Wyoming has a small, struggling lumber industry that has been on life support of late, and it was heartened to hear President Donald Trump say that America doesn’t need lumber from Canada.
Neiman Enterprises, Inc., owned by Jim Neiman, is one of Wyoming’s last remaining large lumber production companies. Today it still has operations in Wyoming, South Dakota and Colorado hanging in there, but they are all in peril under current market conditions.
“Canada subsidizes the forest products industry,” Neiman said. “And that, along with the exchange rates, gives them, in a lot of cases, clear advantages.”
In addition to that imbalance, the last two years have brought a dramatic slump in prices for the lumber industry right alongside some of the highest inflation Neiman has ever seen. His costs are up 30%, while his prices are now well below pre-COVID levels.
“So, there’s a real need to get prices back to a level that matches up, so industry can survive,” Neiman said.
A tariff that evens the playing field between domestic and imported timber could help the industry, Neiman said — at least in the short-term. He doesn’t believe it would completely stem the tide of Canadian lumber.
Wyoming Lumber Used To Be Much Bigger
State Sen. Ogden Driskill, R-Devils Tower, remembers how big Wyoming’s lumber industry used to be in the Hulett and Devils Tower area.
“Our little town where I live has been driven by cowboys and lumber,” Ogden said. “The whole time when I grew up, the downtown, there were loggers and ranchers. It’s been a backbone of where I grew up.”
Wyoming once had lumber operations across the state, Neiman added, back when he was studying range management at the University of Wyoming, in lieu of a forestry management degree, which was not then available.
There was a mill in Laramie, one at Fox Park, one at Encampment, one in Sheridan, one in Saratoga, Neiman said.
“Those are all gone except for the one at Saratoga,” he said. “And it’s only running one shift.”
The market began shifting dramatically in the late 1990s, when Congress passed legislation removing millions of acres of forest land away from commercial use, Neiman said.
As the supply of lumber available to lumber companies dwindled, fewer and fewer lumber mills were able to survive.
“Historically, you need to run two shifts to be profitable,” Neiman said.
Forest management practices have continued to get more and more restrictive when it comes to logging, further depressing supply and adding up to more problems for the industry.
In 2018, Wyoming milled more than 80 million board feet of lumber. But, last year, it was more like 10 million board feet, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“The focus has been on removing the very small trees to reduce fire risk, trying to make the forest more fire resilient,” Neiman said. “In principle, that’s good, but you don’t have any markup for that material. So where are you going to go with all the small trees?”
Timber from a U.S. Forest Service sale in Wyoming in this file photo. (U.S. Forest Service)Forest Fires And Logging
A larger supply would cure many of the ills Wyoming’s lumber industry has faced and would bring his own business back to full vitality, Neiman said. It would also allow him to employ more people not just in Wyoming, but in Colorado and South Dakota.
He now has about 450 employees, but with an adequate supply of lumber that would be more like in the 650 range.
That would not just be good for his business, but for forests in general. Both Neiman and Driskill believe that current forest management practices are not as fire resilient as the past multi-use concept, when more old-growth trees could be harvested from forests.
“Teddy Roosevelt looked at the forest as a multi-level thing,” Driskill said. “And … one of the base levels of it was honest forest health management and a logging industry.
“As we’ve moved away from intense management of our timber grounds to a preservation mode, you can watch the fires grow right alongside of it.”
Forests, Driskill added, are renewable resources.
“We can manage it into what we want,” he said. “Wyoming spent about $10 million on forest health in the Black Hills Forest, and consequently a big part of the Black Hills Forest is still green. It doesn’t have major issues or bugs in it.
“But in the last seven or eight years, we’ve seen a turn in the forest service, that they no longer actively manage it, and they continue to cut the sell quota down.”
That’s leading nowhere good for that forest, Driskill said.
“If that continues, I’ll make a crystal ball prediction that the Black Hills will have catastrophe-level fires in the next couple decades because of their current management practices,” he said. “They basically have quit cutting timber, and it’s just a given, when you quit thinning and cutting the timber to a major degree you’re going to get a lot of ground growth.”
That ground growth makes for more intense, bigger fires. The fires in Wyoming last year, where almost a million acres burned up over the summer, are just one example of that dynamic in action.
“You can literally look around at Devils Tower and look at the Park Service, who does not cut timber,” Driskill said. “And they’ve had numbers of prescribed burns get out of control, because they don’t graze or log.”
Renée Jean can be reached at [email protected].
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Publish date : 2025-02-28 05:02:00
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