It’s a cold day at Sun Mountain Lumber in Deer Lodge, Montana. Outreach Forester Sean Steinebach walks toward the mill’s massive kiln where freshly cut two-by-fours are dried. You can feel the heat radiating off the fresh boards. He stops and inhales.
"It smells fresh and it smells bright and it smells wild," he says.
The mill’s lumber yard is filled with stacks of Douglas fir and lodgepole pine logs that will soon become lumber. Having a steady and reliable supply of logs is crucial to keeping the mill in business, says Steinebach.
Sitting in his office, he says Sun Mountain is one of the largest employers in the area.
"We drive the economics of Powell County for sure, Anaconda, Deer Lodge County. We've got a lot of employees that live there. Granite County, we've got employees there. We're a big impact in the whole state, I think. Forest products in general is a huge impact in the state of Montana."
Sun Mountain is one of the six timber mills that remain in Montana. Thirty-six mills have closed across the state since the 1990s.
On March 1, President Donald Trump directed federal land management agencies to increase logging and scale back environmental protections, which Trump says slows down the process.
Environmental groups say these changes could be disastrous for wildlife and water quality.
Julia Altemus with the Montana Wood Products Association welcomed the order. She says most mills close because they lack a steady supply of timber.
"What we have left, we just cannot lose anymore. These mills, all these manufacturing facilities, are extremely capital intensive. When you lose one it is so difficult to get it back."
She thinks the executive order will help fix the supply problem.
Mindy Crandall, a Forest Policy Professor at Oregon State explains that public lands are only one piece of the supply equation.
"This is a complicated market, we’ve got public timber, we’ve got private timber, we import timber, and we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with that piece of the puzzle either. "
She adds that not every tree you see can be turned into the lumber used to build homes. When logging companies bid to log on public lands, they are also contracting to thin out sections of the forest. That means cutting smaller trees that generate byproducts like wood chips and sawdust. Crandall says the companies that used to take those materials from lumber mills have been dwindling.
"If you can't give that material away, then everything becomes an additional cost," she says.
According to Steinebach, Sun Mountain makes more than 15 semi-truck loads of these byproducts every day. The company pays to ship them out of state, which eats into profits.
He says having a better supply of logs is great, but there are other market forces they’re dealing with too. Hiring staff has been hard and demand for lumber can fluctuate, making it harder to drive a profit.
Steinbach says the Trump administration’s other changes are creating uncertainty. Federal grants that could help the mill stay afloat are held up indefinitely. He also wonders whether federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service can open more lands for logging as the Administration continues to fire staff.
"Are we going to be running back against capacity issues where we don’t have the specialists and the 'ologists on the Forest Service or our agency partners to put projects up? We just don’t know."
He says the logging industry’s future is cloudy, which is nothing new.
"Going all the way back to Clinton, there's always been some issues to navigate with the administration and it's never an easy industry to be in."
He says there’s no president that’s going to fix the logging industry with a stroke of a pen, even if it means they can cut more logs.
