09/12/2026
A very good article. And it's very receptive to this area as well. Greenleaf has been working with the ArborGen Nursery and pushing better genetics and we are starting to recommend wider spacing at planting time. We hope that this will pay off for our clients and help them in the future.
The New Pine Economy: Why Growing Timber Is Becoming a Different Business
By K. Brad Barfield
For generations across South Arkansas, the basic formula for growing pine timber seemed straightforward.
Plant plenty of trees. Let them grow. Thin them when they become crowded. Sell the smaller trees for pulpwood. Give the remaining pines room to add diameter. Then wait for the final sawtimber harvest.
That system helped shape millions of acres of the modern Southern forest.
But the economics underneath it are changing.
The pine tree has not changed. It still responds to sunlight, soil, water and competition much as it always has.
What has changed is everything surrounding the tree.
There are fewer buyers for some classes of wood. Pulpwood prices have weakened dramatically in many Southern markets. Logging contractors are increasingly selective about the tracts they can economically harvest. Mills have closed or reduced production. Meanwhile, decades of successful pine management have created an enormous standing inventory across much of the South.
The result is one of the great paradoxes of modern Southern forestry:
We have become extremely good at growing pine at the same time that simply growing more pine is no longer enough.
The Wall of Wood
Foresters sometimes describe the South’s accumulated timber inventory as a “wall of wood.”
Much of it has roots in the enormous reforestation effort of the late twentieth century. Millions of acres were planted or regenerated in pine. Forest productivity improved. Genetics improved. Landowners became better at growing timber.
Then came the housing collapse and Great Recession of 2007–2009.
Harvests fell.
Trees did what trees do.
They kept growing.
By 2024, estimates from Forisk placed the South-wide pine growth-to-drain ratio at approximately 1.4. In simple terms, Southern forests were growing about 40 percent more pine volume annually than the market was removing.
That does not mean every local timber market is oversupplied. Timber is intensely local. A new sawmill can tighten one procurement area while a mill closure can devastate another.
But across the region as a whole, there is a lot of pine standing on the stump.
And abundant raw material makes it difficult for stumpage prices to rise.
The Pulpwood Problem
The greatest change may be occurring at the bottom of the timber-value ladder.
Pine pulpwood is the small-diameter material traditionally used by pulp and paper mills and certain other fiber consumers. For decades it played an important role in plantation management.
A landowner might plant a relatively dense stand, then make a commercial thinning when the trees reached merchantable size.
The logger removed pulpwood.
The landowner received some income.
The remaining trees received additional growing space.
It was a useful biological treatment that also generated money.
That arrangement becomes much harder when pulpwood itself is worth very little.
During the fourth quarter of 2025, TimberMart-South reported average Southern pine pulpwood stumpage of only $5.96 per ton, down more than 45 percent from its early-2022 peak.
In Arkansas and several other weak markets, reported prices fell below $4 per ton.
By comparison, Southern pine sawtimber averaged $23.23 per ton during the same quarter.
Those figures tell the story.
A ton of pine is not simply a ton of pine.
Its value depends enormously upon what the tree has become.
Growing Diameter Instead of Just Volume
That changes the question a landowner should ask.
The old question might have been:
How much wood can I grow per acre?
The modern question increasingly becomes:
How quickly can I grow the kind of wood somebody actually wants to buy?
That means diameter matters.
A plantation containing enormous biological volume can still be financially disappointing if too much of that volume remains trapped in small-diameter pulpwood.
A somewhat more open stand may contain less total wood at certain points in the rotation but allow individual trees to gain diameter faster.
Those larger stems can eventually enter chip-n-saw and sawtimber markets where stumpage values are considerably higher.
That distinction is helping change plantation design.
The Genetics Inside the Seedling
Another revolution is occurring in something almost invisible when the plantation is established.
The seedling.
Southern tree-improvement programs have spent decades selecting loblolly pine for faster growth, better form, disease resistance and other desirable characteristics.
Traditional improved seedlings were commonly produced through open pollination. The mother tree was known, but pollen might arrive from numerous trees within the orchard.
Controlled-pollinated families go farther.
Both parents are selected.
That allows breeders to combine particular traits and produce families with more predictable performance.
Controlled-pollinated seedlings still represent only part of the Southern loblolly market, but their use has expanded substantially. Recent research from the North Carolina State University Cooperative Tree Improvement Program found controlled-pollinated seedlings had grown from a tiny share of production two decades ago to roughly one-quarter of Southern loblolly seedling production by 2024.
The attraction is obvious.
If a landowner is going to wait twenty-five or thirty years for a tree, the genetics placed in the ground on the first day matter enormously.
But faster growth alone is not enough.
A crooked tree that grows rapidly is still crooked.
A tree highly susceptible to disease may never reach the mill.
Modern breeding programs therefore evaluate combinations of growth, stem straightness, branching characteristics, disease resistance and wood properties.
Forestry is increasingly moving toward something agriculture has understood for generations:
The crop begins with genetics.
Why Fewer Trees May Sometimes Make Sense
That brings us to another change.
Plantation density.
Traditional pine plantations were commonly established at relatively high densities partly because landowners expected future commercial thinnings.
The system works beautifully when there is a healthy market for the trees being removed.
But suppose there is not.
Suppose a landowner plants six hundred or more trees per acre expecting a pulpwood thinning fifteen years later.
Then fifteen years pass.
The pulpwood market is terrible.
The tract is small.
The haul distance is long.
The logging contractor has more profitable jobs elsewhere.
Nobody wants the thinning.
The biological prescription may still say the stand should be thinned.
The market may say otherwise.
That is why foresters and researchers increasingly examine lower planting densities as one possible strategy.
Instead of depending upon a future pulpwood thinning to create growing space, some plantations can be established with fewer stems from the beginning.
Research installations across the South have examined densities ranging from only a few hundred trees per acre to well above a thousand.
The tradeoff is important.
More trees can maximize early stand-level volume.
Fewer trees generally provide more growing space to each individual stem and can accelerate diameter development.
There is no magic number.
A prescription appropriate for industrial timberland in Georgia may be wrong for a family tract near Crossett, Hamburg or Fountain Hill.
Soil, drainage, genetics, markets, site preparation, wildlife objectives, tract size and the owner’s time horizon all matter.
But the principle has changed.
More trees per acre does not automatically mean more money per acre.
The Price of Growing Fewer Trees
Lower-density forestry is not simply a matter of buying fewer seedlings and walking away.
Opening additional growing space also gives competitors additional growing space.
Grass grows.
Hardwood sprouts grow.
Vines grow.
Everything competing with the young pine receives the same sunlight.
That makes site preparation and early competition control particularly important.
Research throughout the South has repeatedly shown that controlling competing woody vegetation and herbaceous plants during establishment can dramatically improve pine survival and growth.
Modern pine management therefore resembles precision agriculture more than the old idea of simply “planting trees.”
The landowner may choose genetics deliberately.
Prepare the site deliberately.
Control vegetation deliberately.
Choose spacing deliberately.
Measure growth deliberately.
And schedule harvests according to both biology and economics.
The forest may look simple from the highway.
The financial model behind it is becoming anything but simple.
The Most Important Mill May Be the One Fifty Miles Away
Perhaps the greatest mistake in talking about “the timber market” is pretending there is only one.
Timber does not travel economically forever.
Transportation matters too much.
A pine tree standing in Ashley County must eventually reach an actual facility capable of using it.
That means the economic value of a forest can depend heavily upon what mills exist within practical hauling distance.
A new sawmill can change the value of surrounding forests.
A pulp mill closure can do the opposite.
A pellet plant, OSB facility or other wood consumer can create demand for material that previously had few buyers.
That is why two apparently identical pine plantations a hundred miles apart may have very different economic futures.
Forestry remains biological.
Timber markets are geographical.
The Logger Has Become Part of the Equation
There is another limitation that does not show up on a forest inventory sheet.
Someone must actually harvest the trees.
Logging is capital intensive.
Modern equipment can cost enormous sums. Diesel, insurance, repairs, transportation and labor all affect whether a tract can be harvested profitably.
That creates a simple business reality.
A logging contractor with limited crews and expensive equipment will naturally prefer jobs capable of producing enough valuable wood to justify moving that equipment.
Small-volume pulpwood thinnings can struggle to compete.
That does not mean commercial thinning is disappearing.
Far from it.
But landowners can no longer assume that every biologically desirable thinning will automatically attract a logger at an economically attractive price.
Forestry prescriptions increasingly have to consider the harvesting infrastructure that will exist when the trees are ready—not merely the trees themselves.
Time Is Part of the Crop
Professional timber investors use a concept known as Land Expectation Value, or LEV.
The mathematics can become complicated, but the principle is simple.
A dollar received today is worth more than a dollar received decades from now.
Therefore forestry is not merely concerned with how much money a forest ultimately produces.
It matters when the money arrives.
If better genetics or better management allows a tree to enter a valuable product class several years sooner, that acceleration has financial value.
If a management treatment costs money today but produces only a small benefit thirty years later, that treatment may not make financial sense.
This is why modern forestry increasingly evaluates the entire rotation as an investment rather than simply measuring tons of timber.
Every decision occupies a place on the timeline.
Seedling cost.
Site preparation.
Herbicide.
Taxes.
Management.
Thinning.
Final harvest.
Even a biologically excellent treatment can be a poor investment if its cost exceeds the discounted value it creates.
The Tax Side Matters Too
Timber also occupies an unusual place in the federal tax code.
Depending upon ownership, holding period and method of sale, qualifying timber income may receive capital-gain treatment rather than being taxed entirely as ordinary income.
Sections 631(a) and 631(b) of the Internal Revenue Code are particularly important in timber taxation, although the exact treatment depends upon the circumstances of the owner and sale.
That is one reason experienced landowners maintain timber basis records and consult foresters, accountants or attorneys familiar with timber taxation before major harvests.
Growing the tree is only part of managing the asset.
Selling it correctly matters too.
What This Means for South Arkansas
None of this means commercial pine forestry is finished.
South Arkansas possesses something extraordinarily valuable:
the biological ability to grow Southern pine extremely well.
The region has spent more than a century learning how to do it.
Crossett became internationally important in forestry precisely because researchers and land managers demonstrated that Southern pine forests could be deliberately managed rather than simply cut and abandoned.
That lesson remains true.
But the next chapter may require a different kind of management.
The objective is becoming less about producing the greatest possible number of pine stems and more about producing the right stems, of the right quality, at the right diameter, at the right time, for the mills that actually exist within hauling distance.
That may mean better genetics.
It may mean different spacing.
It may mean more intensive establishment work.
It may mean delaying a harvest.
It may mean thinning.
It may mean designing a rotation that does not depend upon a weak pulpwood market at all.
And it may mean managing different portions of the same property for completely different objectives.
The Tree Is Still Growing. The Business Around It Has Changed.
There was a time when simply owning a stand of Southern pine seemed almost synonymous with owning future timber income.
The relationship is no longer that simple.
The South has become exceptionally good at producing wood.
Perhaps too good.
That abundance has forced forestry into its next stage.
The successful timberland owner of the future may not be the person who grows the most trees.
It may be the person who understands most clearly what those trees must eventually become.
Because the most important question in modern forestry is no longer simply:
How much timber can this acre grow?
It is:
What should this acre grow—and who will want to buy it when it is ready?
That is a very different question.
And across the pine country of South Arkansas, it may define the next generation of forestry.
Sources: This essay draws on TimberMart-South quarterly market reporting, including fourth-quarter 2025 Southern stumpage data; Forisk Consulting research on Southern timber supply, growth-to-drain conditions and recent mill openings and closures; research associated with the North Carolina State University Cooperative Tree Improvement Program on controlled-pollinated loblolly pine; Plantation Management Research Cooperative studies at the University of Georgia on planting density and intensive loblolly pine management; Alabama Cooperative Extension forestry guidance; and National Timber Tax materials concerning federal timber taxation and Internal Revenue Code Sections 631(a) and 631(b). Market conditions are highly localized and management prescriptions should be developed for the individual property. Essay researched and written by K. Brad Barfield.
