboro property for sale.

Beam and Wheat are now raking longleaf pine straw and selling it to garden centers until the market improves.

But timber has unique risks—hurricanes, fire, feral hogs—that can make waiting a risky proposition. Flooding two years ago during Hurricane Helene swept beavers inland from the Ogeechee River. They went to work and standing water stressed a swath of trees. Wood-boring beetles attacked. By the time the beavers were trapped and their dams dismantled, a few dozen acres of trees were dead and too dangerous to remove.

Besides last summer’s interrupted logging job, several hundred acres of fast-growing loblolly planted in 2017 and 2018 are coming due for thinning.

“We’ll continue to rake and wait it out,” said Wheat, the fifth generation to run Guerry Lumber.

He’s already planted pine at the farm for his young daughters to harvest when they take over.

Convincing others to do the same has become an important part of the job at Pierce Timber. The Blackshear, Ga., logging firm buys standing timber from landowners, deploys logging crews and hauls the wood to mills. Riceboro was a major destination.

“Our customers come in talking about the next generation,” said Trey Thompson, who is following his father and grandfather at Pierce. “I don’t know any other business like that other than lawyers setting up wills.”

Thompson was planning on becoming a lawyer himself when a summer working in the woods led him to join the family firm and buy timberland of his own.

He’s been installing new technology at Pierce to help reposition loggers and redraw hauling routes since Riceboro closed. “If prices are lower, then efficiency is key.”

He also recently planted pines that will reach maturity alongside his 4-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. “The third generation ain’t gonna be where it stops.”