Log trucking now accounts for 40% of delivered pulpwood cost, and some operators have seen liability insurance premiums rise 300%, making short-haul timber sales uneconomical

In the U.S. Southeast — the most productive timber region in the country — hauling logs from stump to mill now accounts for over 40% of the delivered cost of pulpwood and 26% of sawtimber cost. For low-value products like pulpwood and biomass, this means that any stand more than about 60 miles from a mill is effectively worthless: the trucking cost exceeds the stumpage value. When a local sawmill closes, the economically harvestable radius around remaining mills shrinks, stranding timber that landowners cannot sell at any price. The downstream consequences cascade. Landowners who cannot sell low-value timber skip thinning operations, which means their stands become overstocked. Overstocked stands grow slowly, are more susceptible to bark beetle outbreaks, and carry far more wildfire fuel. The landowner loses income, the stand degrades, and the community loses the next generation of high-value sawtimber that would have grown in a properly thinned stand. Meanwhile, forest health treatments on public land — the mechanical thinning that the Forest Service needs to reduce wildfire risk — depend on contractors being able to sell the removed material to a mill. If there is no mill within economical hauling distance, the contractor has to pay to dispose of the material instead of selling it, and the treatment cost doubles or triples. The structural cause is a vicious cycle between log truck economics and sawmill consolidation. Liability insurance premiums for log trucking operations have spiked — some operators report increases of up to 300%, and others have been denied coverage entirely. Combined with chronic driver shortages (the average logging business owner is 55+), rising fuel costs, and a patchwork of state-by-state weight limits that force trucks to run below capacity on certain roads, the economics of log trucking are squeezing out small operators. As small truckers exit, hauling capacity drops, which raises costs, which makes marginal mills uneconomical, which causes mill closures, which lengthens haul distances, which raises costs further.