Communities Want Trees Thinned. Timber Companies Want Contracts. So What’s The Problem?

Many of the trees that Ford’s Forest Health Company removes are too thin to turn into conventional lumber products, such as boards and planks. So he chips them. And now, six years into his 10-year tree thinning contract with the Forest Service, he has far more chips than he can sell. Four orange-brown heaps of wood chips, as high as 20 feet tall, loom around his small sawmill in the mountain town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The heaps collectively cover five acres, he calculates. They’re so vast that his company has halved the area it thins per year to between 500 and 600 acres. “We’ve slowed down,” he said, “because you can only pile so many wood chips.”The Trump administration, states and local leaders — including many environmentalists — agree that more must be done to avert catastrophic wildfire, including thinning trees. But few timber companies have found a way to make a profit from the stewardship work land managers want.That means the work is costly, and can be delayed while contractors tinker with their business model.Mechanical thinning on steep slopes can cost taxpayers up to $2,000 per acre in Colorado, said Courtney Schultz, director of the public lands policy group at Colorado State University. While it’ll take controlled burns to improve forest conditions on a large scale, she said, the state also needs contractors who can turn forest debris into dollars.