By Lori Kersey
While the old adage says money doesn’t grow on trees, it doesn’t seem to hold the same truth for the landowners, loggers, sawmill operators and manufacturers that make up the Mountain State’s thriving forestry industry.
According to a 2019 economic study of the industry by West Virginia University, forestry generates approximately $3.4 billion each year and employs more than 19,000 people statewide.
“West Virginia is the third most forested state in the country,” says Eric Carlson, executive director of the West Virginia Forestry Association (WVFA), a nonprofit organization that represents all sectors of the state’s forestry supply chain, from landowners to manufacturers. “We’re about four times the size of agriculture in sheer economic impact according to the West Virginia Department of Agriculture’s latest information.”
While this industry has a rich history in West Virginia, many people know little to nothing about it, its presence or its success.
“It’s all run by closely held private companies,” says John Crites II, president of Allegheny Wood Products. “We’re not exactly the great big factories you see along the road. A lot of these operations are out in the woods. There are some places where sawmills are prominent in the community, but in most cases, a lot of people in the community don’t even know they’re there.”
Crites’ father founded Allegheny Wood Products in 1973 with one sawmill in Riverton, WV, which is located in Pendleton County. Today it is one of the largest producers of eastern U.S. hardwoods, with six sawmills and four dry kiln facilities in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
While cutting down trees is not a popular practice among environmentalists, according to Crites, of all building materials, wood has the lowest carbon footprint.
“In a lot of cases, wood actually has a negative carbon footprint, so we’re even better than carbon neutral,” he says. “The growing of trees takes carbon out of the atmosphere. They are literally sequestering carbon. As you harvest timber, it is one of the least energy intensive building materials when you analyze the process of harvesting timber and putting it into products.”
In recent decades, the way trees are harvested has become more thoughtful and sustainable. The WVFA also serves as the local affiliate of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), a Canadian-based nonprofit whose mission is to advance sustainability through forest-focused initiatives. SFI operates a third-party verification program for sustainable forests and the products they produce.
“It’s very complex. There are hundreds of conditions companies must meet, and the auditors will come in and periodically audit the records,” says Carlson. “These companies are very dedicated to making sure they have good audits and that they maintain the certification. Then those products can be sold as certified products.”
Products marked with the SFI’s evergreen tree label are certified to be from well-managed, sustainable forests.
“You’ll see some of that on published books and packaging and a lot on cardboard packaging that verifies that product came from a well-managed forest,” says Carlson. “It has been a growing movement.”
In West Virginia, WestRock, Weyerhaeuser and Pixelle Specialty Solutions are sourcing certified, meaning they purchase a substantial amount of SFI-certified forests to put the SFI label on their products. Weyerhaeuser, the Boy Scouts of America Summit Bechtel Reserve and The Conservation Fund—a national conservation group—all manage their forests to SFI standards.
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international nonprofit, has a similar certification program.
West Virginia companies The Forestland Group, The Lyme Timber Company and Columbia Forest Products all manage their lands according to FSC standards. According to Carlson, the forestry industry’s move toward sustainability has been driven by its customers.
“When your customers tell you to do something, you do it or you’re out of business,” he says.
In the last decade, the forestry industry has become more high tech, primarily in the manufacturing sector. Traditionally, metal detectors have been used to make sure a tree doesn’t have an embedded wire fence before it is run through a saw. Metal detectors are still commonplace, but the technology has expanded. These days, sawmills use computers with scanning technology to determine the best way of cutting a log to avoid wood knots and other imperfections.
“These computers are able to take and guide these large band saws to cut trees in a way that maximizes the profit of the company and the quality of the products,” says Carlson.
The grading system for determining the quality of hardwood has also become more high tech. One of West Virginia’s newest wood manufacturers, West Virginia Great Barrel Company, based in White Sulphur Springs, manufactures wood barrels for whiskey production and exemplifies another way companies are using more technology during manufacturing.
“That manufacturing plant made a tremendous investment in robotic technology to move the product around that reduces the amount of danger for safety purposes,” says Carlson.
The plant’s barrel-making process is almost entirely robotic, from the way the wood is cut and put together into barrels to the wood toasting process that gives the whiskey its charcoal flavor.
“When you’re dealing with large round logs in a big manufacturing facility—when you can handle that with equipment, the less likely someone is going to be injured,” says Carlson. “That has been a big part of the technology development.”
Technology has helped improve safety in the harvesting segment of the industry, too. More and more logging companies are making the investment in mechanical equipment to cut down trees.
“We went from axes to chainsaws to larger saws in which men and women can work in closed cabs with heat and air conditioning and run what they call a feller buncher, which actually cuts the tree, delimbs the tree, cuts it in links and stacks it,” says Carlson.
Lyme Timber, a timber investment company that acquired land in Logan County, uses a robotic system run by cables to harvest trees.
“They have eliminated the necessity to build roads and skid trails on the hillside. They simply set the cable logger at the top of the hill, and they can cut the whole hillside to the bottom using basically a robotic system,” says Carlson. “It’s an extraordinarily safe system, but it’s a huge investment.”
Carlson says the WVFA would like to see more companies invest in this technology, but it can be expensive, as many West Virginia forestry companies are family-owned businesses that have been in the industry for generations.
Another way the industry is changing is by recognizing a need for more vocation training programs to train workers on the equipment.
“To my knowledge, the only training program for the complex harvesting equipment is a new program at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks, but there are not a lot of other training programs for the equipment available,” says Carlson. “It takes many months for these employees and family members to learn how to use this equipment efficiently. That is a big need we have in the industry—to find both the capital to invest and the skilled workers.”
While the forestry industry makes up a large section of the state’s economy, there is still room for it to grow sustainably. Studies by the U.S. Forest Service show that West Virginia’s forests have been growing larger and older for decades.
“We are underutilizing this resource,” says Carlson. “We harvest about 0.8% of the total resource on a statewide basis. The U.S. Forest Service’s latest forest inventory annual growth of West Virginia’s forests exceeds harvesting by three times, and that figure in 2020 was even greater because of the slowdown in harvesting. We will never run out of trees when we harvest, even on a sustainable basis.”
