Woods Folks
The way I look at most forest management decisions is through the theory of butterfly effects. The theory of butterfly effects says that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can set off a chain reaction that creates a hurricane on the other side of the world. It is a simple metaphor to describe a life truth that all of us deal with: small events in the short term can have large effects in the long term.
A forest management decision, for a lot of families, is the flap of a butterfly’s wings, and it produces a wind that their children or grandchildren will have to cope with. Sometimes it takes generations to return to present circumstances after a mistake. I believe that if we as forest managers do create a wind with our decisions, may it be a positive current that lifts up the future generations in such a way that the torch of conservation and prudent forest management may keep burning. It is from this perspective that I approach every decision that a family might make, with the utmost respect for that future wind that it might create. I pore over every alternative. I earnestly consider the issues from every angle. It is my passion, as it is for many others. Unfortunately for us, oftentimes we watch as other individuals influence, if not flat out coerce, unknowing individuals into making decisions that harm their timberland’s economic future.
Forestry is a $1.2 billion industry in my home state. It is the second largest contributor to our state’s GDP. It is hard to go anywhere in Alabama and not see a log truck on the road. If you are from a rural area it’s hard not to know someone working in the logging industry or at the local wood products facility. Yet there seems to be tremendous lack of knowledge and understanding about what all that activity going on around us actually is. I can remember in college I was a particularly proud student of all my classwork, and I would go through a whole bit about studying economics, then finance, and now forestry, and the most common response I got to that whole spiel was, “Are you going to be a forest ranger?”
My experience with this condition of our society has only gotten worse as a professional. I can talk articulately about biology, aesthetics, chemical application, prescribed fire, road building, taxation, government programs, accounting, and all types of harvesting. I can talk about markets and what’s going on in our current times. I can look at large complex acreages and rough out a twenty-year budget and plan by week’s end. Yet most of the time, I am not discernable in any way from all the “woods folks” people are accustomed to seeing in our communities. I get lumped in with everyone else and all the things that make me a sharp and valuable tool for private landowning families gets overlooked.
The purpose of this article is to define the different types of “woods folks”. I present a series of archetypes, with the understanding that there are many individuals who provide great examples of exceptions.
Government – The Cooperative Extension, Forestry Association, and Forestry Commission people are probably the most well-natured and genuinely nice, caring people on the list. They are as helpful as they can be and most of the time willing and ready to provide assistance, though it might not progress at an impressive speed. The younger these agents are, the more their information provided is based on the beliefs of their superiors or internal informational flyers/posters. It oftentimes sounds like anecdotal evidence, which is another thing entirely. This is not something they do purposefully, this is something that naturally happens in the course of a conversation.
They are the only person in this list who has zero economic interest in what you do. You might see this as being a good thing. I believe that it causes a very lackadaisical approach to forest management activities and prescriptions. If there is no financial reward for them when you accept their advice, can you be certain they are putting forth their best effort and doing due diligence in their research? Even then, if you do accept there recommendations, you will still be forced to walk though most of the operational procurement and management yourself.
Wood Dealers – Wood dealers are all salespeople at heart. They are selling themselves, they are selling their loggers, they are selling their prices, but most of the time, if they are talking, they are selling somebody on something. They are tenacious, dogged, competitive people, sometimes to a fault. What they play is a game of people, machines, trucks, and trees, each having a known value or cost. They typically have very little empathy for the trees. They are here to price wood, manage loggers, and fill the needs of the market—that is what they think about.
Like any group of salespeople, some are offering you good products at good prices and others are offering poor products at poor prices. Here is the difference between the wood business and the rest of the economic world: If an agent manages the experience for the landowner with finesse, the landowner really has no way of determining if he got a good product at a good price or a poor product at a poor price due to lack of relevant information. If there are no online forums or Google reviews and there’s no information about any of these service providers anywhere, how would the landowner know? Naturally a lot of the people selling poor products at poor prices are the best salesmen, the ones who above all else manage the experience to help mask all of their strategic shortcomings.
There is a wide range here in terms of ethical beliefs about what should be paid for wood. I know some dealers that always seem to pay the most they can pay. Others are always looking for that tract that no one knows about owned by the family who doesn’t seem to have a clue. One of the oldest dealer tricks that I still to this day hear about being pulled is as follows. They get a call or information about a landowner having fallen on hard times or just generally needing money for a life expense. They have to of course look at the timber, but after that they can ask the landowner about their current financial issues. After which they say, “I have some good news, the timber you own should cover that after I cut it, and I can write you a check for what you need right now if you sign this contract.” Anyone who has ever needed money to pay a bill understands what happens next. The person is so happy they escaped their economic perils, they never think another thing about the transaction. Meanwhile, the dealer just bought his daughter a brand-new Mercedes for Christmas off that one deal.
It should have been your Mercedes. Unfortunately, you have no way to know you have been swindled. Based on the evidence you have on-hand, it was a very positive experience; in fact, you might call and tell someone about the good service, and this is how the swindle continues.
Pinhookers (unaffiliated timber people) – This is a very neighborly or community-driven individual. They aren’t that slick, fast-talking salesman; they typically come off much more unassuming that that. Often, they worked for someone directly in the industry at some point or learned some basic skills from within their extended family. These people know just enough to be dangerous. They have a fair idea about how much a tract of timber is worth from just a ride-by. Then they focus on their mark. They pose as a friendly representative for that person to the timber industry. They promise to help the landowner navigate the difficult process of finding someone to cut his timber and assure him that—with their help—the landowner can get top dollar. These are the most common conmen you will meet in this business. These individuals, most of the time living near life’s bottom, don’t need to make a lot of deals. They just need to make a couple of deals every year that they make tremendous profit from. So, after getting on the same page with the landowner, they find a dealership to make the deal with. There are some dealerships that refuse to employ such an individual but most of them could not care less.
The pinhooker uses his knowledge to negotiate a reasonable price for the timber as he knows it to be. Then having a price locked in, he will go back and negotiate with the landowner about what they should be paid, creating in the middle a windfall of money for himself. All the while calling for celebration about the good fortune he was able to provide them.
I have seen a pinhooker take $50 thousand out of a $70 thousand sale. And it happens much more than you would care to know. The horror doesn’t end there; this one transaction cleaned out most of the net wealth of that unsuspecting owner, who had no recourse. Rarely do the individuals realize they have had a negative experience. They don’t have enough information or knowledge about what just happened to come to that conclusion. Feeling pretty good about the money in their pocket, they might just call their cousin who has a patch of timber over there and tell them about their good experience.
There are no laws to enforce against this type of fraud. If it were any other occupation or industry you could easily prosecute these individuals but in the timber business, it is, as they say, “business as usual.”
Loggers – First and foremost, I grew up around loggers and they were very influential in my life. Some of them are real salt-of-the-earth type of people. But as with any demographic of people, not all of them are. In general loggers are gruff, hard, and tough-as-nails individuals. They are the type of men that built America; what they know best is to work. I have met a few observant loggers that had incredible knowledge about the biology of growing trees and managing forests. Most are much more comfortable talking about machines, roadbuilding, and product mechanization. Our industry has not been the most supportive of loggers in the past few decades considering the lack of appreciation they have experienced in nearly all the cost components of logging. Because of that, a lot of loggers operate at that level where they can stay in business and cover their costs, but they never really move ahead financially. It is a lot of debt, risk, and worry to not feel like you are getting ahead. People not getting ahead are always looking for a shortcut.
Sometimes in rural communities an individual owns some timberland and they decide they want to see about “getting their trees cut.” Invariably the next comment is, “Well you know Jack’s son across the road drives a skidder for someone.” I want to walk you through how this happens. First, they contact Jack’s son. He passes along the information to his boss. At this point the logger knows two things almost certainly. One, you don’t have any idea how much your timber is worth. Two, you don’t have any idea about any other options. It’s hard not to see this as an opportunity. There are some loggers who will get you the most money they can and give you a great harvesting job to boot. That’s a rare experience. The logger, knowing he has no competition and an owner who is probably in some type of a cash crunch, often uses this information to his supreme advantage. He acts as the pinhooker does, negotiating with the dealership, locking in his profit, and then giving what’s left to the landowner. Furthermore, without any oversight they can pretty much wreck your place and leave it a disaster without any hope of recourse. This is typically when a consultant is called.
An important thing to remember: loggers are in the tree-cutting business—they are always going to tell you the timber needs to be cut. They could make you a good deal, but if you show your hand put your trust in them, believe me that more of your money is going to flow into their pocket than yours.
Consultants/Managers – I will talk about managers here but I will first warn you about my bias: I am one. Consultants are the most eclectic, diverse, sometimes strange group of people in the bunch. Though most of us make money at least partially selling timber for a living, we are the closest relative in the group to a naturalist. Most of my peers can all talk on the same topics and subjects that I can, each of us having our own niche of expertise. What most consultants are not are salesmen. Typically, we are not good at selling ourselves, our services, and our products. We like to rely on “referrals” and doing work good enough that people talk about it. But I will tell you that philosophy and mindset doesn’t make you feel any better when you ride by some place where you know a local pinhooker is robbing someone’s grandmother blind.
Most of us are tree nerds at heart. If you got a bunch of consultants in the room it would be never-ending stories about unique tracts and interesting swamps and majestic ridgetops and something we saw in the woods that was without explanation. Each trying to top the other with untold mysteries of the forest. Most of us genuinely care and spend time thinking about how to provide the most to our clients and how best to improve the management of their forest assets. We try to triangulate the needs of the people with the needs of the trees and fold that back into to our feelings on the market—that is how we go about making actionable decisions. But we don’t bang drums well, and we haven’t historically reached out with much information about who we are and what we are doing. For the families who could have been helped and weren’t, shame on us. Where else might we put the blame?
One important distinction here on this list, is we are the only individuals who make more money when you make more money. I want to say it louder for people in the back. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard someone say, “Well they said if a consultant got involved, I wouldn’t have any money left.” When I first got out of school and started working in a small consulting shop, I was amazed at the difference in timber bid results. The top and the bottom may be off 50% even in a very competitive sale. I have never seen a consultant help someone get less money for their timber. Our representation, based on my anecdotal evidence, is worth at least 15-25% over whatever commission someone might charge.
Then we typically get your trees replanted and help you with any other ownership issues you might have, oftentimes fostering a relationship that lasts decades and helping you make that positive wind for the next generation with each decision you make. Everyone else on this list, aside from government agency personnel, makes more money when you make less money, and desert the scene literally and figuratively as soon as the last load is hauled.
I want to restate this in case that point was looked over: Managers are the only people on the list who make more money when you make more money.
Everyone else on the list, government workers not included, make more money when you make less money.
This is a bit of a conflict of interest, and cause for a lot of individuals to be dishonest, but there is no way for you to really know how well you have been treated. Furthermore, the ignorance of this simple, yet very important fact is what inspired me to write this paper.
I do not mean to beat up on people here or to cast any stones, this is just a realistic and honest assessment of the typical “woods folks” and what you should expect from them. You might know people who are examples of exceptions to these rules but most likely, you do not.