ELLSWORTH, Maine — Loggers hauled large trunks through the snow Saturday, as part of a small-scale timber harvest on a parcel of woods belonging to the Maine Woodland Owners in Ellsworth.
Though the land is owned by the organization, its forests are managed by Prentiss and Carlisle, a large timber company that collaborates with landowners to sell trees in their forests.
Saturday’s stock used a more traditional process of extraction. “Hand felling… with a chainsaw, dragging it the landing with a skidder and then selling it from there,” described Si Balch, a forester and chapter head of Maine Woodland Owners.
Balch was one of the first hundred people to earn an official forestry license from the State of Maine, which he lists as “Lic #61” on his business cards. There are now more than 4,000.
In his decades-long career, Balch notes a change from hand-felling trees to using heavy machinery to cut timber and notes the destination of the wood leaving many Maine forests has changed since the 20th century.
“The quantity of wood going into paper is considerably less than it was. And that’s because of these changing world markets,” Balch said.
Indeed, traditional paper products are on the decline, with data presented by the state of Maine predicting a continued fall in demand for printing papers and office stationery in the coming years.
“You’re not [going to] see a return of people buying newspapers on a regular basis or printer paper,” Mike Redante, the forester from Prentiss and Carlisle in charge of Saturday’s harvest, said.
But where the same state data that forecasts the further decline of paper products, it expects cardboard boxes, which can be made from the pulp of the wood coming from Ellsworth, will surge in demand 15% between 2021 and 2026. This points to a new trend that could be felt along the forest products supply chain hope for: a surge in the manufacturing of alternative paper products that are high in demand.
“The landowner gets paid, the forester gets paid, the logger gets paid,” Redante adds.