A tractor-trailer full of neatly packaged dimensional lumber stops for one last check before leaving Biewer Sawmill in McBain.
It’s heading to a Menards distribution center in Ohio. Just beyond the tractor-trailer are stacks and stacks of trees. They look like Lincoln Logs with the bark still on. The whole place smells like pine.
“These logs here are all 16-foot red pine and then 12-foot white pine in that section right there,” says Wes Windover, pointing to the stacks. He’s in charge of finding and buying that timber.
This reporting is made possible by the Northern Michigan Journalism Collaborative, led by Bridge Michigan and Interlochen Public Radio, and funded by Press Forward Northern Michigan.
The logs are trucked in from northern Michigan’s forests, including the region hit hard by an ice storm earlier this spring. The storm impacted about 3 million acres of trees in 30 counties. Hardwoods like maple and oak were shredded while softwoods like pine snapped in half. Foresters, loggers and sawmills in the region worked around the clock to salvage as much of that timber as possible.
Now, though, there’s a new concern: Much of northern Michigan’s “wood basket” — worth about $2.2 billion — has been emptied.
The glut of timber after the storm had to be harvested quickly, flooding the market and leading to a good year for Up North foresters this year. But now there’s little left to harvest that the storm didn’t destroy, and foresters worry what the next several years will look like until newly planted trees can replace what the storm took away.
The sudden shortage could ripple throughout the supply chain in the coming years, crippling an important sector of northern Michigan's economy, foresters say.
“It really sucks to see years of your labors just get wiped out,” said Bryce Metcalfe, a forester based out of Grayling. “Like building a house and then watching it blow down.”
‘All of a sudden everything’s dead’
A wood basket is the geographic radius around a sawmill. Sawmills are strategically located near the species in which they specialize. In the case of a few big mills in northern Michigan, like Biewer Sawmill in McBain, that’s pine. But pine species were some of the hardest hit by the ice storm.
“It's like standing in the middle of your farm field and all of a sudden everything's dead around you, and you can't move your farm because you're stuck there,” said Justin Knepper, executive director of the Michigan Association of Timbermen. “You went and dropped millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars into your mill in that spot.”
The northern Lower Peninsula is a powerhouse for Michigan’s timber industry. It accounts for about 40% of the state’s entire sawmill output, according to numbers from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
“Most of the red pine plantations, from Gaylord to the Mackinac Bridge and from Petoskey to Alpena have been severely damaged, if not completely destroyed,” said Metcalfe, the Grayling forester. “That's just a huge portion of the wood basket that's out there.”
About a quarter of Michigan’s state-owned forestland was damaged by the storm and had to be salvaged as quickly as possible.
“There's so much that got harvested that should not have gotten harvested for another five, 10, 20 years,” said Brenda Haskill, supervisor for the DNR’s timber sales and forest utilization unit. “For those of us that understand and monitor the markets and the forest industry, the coming five to 10 years could be very difficult with certain wood species in certain areas.”
‘You lose customers that way’
Windover estimates about a quarter of Biewer Sawmill’s timber comes to McBain from the ice storm zone.
Another major pine mill, PotlatchDeltic near Marquette, also sources a significant amount of timber from the area.
“We're looking at probably 10(%) to 15% less red pine on the market next year because of this, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it is in the big scheme of things,” Windover said.
It’s unlikely the cost of two-by-fours will go up much at Menards — those companies can just ship in lumber from the rest of the country. But Metcalfe, the Grayling forester, said price increases are a possibility down the road.
“Because instead of shipping in those two-by-fours from Michigan to a Michigan location, they’re hauling them in from an out-of-state location,” he said.
But the regional timber industry will be hit hardest. People like Windover will have to send their logging crews farther, paying more for fuel and hauling costs. Plus, more buyers will be competing for less available timber.
It might also mean a dip in the amount of products coming out of northern lower Michigan and a rise in those same products coming from other parts of the region or country.
“We're hoping that doesn't happen,” Windover said. “You lose customers that way if you can't produce enough for them.”
But exactly how much production will go down is still unknown. The state won’t have exact estimates until next year, when the remaining patches of damaged forest are cleaned.
“What I don't want is people to think, ‘Oh, all the sawmills in northern Michigan are going to shut down.’ No, they're not,” said Haskill, with the DNR. “It is going to change the way in which business is done, to the extent of availability, distance to markets, distance to harvest. It could be a little bit rough for a couple years.”
Knepper, with the Michigan Association of Timbermen, is less optimistic.
“Many of our mills might ride it out. Our loggers might be able to ride it out,” he said. “But the industry will (probably) have to go through some downsizing and/or correction in part due to the ice storm.”
Metcalfe, the forester in Grayling, put the changes coming to mills in the region more simply: “Make less, make something different (or) move.”
The state recently set aside $14 million to replant red pine after the ice storm. That money will go toward prepping sites, buying seed and paying nurseries to grow extra stock for the DNR. But it’s likely to take at least three to five years for all the damaged acreage to be replanted — and decades longer for those trees to be useful to the industry.
“It's kind of a long-term problem that, unfortunately, needs to be addressed quickly,” said Travis Heikkinen, a procurement manager at PotlatchDeltic — the pine mill near Marquette that produces stud lumber like two-by-fours. “We'll really see the effects of it further down the pipeline.”
But maybe the biggest question mark is what happens in the decades between now and when that timber is harvestable again.
“While we're fortunate enough to have a very large procurement area, it seems like we are seeing more and more of these events,” said Heikkinen. “The blowdown in Wisconsin and the ice storm now in Michigan — just seems like they're happening more and more now.”
