Mike Pennington eased his pickup to the edge of a muddy road to let a log truck pass. Thick stands of pine trees crowded the road on both sides.
“There’s more trees standing now than ever before,” said Pennington, an Arkansas timber industry veteran and owner of LD Long Inc., a logging company. “There is a glut of pine. There’s a sea of pine.”
Hardwood growth, while not at record levels, also is high, industry experts say. Oversupply drives down prices in any market, but in the timber business it also increases risks to producers’ inventory — overly dense forests full of stressed trees are more susceptible to insect infestations, disease, storms and wildfires.
“The supply is just huge and it’s going to take us a while to chew through it,” said Matthew Pelkki, who holds the George H. Clippert Endowed Chair of Forest Economics at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. “It’s a manageable problem, but we’re sitting on a powder keg.” Essentially, Pelkki said, landowners in Arkansas are growing trees faster than they can be cut.
Numbers provided by the Arkansas Forestry Commission support that contention. In 1995-2005, the last survey period before the recession, Arkansas had 38.5 million tons of mature trees available for harvest, and 31.5 million tons were actually removed from the land. That left a surplus of 7 million tons.
From Arkansas Online: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2015/sep/20/timber-glut-worries-state-loggers-20150/