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Murf, it's kind of funny how people play the game. A few years back, Weyerhaeuser (the largest employer and private landowner in this area) was one of the biggest companies hollering for tariffs on Canadian lumber.
So what did they do? They bought MacMillan Bloedel Limited in 1999. Today, Weyerhaeuser Canada holds renewable, long-term licenses on 32.6 million acres of forestlands in five provinces and owns 664,000 acres.
Guess who's against the lumber tariff now! Oh, the games people play...
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Grinder Murf covered some of this. I can only address issues pertaining to B.C. It is only 60% of the exports to the US, but I only worked in forestry and ministry of forest in this province, not Ontario or other provinces.
In the 60 and 70's a company called Columbia Cellulose a US company owned the major timber rights in the northern 1/2 of the province. In the area I lived they owned the Kitsam-Kalem-Nass area. The total area is approximately 200 miles long and 100 miles wide roughly 1/4 the size of Alabama. They also own other large tracts in other areas near by. Most of the area was prime 1st growth timber growing in relatively flat valleys. Prime in this area means 300+ foot trees.
They clear cut all the valleys selling much of the timber over seas or to the US mills. They ran the pulp mill and logging operation into the ground, blew up the boiler and killed people. They never replanted a thing. After some 30 years of raping the prime timber, they claimed they were not making any money and in about 74 they walked out of the province and gave all the responsibility to the province for 1 dollar. (I know at the time I lived in Terrace B.C.)
For example a single tree in the area typically would be worth $20,000 dollars or more in raw logs at the railroad tracks at the time. Remember a new car was 3-7 thousand at this time.
After this the laws in the province required that resource companies have a provincial entity so the government could control them better and post bonds for the replanting costs.
Timber rights on public lands in B.C. are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Sealed bids are submitted to the province after plots are advertised in the news papers. Any company with a national identity can bid. For example some of the larger operations in the Sunshine Coast were Weldwood and Rainier, american base companies.
Part of the problem in B.C. is the fact that the rights were sold a number of years ago. For example the northern Peace River plateau area was sold when you could only log in the winter as there is a lot of muskeg. A faller wandered around in 30-40 below weather in waist deep snow. Back in the 60's and 70's the poor Canadian companies could only afford this area and CanFor and others bought here not the rich expensive coastal forests. Suddenly in the 80’s mechanized logging arrived making logging more profitable and the stumpage fees look ridiculous. Canfor and other built new computerized saw mills intergrated with new pulp operations. The new saw heads made more efficient use of a raw log and reduce the labor significantly. Even the coastal operations in B.C. with older mills and water transport could not compete and were idled.
Likewise the water rights and electricity from power generation contracts made in the 50’s between US governments and B.C., fractions of cents per kilowatt look ridiculous. Naturally as Murf stated there are no complaints on the US side about dumping energy.
I now live in Alabama. I pay about 50 dollars an acre for land tax. No stumpage is paid when you log. The large timber company next door pays about 50 cents and acre for their land and no stumpage. Which area do I think is subsidizing? We just have big business on one side and no one lobbying for the small consumer.
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Thanks for the history lesson. I guess greed is universal.
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My neighbor and I are in the process of installing a joint use electric/telecom 270' ditchline with conduit. A couple of weeks ago we brought schedule 40 2" PVC for $4.30/10ft section. Yesterday, we brought the same 2" conduit to complete the telecom part and paid $8.00/10ft section.
I have also heard that plywood has increased in price about 50%. I guess this is to be expected. Dave
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If it's not going up due to demand, it'll go up due to the cost of transportation. Has anyone seen the cost of diesel fuel lately? Crap!! Gas here is down to $2.29, but diesel is climbing and has passed $3.15 a gallon. I'll have to park my diesel pickup soon. Local station has a $75 cap on fuel purchase at the non-semi rig pumps. I can't fill my F-250 for $75.
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Well I did not get to the top of the Dodge's tank with $105 dollars the other day. Diesel is near $3.20 around here.
Well on the back pages of the local MS rag I found the news that the USDA estimates that we lost or damaged 19 billion board feet of timber with the two hurricanes. Most of it is yellow and white pine that will go moldy in a few months. They say they need to get it out or it will all be waste. Well it has been a month and a half and this is the first I have heard about it so?
To put in prospective it is about 1/2 a years production of US lumber or 1 years worth of Canadian imports. You could say we lost 2 percent of the softwood lumber available in the next 30 years.
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Here in Oregon the Biscuit fire burned 500,000 acres of old growth forest. The environmentalists have had salvage logging of hundreds of millions of board feet of timber from that burn tied up in lawsuits for years. It's probably too late now, a lot of it has rotted. What a waste.
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"...diesel is climbing and has passed $3.15 a gallon. I'll have to park my diesel pickup soon."
Wanna trade? Ours is DOWN to just under $4.75 a gallon now.
Peters, Ken, another forum I participate in a bit is Forestry related. They were talking about exactly this the other day. I think the 19 billion BF is a conservative number. We flew over a very vast area with not a single tree remaining vertical. They say there is some 5 million acres of timber destroyed. It would have had a market value of $5 billion had it been harvested.
To put those numbers in perspective a little, that would be enough wood to produce 800,000 single family homes AND 25 million tons of paper and paperboard.
However, in the case of the hurricanes they are expiditing efforts to reclaim as much of the wood as possible. They are ven recruiting owners of small portable sawmills to come in and saw on-site for the rebuilding effort.
Best of luck.
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Our diesel is $3.15 and has held this price for a couple of weeks while gasoline has dropped to $2.56.
I assume you have been keeping up with Wilma, she became a cat 5 hurricane overnight and is projected to hit Ft Meyers, Florida on Saturday. About the same place as Charley last summer.
However, not much timber there to destroy. Just rebuilt homes and businesses.
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Murf from the report I read, the 800,000 homes and 25 million tons is what they believe they can save. The other figure, the amount lost is near twice that. As you stated you need more capacity in a relatively small area to process all this timber.
Kyvette, I am finally getting people in the area interested in ICF houses. We need to rebuild but as the price of timber goes out of site, maybe people will start looking for better safer methods of construction.
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