The Last Loggers

The following is a chapter from Empty Homes & Silent Saws: Economics, Demographics, Culture, and the Coming Reckoning in America’s Forest Industry, available now.

My first job out of college was working as a forester deep in the Maine woods, living three nights a week in a remote camp and spending my days tying ribbons to trees and supervising logging crews. I was twenty two at the time, and the loggers I worked with were often in their fifties and even sixties. I’m not sure if you’ve ever worked in a blue collar field, but fifty-year-old men who turn wrenches tend not to hold the words of twenty-two-year-olds in high regard (for good reason). Suffice to say, it could be a challenging job from an interpersonal standpoint. I was effectively an intermediary between two parties (landowner and logger) that sometimes had interests with little to no overlap. I went to school for forestry but got a job in statesmanship.

There was one notable exception, however—a logger who I will call Jim. Jim was one of the first loggers I ever worked with, and when I met him, he was in his fifties. He was an owner of a logging company that managed several full crews (a large company for an industry dominated by small operators). Despite the age difference, we got along quite well. It wasn’t uncommon for him to stop me in the middle of a woods road to talk for two hours about the Roman Empire and give me a box of pecan pie bites—my two favorite things.

Jim was adept at dealing with twenty-two-year-olds, and there was a good reason for that: his crews were overwhelmingly young men around my age. He knew how they thought, and he was good at managing them. From all evidence, he was the type of boss that young men would want to work for. He was a logger, but he didn’t see it that way. He saw himself as being in the business of getting young men to become loggers. That was his mission and purpose.

Jim had built his entire business around proactively counteracting an existential threat in the forest industry: a deluge of loggers leaving the industry, and a deficit of young men entering. The logger shortage.

The average age of a logging crew foreman in the United States is fifty-four years old. That might not sound too bad, but we aren’t talking about office jobs. Logging is brutally physical work. You’re in the woods before dawn, operating heavy machinery in unforgiving conditions, working through weather that shuts down construction sites, handling equipment that can kill you in an instant if you make a mistake. And the people running these operations are in their mid-fifties, approaching retirement, with their bodies already showing decades of accumulated damage.

Visit a logging site anywhere in the country and you’ll probably find the same demographic pattern: a handful of men in their fifties and sixties, maybe one or two in their forties if you’re lucky, and almost nobody under thirty-five. The young workers in the industry tend to switch careers fairly quickly—sometimes after only a few months. That’s what made Jim’s crews so unique. He was the exception, having great success in recruiting, training, and retaining young workers, but even with all his efforts, the shortage had a palpable effect on Maine’s timber industry.

The term “labor shortage” is often abused by pundits unwilling to acknowledge a more-material wage shortage, granted. But here we are talking about an actual shortage whereby supply can only be raised by substantially increasing costs to levels that, frankly, are unrealistic in a commodity field where firms are price-takers. In other words, the problem goes far beyond short-term market forces. Rather, this is the leading edge of a labor force collapse that is fundamentally reshaping what the lumber industry can produce and at what cost. The people who both know how to harvest timber efficiently and can tolerate lifestyle inefficiencies are retiring or leaving the industry, and there’s no replacement generation behind them. The consequences are already visible in the woods. Rising production costs are already manifesting and wreaking havoc, and they’re about to become catastrophic.

Logging isn’t something you learn in a classroom or pick up from YouTube videos. It’s craft knowledge accumulated over years of hard experience: knowing which trees to cut first, reading terrain to predict where a log will roll, understanding machine limits in different conditions, troubleshooting equipment breakdowns in the field, managing risk in constantly changing environments. The best loggers are foresters, mechanics, machine operators, and businessmen.

When a fifty-eight-year-old foreman leaves, you lose more than a worker. You lose someone who’s been running logging operations for thirty years, who knows every trick for maximizing productivity while minimizing damage to residual trees, who can diagnose a mechanical problem by sound, who can manage a crew through dangerous conditions without getting anyone killed. That knowledge doesn’t transfer to a twenty-five-year-old who lasted three months before deciding this wasn’t for him.

The industry is experiencing something akin to an industrial burning of the Library of Alexandria. As the experienced workers retire, the collective expertise that made American logging productive and relatively cheap is walking out of the woods and not coming back.

The most common response from industry observers is that logging simply doesn’t pay enough to attract young workers. Raise wages and the problem solves itself. This is true in the same way that saying “just charge more for lumber” solves mill profitability. It’s undeniably correct but practically useless because it ignores why wages can’t rise enough to matter given current business models.

Let’s start with the baseline reality. According to BLS data, median pay for logging workers is around $48,000 per year. With the obvious caveat that there is a tremendous amount of variation across regions, harvest systems, and roles (some loggers do make six figures, albeit with long hours and personal financial and/or physical risk), $48,000 per year is, to be frank, completely unreasonable. The work is seasonal in much of the country, meaning that $48,000 might represent eight or nine months of employment, not twelve. Adjust for lost workdays from weather, breakdowns, and slow markets, and you’re often looking at effective hourly rates below $20 for work that’s among the most dangerous in the country.

The fatality rate for logging workers is roughly 135 per 100,000 workers, making it the most dangerous occupation in America by a wide margin. For comparison, police officers have a fatality rate around 14 per 100,000. Loggers are nearly ten times more likely to die on the job than cops. The injury rate is similarly severe. Back injuries, crushed limbs, hearing loss, joint damage, the kind of accumulated physical trauma that leaves fifty-five-year-olds moving like they’re seventy-five. Granted, the vast majority of this data comes from conventional chainsaw felling operations, but even mechanized equipment has its dangers, as any industrial worker can tell you.

So you’re asking young workers to take a job that pays $48,000 a year, destroys their bodies, might kill them, offers no health insurance or retirement benefits in many cases, requires living in remote rural areas with limited amenities, and provides no clear path to advancement or skill development that transfers to other adjacent industries aside from maybe road construction or mining. That is simply not a competitive offer in 2025.

Could wages rise enough to compensate? Yes. But the economics of logging mean that meaningful wage increases break the business model. Forest product prices are set by global markets and domestic competition. Landowners can increase the value of their product (their trees), but the payoff won’t be for decades. Generally, if they want more margin, they have to cut costs. If your crew costs 20% more because you’re paying competitive wages, you simply don’t get contracts unless the overall enterprise is strategic and forward-thinking. Otherwise, the work goes to whoever can still scrape by on razor-thin margins, which usually means older owner-operators with paid-off equipment, no employees (maybe some subcontractors), and a willingness to work for what could amount to minimum wage after expenses.

Raising wages across the board requires raising timber or log prices, which means raising lumber prices, which for an international commodity means losing market share to Canadian imports, overseas suppliers, or alternative building materials (or living situations, as the case may be). For hardwood products, this might mean a beautiful cherry dresser will be replaced with a cheap IKEA stand-in or Malaysian and Indonesian teak. The industry is trapped in a low-wage equilibrium where everyone understands that current pay is insufficient but nobody can afford to pay more without becoming uncompetitive.

The dilemma might be solvable through industry coordination or government intervention (indeed this is what is currently happening through various mechanisms), but there’s a deeper problem. Even if wages doubled, logging may still not be attractive to the workers the industry needs.

Here’s what a day of logging actually looks like. It looks different across the country, of course, but this is a decent universal illustration:

You wake up at 4:30 AM because the job site is an hour and a half from town and work starts at 6:00. You drive into the mountains on logging roads that barely qualify as roads, hoping your truck doesn’t break down because there’s no cell service and nobody’s coming to look for you until you miss your evening check-in. You park next to a landing that’s essentially a cleared flat area where logs get processed, and you walk into the woods carrying a chainsaw that weighs thirty pounds when fueled.

The first few hours are felling. You’re cutting trees according to a plan designed to minimize damage to residual timber, which means precision work with a tool that kicks when it hits knots, sprays sawdust in your face, screams at 110 decibels even with hearing protection, and can kill you instantly if the tree falls in an unexpected way. You’re making dozens of judgment calls: where to cut, which direction to drop, when the wind matters, whether the tree has internal rot that changes everything. Each tree is different. Each one can kill you.

Then you switch to limbing and bucking, which means removing branches and cutting the trunk into logs of specified lengths. This is still chainsaw work, still dangerous, still physically exhausting, but now you’re working on unstable logs that can roll or shift. You’re bent over, twisted sideways, reaching under tension, always aware that the chainsaw is inches from your leg and one slip means a trip to the emergency room if you’re lucky.

By lunchtime, you’ve been running a chainsaw for five or six hours. Your hands are numb from vibration. Your back aches from the constant bending and twisting. You’ve got sawdust in your hair, your clothes, your mouth. You eat lunch sitting on a log because there’s nowhere else, and then you’re back at it for another four or five hours.

If you’re on a mechanized crew, the work is different but not easier. You’re operating a feller buncher or a harvester, sitting in a cab for ten hours, making thousands of repetitive motions with control sticks, dealing with hydraulic failures and broken chains and computers that crash at random. The machine costs $500,000 and you’re responsible for not breaking it, which means constant stress even when everything’s working. When something breaks, you’re expected to diagnose and repair it yourself because getting a mechanic out to a remote logging site costs more than the repair. And don’t think being in a cab makes the experience comfortable: I can tell you from experience during those 10 hours you are getting thrown around constantly. Imagine riding a lawnmower across boulders.

At the end of the day, you drive back through the woods in the dark, get home around 6:00 or 7:00 PM, and realize you’ve got enough energy to eat dinner and collapse into bed. Then you do it again tomorrow. And the day after. Sometimes six days a week if production is constrained, fifty or sixty hours a week at minimum, often more when you’re trying to hit production targets or weather windows.

This is why young workers don’t usually stick around. It’s not just the pay or the danger. It’s that the job offers nothing that young people value in 2025. There’s no work-life balance. No remote work option. No career development. No social environment. No cultural amenities. You’re in the woods with three other guys, all of them old enough to be your father, listening to the same classic rock station, complaining about the same things everyday (although, to be fair, complaining with coworkers is an integral part of all jobsites).

For the current generation of young adults, logging can be incomprehensible as a career choice. It’s not that they’re soft or entitled. It’s that the job offers absolutely nothing that a competent young worker would want in 2025, and the things it does offer, like “character building through suffering,” are not only unpersuasive, they are already offered by all the other blue collar fields.

The result is a structural workforce shortage that is driving costs up across every aspect of logging operations, creating a feedback loop that makes the problem worse.

Start with equipment. A new feller buncher costs $500,000 to $700,000. A new harvester runs $600,000 to $800,000. A forwarder is another $400,000. For a small logging operation, assembling a mechanized crew means $1.5 to $2 million in equipment purchases. That’s before you buy skidders, loaders, trucks, trailers, and all the support equipment.

Most loggers don’t have $2 million in the bank. These purchases are financed, usually at commercial rates, which means monthly payments that run $15,000 to $25,000 for the equipment package. Over five years, you might pay $1.8 million for machines that cost $1.5 million, and by the time you’ve paid them off, they’re worth perhaps $500,000 if you’re lucky.

The interest rate environment, which is weighing on the demand side of lumber, also affects the supply side here. When money was cheap, equipment financing at 3-4% was painful but manageable. With rates that have risen significantly and remain elevated, financing costs for logging equipment now run 7-10% depending on creditworthiness. That difference multiplies across a $1.5 million equipment package. At 4%, you’re paying roughly $360,000 in interest over five years. At 8%, you’re paying $730,000. The same equipment package costs an additional $370,000 simply because rates went up.

The financing costs are bad enough, but maintenance is where mechanized logging becomes truly brutal. Modern logging equipment is hydraulically complex and computer-controlled. It breaks constantly. Hydraulic lines burst, cutting chains snap, computer systems fail, engines overheat, transmissions leak. Repairing this equipment requires specialized knowledge and expensive parts.

A broken hydraulic pump might cost $8,000 to replace. A cutting head rebuild is $20,000. An engine overhaul is $40,000. These failures happen multiple times per year for equipment operating in harsh conditions. The logger either learns to do most repairs himself or pays shop rates of $150 per hour plus parts, with the machine sitting idle and the clock still ticking on the equipment loan.

Fuel costs are similarly punishing. A feller buncher can burn six to eight gallons per hour—up to sixty gallons in a ten-hour day. A forwarder adds another fifteen to twenty. At current diesel prices, that’s close to $300 per day just in fuel for two machines, or roughly $60,000 per year in fuel costs alone. Multiply across all equipment and you’re looking at $100,000 to $150,000 annually just to keep machines running. And remember summer 2022 when diesel hit $6 per gallon? Those same machines were burning nearly $500 per day in fuel alone.

Labor costs, insurance, transportation, the operating expenses for a small mechanized logging crew run $300,000 to $500,000 per year. To break even, you need to harvest enough timber to cover those costs plus generate enough profit to justify the risk and capital investment. Given typical stumpage prices and logging rates, that usually means producing 40,000 to 60,000 tons of timber per year. Miss that target and you’re losing money. Hit it and you’re making perhaps $50,000 to $100,000 in profit, assuming nothing catastrophic happens.

This is why smaller logging operations are disappearing in our precarious environment. The capital requirements are enormous, the margins are razor-thin, the risks are severe, and the only path to profitability is running equipment at high utilization for years without major failures. That was possible when the workforce was younger and more numerous, when mechanics were available in rural areas, when parts could be sourced locally. None of those conditions hold anymore.

The aging workforce makes everything worse. A sixty-year-old operator is more likely to make mistakes from fatigue. He’s more likely to miss nuanced maintenance issues until they become catastrophic. He’s less willing to work the long hours necessary to hit production targets. When he gets hurt or sick, there’s nobody to replace him for the two or three weeks he’s recovering.

The younger workers who might fill those gaps don’t exist, which means logging contractors are scrambling to keep operations running with whomever they can find. That often means paying premium wages to lure workers from other crews to the degree that they are able, which increases costs but doesn’t increase productivity. Or it means the contractor himself, already in his fifties, works sixty or seventy hours a week trying to compensate for the missing workers, which accelerates burnout and increases injury risk, ultimately just delaying if not exacerbating the issue.

You might think that logging workforce problems could be solved through greater mechanization. If manual labor is the constraint, replace it with machines. Easier said than done.

Mechanization already dominates American logging. Fully mechanized whole-tree harvesting systems are the most common and most productive systems in most states. In Montana, 84% of loggers use mechanical felling equipment, with only 16% still using conventional chainsaw methods. Chainsaws persist in specific situations where machines can’t operate: steep mountainous terrain, timber too large for feller-buncher cutting heads, environmentally sensitive areas where ground pressure must be minimized, or salvage operations after fires and storms. But these are exceptions to a heavily mechanized industry, not the norm.

The workforce crisis affects mechanized operations just as severely as manual operations, sometimes more so. A mechanized logging crew needs:

• Equipment operators who can run feller bunchers, harvesters, forwarders, and loaders efficiently and safely
• Mechanics who understand complex hydraulic systems, computer controls, and can diagnose problems in field conditions
• Supervisors with deep woods experience who can plan harvest operations, manage crew safety, and coordinate with landowners and mills (often this is a forester, though not always)
• Truck drivers to haul equipment and logs

Every one of these roles faces the same aging workforce and recruitment problems as chainsaw logging. The operator who can efficiently run a $600,000 harvester is typically someone with 15-20 years of woods experience. You don’t hand a computer-controlled harvester to a 23-year-old with no background and expect productivity. The learning curve is steep, the consequences of mistakes are expensive, and you might have to train five people before finding a worker who stays past 5 years.

Of these auxiliary problems, the mechanic problem is particularly acute. Modern logging equipment combines mechanical, hydraulic, electrical, and computer systems. When a harvester breaks down in the woods, you need someone who can diagnose whether the problem is a failed hydraulic valve, a computer sensor error, or a mechanical issue. It isn’t uncommon for equipment dealerships to have their own crews of on-call mechanics that can handle on-site repair and diagnostics. That is yet another highly-skilled position that competes with many other industries for an ever-dwindling educated rural labor force.

Moreover, capital intensity makes workforce problems more severe rather than less. A manual logging crew with chainsaws and a cable skidder might represent $100,000 in equipment investment. If the operator retires or quits, you’ve lost $100,000 in productive capacity. A mechanized crew with $1.5 million in equipment sitting idle because you can’t find a qualified operator or mechanic is a catastrophically larger problem. The monthly loan payments continue whether the equipment runs or not.

Mechanization was supposed to solve labor problems by increasing productivity per worker. A single feller buncher operator can harvest what ten chainsaw fallers produce. But that only works if you can find, train, and retain that operator. When you can’t, all you’ve accomplished is concentrating more capital into operations that are even more vulnerable to workforce and market disruptions.

Could these machines become fully autonomous? Unlikely. That technology is years or even decades away from practical deployment, and even when it arrives, it will be expensive enough that only large, scaled operations could afford it, which accelerates consolidation and leaves vast areas of forest inaccessible to mechanized harvest.

Notably, if any forestry jobs get automated first, it will likely be the more white collar professions like foresters themselves rather than the loggers. AI combined with LiDAR and satellite imagery can already help identify optimal harvest strategies, predict timber yields, and make cutting decisions that once required experienced foresters walking the land. The judgment calls that make logging hard to automate are precisely the decisions that machine learning handles well when given enough data. A logger needs split-second physical reactions in unpredictable environments. A forester needs pattern recognition across large datasets. One is harder to automate than the other.

There’s also a darker possibility worth considering. If AI development leads to widespread technological unemployment across other sectors, that could theoretically “solve” the logger shortage by eliminating alternative job opportunities. When office workers and truck drivers and retail employees find themselves displaced, suddenly a $48,000 logging job might look more attractive. But the aggregate implications of mass unemployment would be no less catastrophic for the forest industry. Technological unemployment means collapsing consumer purchasing power, which means even worse housing demand and affordability issues than we’ve already discussed. The logger shortage would be solved at precisely the moment when there’s no need for loggers. That, or the basis of civilization would need to be so fundamentally restructured that speculation becomes both impossible and meaningless.

Such possibilities aside, it would seem that over the last few decades, the forest products industry has depended on a hidden lifestyle subsidy: workers willing to accept low wages, poor working conditions, and severe physical risk because they had limited alternatives or found great meaning and value in the tradition. These were men from rural areas with little formal education, often from families that had been logging for generations, who entered the woods because that’s what their fathers and grandfathers had done.

That workforce accepted wages below what their productivity justified because logging was part of their identity. It was dangerous but honorable work. It was hard but meaningful. You could see the results of your labor in physical form. There was pride in being able to drop a tree exactly where you wanted it, to run a skidder through terrain that would stop anyone else, to keep equipment running through repairs that would baffle a dealership mechanic.

That generation is dying out, and the identity that sustained them is dying with it. Their children didn’t become loggers. They became electricians, HVAC technicians, diesel mechanics, or they moved to cities and became teachers or nurses or accountants. The logging identity didn’t transfer because the children could see what the work did to their fathers. The destroyed backs and shot shoulders, the hearing loss, the missing fingers, the constant financial stress, the early deaths.

The subsidy is ending because the people willing to provide it no longer exist. You can’t run an industry on the willingness of workers to accept below-market compensation for brutal working conditions when those workers have left the labor force and their children have zero interest in replacing them.

If logging costs need to rise 30-40% to attract workers, someone in the supply chain has to absorb those costs. The logger can’t raise prices unilaterally because landowners will simply hire/sell to cheaper competitors. Mills can’t pay significantly more for logs because lumber is a commodity with prices set by global markets. If mills raise lumber prices to cover higher log costs, they lose market share to Canadian imports or alternative materials. Landowners end up receiving lower stumpage payments as their margin gets compressed by higher logging costs and stagnant lumber prices.

The result is a three-way squeeze where nobody can afford to pay more, but the work can’t get done at current rates. Each participant in the chain needs the others to absorb the cost increase, but none of them have the margin to do so. This is why the workforce shortage is so intractable. It’s not a simple problem of raising wages. It’s a structural problem where the entire economic model depends on cheap and available labor, and when that labor disappears, the model breaks.

The problems cascade and compound throughout the industry. Production falls because there aren’t enough workers at current wage rates. Reduced harvest volumes create regional timber shortages even in areas with abundant forests. Mills face inconsistent supply and operate below capacity. Some mills close, which reduces competition for logs and puts downward pressure on log and stumpage prices. Lower stumpage prices reduce the incentive for landowners to manage their forests actively. Less active management means less frequent harvests, which further reduces work opportunities for the remaining loggers. The industry enters a contraction spiral where each piece of bad news accelerates the decline. But because it is a fundamentally structural issue, there is no recovery. The industry just contracts permanently.

This is the supply-side wild card. Even if housing demand remained robust, the logging workforce shortage would constrain timber supply. Combined with demand collapse, it creates a pincer movement that compresses margins and crushes the industry from both sides. The economic consequences flow through timber-dependent communities, and mill closures could accelerate not because no one needs lumber but because timber supply becomes unreliable.

The industry is caught in a doom loop where every piece of bad news amplifies the others. But the logger shortage is just one piece of the supply-side crisis.de crisis. Mills are caught in a crisis of their own.

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