Oregon’s timber harvest decreased slightly last year, ending a four-year run of gains that began after the Great Recession, the state Department of Forestry said Wednesday.
The 4.13 billion board feet harvested in 2014 represents a 1.7 per cent decline from the year before. It was, however, the second consecutive year of more than 4 billion board feet, a total Oregon had not seen since 2006.
The state hit a recession low of 2.7 billion board feet in 2009. It takes 10,000 board feet to build a roughly 1,800-square-foot house.
The Forestry Department said in its annual harvest report it doesn’t expect a big change in 2015.
Timber Harvest, Oregon
Brandon Kaetzel, a top economist at the department, said several issues will likely keep the harvest from rising, including reduced port access, a challenging export market and housing starts not reaching the levels some expected.
Sixty per cent of Oregon’s forest land is federal. Industrial and family owned lands comprise another 34 per cent and the rest is divided between entities such as the state, counties and First Nations.
Percentage-wise, the largest harvest spikes in 2014 were on US Bureau of Land Management lands west of the Cascades, boosted by salvage logging from the Douglas Complex fire, and on US Forest Service lands east of the Cascades.
The private industry harvest declined 5 per cent, the report states, and the harvest on Native American forestland dropped 14 per cent — from 66 million board feet to 57 million board feet.
Oregon’s largest timber harvest was 9.74 billion board feet in 1972. It has not exceeded 5 billion since 1993.