Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon’s timber harvest dropped by about nine percent last year -- to levels last seen during the recession of 2001.

Gary Lettman of the Oregon Department of Forestry says private forestland owners are responsible for much of the decrease -- when prices are low, they prefer to leave their trees in the ground. 

He says industrial companies also cut back, as home builders wait out the recession.

Gary Lettman: “It’s going to pick up when housing starts to pick-up. You know we’ve already seen a flattening. Log prices were headed down. And now they’ve kind of bottomed out. And I think we’ve see housing starts do the same thing. I think we’re going to see a slow gradual return to normality.”

About 3.5 billion board feet of lumber were harvested in Oregon last year. In 1988 output peaked at about 8.5 billion.

The drop in logging caused 16 percent of Oregon’s lumber and plywood mills to close in the last four years.