Until the ground froze in early January, area loggers couldn’t get back into spruce swamps or wet areas to harvest wood, said Wayne Brandt, executive vice president of Minnesota Forest Industries and Minnesota Timber Producers Association in a phone interview this week.
“The cold weather allowed them to ramp up to full production,” said Brandt.
Just how long winter will last is another thing. “It could be a short season if break-up occurs in mid- March, or late March,” he said.
Because of the long fall and early warm winter, timber producers worked summer sales much longer than they normally would, and Brandt said he wasn’t sure how they would resolve that when the snow left and it was time to head back to summer sales, assuming they had wood left on them.
Brandt said markets look good for pine, spruce and poplar, and most timber sales offered by the U.S. Forest Service and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources have sold.
“The exception will be for sales that have a tough access or contain a low volume of wood or are a long way from market,” said Brandt. “A logger might be able to overcome one of those obstacles to bid on a sale, but not on two or more. Those sales tend to sit.
“I was pleased with the [Minnesota Department of Natural Resources] DNR’s super auction held last year. They found an innovative way to combine smaller sales into one large sale. By packaging them together it provided a certainty for the logger [Stan Nelson] that he would have a significant volume of wood to log for a long period of time.”
The biggest challenge to loggers in Cook and Lake counties is the distance to market and the quality of wood.
“The quality of wood on many sales in Lake County is poor. They (U.S. Forest Service) let the wood get too old before putting it up for sale. There is a lot of cull at the sawmills and some of the stands don’t have enough cords per acre to make them profitable to log.”
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