The dirt roads in the northern corner of Oxford County froze early this year, marking the unofficial start of the winter logging season in Maine. 

The hardened roads make it possible for loggers such as Andy Irish and his Rumford-based company, Irish Family Logging, to drive a fleet of semi-trucks and heavy machinery into the woods without disturbing the underlying soil as much as in the summer.

Today’s loggers are far more reliant on these hulking pieces of equipment that make logging safer and quicker than when Irish entered the industry in the 1970s.

That efficiency comes at a premium, however. Each machine is often imported from Canada or Scandinavia, and can cost more than $500,000, a price that Irish absorbs by selling timber to local sawmills and ND Paper’s mill in Rumford.

But as Irish prepares to pass the business down to his children, demand for pulpwood — the scrawny, low-quality wood sold to mills — is falling due to the Trump administration’s latest tariffs on Canadian timber and poor market conditions. 

Add to that the federal administration’s steeper tariffs on foreign parts and equipment needed for logging, and Irish’s operation costs threaten to dip into his reserves.

“An old guy told me a long time ago, ‘If you’re in this business, there are going to be some years that you just gotta eat [the costs],’” Irish recalled. “But I’m not sure how this is going to go.”

From loggers such as Irish to the woodlot owners who open their land to timber harvests, almost every link of New England’s forest products supply chain has been hit hard by a perfect storm of tariffs and falling market values, loggers, researchers and industry officials told The Maine Monitor.  

That financial pain only intensifies when industry linchpins, such as paper or pulp mills, limit or halt purchases from other links of the supply chain. After the administration slapped a 10 percent tariff on Canadian timber in October, Woodland Pulp in Baileyville stopped buying wood not just from Canadian loggers but Maine loggers, too.

The company then laid off 144 employees in mid-November and plans to reinstate them next week. Before it resumes buying timber, however, it will have to process the wood it’s stockpiled.

“If some of that fiber has to come from Canada, and now the mill can’t afford that fiber, there starts to be a reduced demand for wood at these mills,” said Krysta West, executive director of the Maine Forest Products Council, an industry advocacy group.

“That trickles throughout the entire industry whenever there’s a curtailment or a shutdown of a mill.”

Maine’s forest products sector provided $4.9 billion in direct economic output in 2024 and more than 29,000 direct jobs, according to a recent analysis by the University of Maine. Although the sector has been in overall decline since 2019, there is underlying hope among industry players that investments in more specialized paper product manufacturing and the innovation of new wood products will keep businesses across Maine humming.

But the tariffs complicate that outlook and will hamper domestic forest products manufacturing, contrary to the Trump administration’s stated purpose, said Dana Doran, executive director of Maine Professional Logging Contractors, an advocacy group. 

The White House has said that the tariffs will spur the sales of domestic timber and, in turn, generate more manufacturing of paper and other wood products.

“The Secretary [of Commerce] also found that the United States possesses ample raw materials and industrial capacity to meet domestic wood products demand, while wood production in the United States remains underdeveloped,” stated a White House press release announcing the tariffs on Canadian timber.

New England forestry leaders, however, said that manufacturing productivity is more heavily linked to market prices for pulp and paper, not cheap Canadian timber, and tariffs will only hurt the supply chain.

“If tariffs are increasing the cost of products coming into the United States, and you’re not boosting American manufacturing at the same time, it’s antithetical,” Doran said.

“You can’t do one without the other. You’ve got to do both.”

‘We’ve basically stopped importing the machines’

Many of the forest products industry’s modern challenges were evident at Irish’s logging operation northeast of the Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge recently.

The process started at the forest’s edge, where a crew member guided a machine with the large, yellow body of an excavator, called a “feller buncher,” into a dense thicket of evergreen trees. When he got close enough, he extended the machine’s arm, grasped a few trunks and cut them all at once, placing the bundle to the side like a Paul Bunyan-sized pile of kindling. 

Shortly after that someone in a longer-armed “processor” grabbed each tree, trimmed its limbs, then smoothed it down to a bare log with a mechanical head similar to a giant pencil sharpener.

What happened next is where market forces come into play. 

The logs were transported to a crew member in a second “cut-to-length” processor, who sorted and sawed the logs to a certain length depending on size and species. High-quality softwood logs were designated for sawmills, where they would be cut into two-by-fours and other building products, while scrappy hardwood species like birch would be ground into pulp at ND Paper’s Rumford mill for paper production. 

Few American logging operations use the same specialized cut-to-length processor that Irish does, which gets him more value out of the finished products he sells to the local sawmills. 

Because of low domestic demand, these machines are manufactured in Canada, Finland or Sweden, where the practice is more common, then imported to the U.S. by forestry equipment retailers.

“It’s a small market,” said Jack Bell, general manager and co-owner of the Vermont-based retailer Long View Forest Machines. “There’s two or three hundred new machines sold in all of the United States in a year.”

A year ago, Bell’s company might pay about $3,000 in duties to import a new cut-to-length processor from Sweden or Finland, paying $525,000 for the machine in total. 

Under the Trump administration’s tariffs on the European Union, that price has now ballooned up to $90,000 per machine, Bell said, costing him a total of $600,000 to import just one processor.

“We’ve basically stopped importing the machines … because I don’t think loggers can absorb that much price increase,” Bell said. “We don’t want to pay those tariffs and be stuck with the machines when people can’t afford to buy them.”

That means Irish might choose to hang on to his current cut-to-length processor a bit longer when the time comes to replace it, though he won’t be able to bypass the tariffs altogether by doing so: machine parts and electronics are also tariffed. 

Irish’s sales are in a crunch like Bell’s. He has an agreement with ND Paper that sets a quota for the amount of pulpwood he sells to the mill each year, which also allows Irish to sell beyond that when the mills are in open market and buying up all the pulpwood they can get.

But Woodland Pulp’s closure means the pulpwood market is oversaturated. Loggers up in Aroostook County have to sell their pulpwood to the Sappi Somerset mill in Skowhegan or ND Paper’s mill in Rumford, driving down prices all around.

“The pulp market is terrible,” Irish said. “We normally have wide open [markets], but this week, they aren’t taking any pulp, and it’s been pretty slow.”

‘Only so much firewood you can sell’

Fourth-generation logger Marty Pelletier and his family’s Allagash-based company, SYL-Ver Logging Inc., were feeling shorthanded this summer. 

In addition to the pulpwood their logging company harvests and sells to Woodland Pulp, the Pelletiers provide a wide range of services — from road building to private woodlot management — and business was good.

In more stable times, the Pelletiers would have added a few new positions to the 13-person company to help manage the workload. But the industry showed signs of uncertainty even before Woodland Pulp began to idle, Pelletier told The Monitor, and he didn’t want to hire new employees in the summer just to lay them off in the winter.

When the Canadian timber tariffs hit, and Woodland Pulp announced its shutdown, Pelletier said the situation ended up being even worse than he had anticipated. 

His company would normally have sold hardwood logs to Woodland Pulp but is instead selling them for cheap on an even more oversaturated firewood market, he said. Meanwhile, Quebec sawmills are willing to pay less for American softwood now that they have to pay even higher tariffs — up to 45 percent — to export their finished lumber for sale in the U.S.

“It’s been difficult because there’s only so much firewood you can sell,” Pelletier said. “With the hardwood pulp market being non-existent right now, well, the price of firewood goes down because everybody’s trying to sell firewood.”

Left and right, the Pelletiers’ product values have fallen, while operation costs for things such as vehicle replacement parts have risen with U.S. tariffs on goods from the European Union. 

The result is a brutal cycle that Pelletier said he’ll be able to ride out, but it won’t be easy.

“It’s tough. Our profit margins have definitely decreased,” Pelletier said. “I’m not going to put the dollar amounts out there, but I will just say it’s significantly down a lot.”

‘We’ve been at this a while’

Many of the challenges that Irish, Pelletier and the forest products industry face today long precede the second Trump administration, but business leaders said the latest tariffs accentuate them.

American trade officials have claimed for decades that Canada unfairly subsidizes its timber industry by charging low stumpage rates for private logging on Canadian public lands and undercutting American timber prices. 

That’s because in the U.S., where more timber comes from private lands than in Canada, American loggers are charged higher rates to harvest timber from private landowners and state or federal agencies than their Canadian counterparts.

“We’ve been at this a while,” said Andrew Muhammad, professor of agricultural policy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an expert on trade issues. “There’s been different tariffs, export restraints and other types of policy, and it still doesn’t seem to stop the flow of Canadian imports.”

And although Canada’s stumpage system does result in lower prices, Muhammad said that likely isn’t to deliberately undercut U.S. timber prices; Canada just has comparatively low demand that makes prices look cheap compared with the U.S. market. 

The two governments have tried to rectify that through past trade agreements, but the most recent tariff on Canadian timber is “just another nail in the coffin of a long list of global issues that are impacting our pulp mills,” said West with the Maine Forest Products Council.

Between 2019 and 2024, Maine’s forest products sector’s economic output decreased by nearly $1 billion and shed 7 percent of its employees. 

West traced Maine’s current industry contraction back to 2020, when a pulp digester at the former Pixelle paper mill in Jay exploded and ended its pulp manufacturing abilities.

After the explosion, Pixelle had to purchase pulp from ND Paper’s mill in Old Town. And when the Jay mill ultimately closed in 2023, ND Paper scaled back, too, leaving a gaping hole in Maine’s pulpwood market. 

On top of the chaos caused by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and a flood of cheap South American pulp inundating the global market, the closure hit Maine’s forest product industry hard. 

“There’s a lot of great things about Maine, but it’s also very expensive to do business here, especially if you’re competing with pulp mills on a global scale,” West said.

Pelletier, in Aroostook County, said he believes that the Trump administration’s current Canadian timber tariffs might have leveled the playing field if they were instituted 20 years ago and coincided with investment in American manufacturing. 

Without that domestic capacity, however, Maine loggers will have to sell to Canadian mills — and the tariffs will hurt them both. 

“There’s no hope in sight as far as anybody setting up a big manufacturing facility to saw two-by-fours, to make furniture,” Pelletier said. “I think, long-term, the tariffs will help certain people, but it’s not helping us at this time.”

‘All the harvesting power needed’

Despite current headwinds, Maine’s forest products sector isn’t doomed, according to West. Over the same five-year period that the industry has contracted, Maine mills have invested $1.5 billion in manufacturing, West said. 

That includes a $500 million upgrade by Sappi to a paper machine at its mill in Skowhegan and TimberHP’s $125 million renovation to convert a shuttered Madison paper mill into North America’s first wood fiber insulation facility. 

These investments and others help Maine mills produce more high-value, finished products that are less susceptible to market contractions, said Adam Daigneault, director of the University of Maine’s School of Forest Resources.

“The more that we can make that is closer to a finished product, the more value we can get out of the woods that we have,” Daigneault said.

Facilities such as TimberHP’s can also give Irish and Pelletier a market to sell the lower-value timber residuals they harvest during forest-thinning operations. 

Although a bulk of timber sales come from the larger logs sold to sawmills, Maine woodlot owners and loggers alike need buyers for these thin, scraggly trees to remain profitable and open up forest canopies to sunlight.

“In order to have a healthy industry and to practice good forest management, you need markets for everything on a wood lot,” West said. “That means harvesting all trees — both valuable, softwood species marketable as construction materials and smaller.”

Even Woodland Pulp has spent big recently, putting $500,000 into a piece of pulp processing equipment. That and the success of Woodland’s tissue manufacturing facility — which didn’t temporarily shut down — are all signs that there’s promise in Maine’s wood products.

And as long as there’s a market to sell to, Pelletier said there’s a workforce ready to supply it.

“We’ve got all the harvesting power needed to cut wood and truck wood,” he said. “I feel that if we can ride this out for the next year or so, that we will rebound.”

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.