The Wood and Fiber Supply Chain Experts
Testimonials and Case Studies
Using Forest2Market's products and services, our clients solve critical business problems. Read more about how they control their costs, improve their efficiency and maximize their profits.
Port Blakely Tree Farms Improves Marketing & Substantiates Performance to Board
Port Blakely Tree Farms does business in Washington and Oregon and
has been around for 145 years. Over the decades, the company has built a reputation as a high class
operation governed by the values of sustainability and innovation. Living by these values, Port
Blakely focuses on rigorous forest management practices and the meticulous balance of harvest and
growth rates. Their approach produces the highest quality and largest trees in the area, and it is
this quality that has become synonymous with Port Blakely Tree Farms.
Port Blakely is also dedicated to growing sustainable forests and marketing sustainable
forest products, not an easy undertaking in today’s business environment. Certainly, it is an
undertaking that requires the right tools. One of the tools used by Port Blakely Tree Farms and its
management team is Forest2Market®, Inc.’s Delivered Price Benchmark.
When Forest2Market introduced its Pacific Northwest Delivered Price Benchmark service in
2007, Port Blakely Tree Farms was one of the first customers. For its benchmarks, Forest2Market
collects delivered prices for sawlogs, pulpwood and wood fiber for a range of species and product
classes. That data is then reported back to participants in the form of cost rankings, pricing by
length, historical time series charts and cost comparisons by area.
Forestry Consultant Uses Small Business Pricing Service
At the Crossroads of North Mississippi, Tom Vigour of Vigour Forestry
Consulting, Inc. does what he's been doing for decades. As a consulting forester, he works with
timberland owners in the Montgomery County area, developing forest management plans and assessing
the value of timber.
Vigour works primarily with small timberland owners — the average tract size is about 40
acres — and most of his clients harvest their timber only once. As a result, his success — like
that of most independent consulting foresters — depends on his reputation and word-of-mouth
recommendations from his customers. "It's extremely important for my customers, who are realizing
once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime revenue from their timber, and for the future of my own business that
my appraisals are based on up-to-date information about real market prices," says Vigour. One of
the tools Vigour uses to accomplish this goal is Forest2Market's Small Business Timber Pricing
Service.
Vigour and Forest2Market began working together in January 2001, when he became one of the
earliest contributors to Forest2Market's stumpage price database. He didn't subscribe to the
service though. Since opening his business in Mississippi in 1987, Vigour relied on price reports
published by Mississippi State University's Extension Program as a barometer of the local timber
market. In 2004, however, MSU contracted with Forest2Market to produce its price reports and Vigour
made the transition as well. He's subscribed to the Small Business Timber Pricing Service ever
since.
Georgia's LIFE Program Partners with Forest2Market
When Marc Thomas worked for the Georgia Forestry Commission (GFC), he met dozens of landowners who, for financial reasons, were selling their timber in a hurry. Many of these landowners had inherited their timberland from their parents, and they were either absentee landowners—trying to manage the land from a distance—or they had just moved home after years of city life. Others knew how they would like to manage their forests but didn’t have the financial resources to put this knowledge to work. While state and federal cost sharing and incentive plans were in place to help them, Marc discovered that very few of the people he met were taking advantage of these programs.
Today, Marc works at Fort Valley State University in Georgia, and one of his responsibilities is to continue the implementation of the Landowner Initiative for Forestry Education (LIFE) program. LIFE’s mission is to help minority and limited resource forest landowners. One of their most important tools is Forest2Market's Timber Market Owner's Guide.
Resource Management Service's Due Diligence Resource Study
When Resource Management Service (RMS) considered purchasing 4.2
million acres of timberland from one of the biggest paper companies in the world, it looked to
Forest2Market (F2M) to gauge the market price.
For RMS, an independent investment management firm managing forest investments throughout
the southern U.S., a deal this size is uncommon and negotiations are often difficult. “It speaks
loudly when we reference F2M’s value for timber in a particular location,” said Dale Weizenecker,
manager of forest operations for RMS. “F2M’s data is well established. IP, as well as others,
accept it, and it is a useful basis from which an agreement can be reached."
Potlatch Corporation Uses Forest2Market's Benchmark Service
Brent Stinnett, Vice President of Forest Resources for Potlatch
Corp., is convinced he’d be in trouble without the services of Forest2Market (F2M). Stinnett, who
initially subscribed to F2M in 2000, said he has saved millions of dollars over the years with the
help of F2M. That amounted to major savings for his former employer, one of the largest private
landowners in the United States.
In his current position as Potlatch’s Vice President of Forest Resources, Brent sells about
4 million tons of product, including sawtimber and pulpwood, annually and expects to repeat the
same results. “When you sell that much in the open market, you have a lot of negotiations and
bidding wars going on,” Stinnett said. “But when you sell such a large volume and are armed with
F2M’s reliable data, it truly gives you leverage. “If you are able to save 50 cents per ton on 4
million tons of product – that’s a savings of $2 million a year. And, that’s a conservative
estimate.”
Forestry Commission Encourages Landowners to Plant Trees
July 2006: With three new wood products mills coming to South Carolina within the
next two years and an announcement of a fourth mill expected soon, the Palmetto State needs
increased tree planting to support its growing timber industry.
Grant Forest Products, an industry leader in the manufacture of wood-panel products, is
opening two of the biggest mills in North America in Allendale and Clarendon counties, and
Tech-Wood, a Dutch manufacturer of wood-composite materials, is set to open a mill in Greenwood
County.
The South Carolina Forestry Commission recruited Forest2Market (F2M), a Charlotte-based
provider of raw material pricing data for the forest products industry, to calculate the return on
investment for landowners who plant trees for future forest products. Acting as a neutral third
party, F2M provided landowners with data that supported a market for their timber and showed that
investment in timber is profitable now and most likely will be profitable in the future.
Forest Capital Partners' Resource Study and Pricing Service
As soon as Forest Capital Partners acquired land in northern Louisiana and eastern Texas, the company's first acquisition in the Southeast, it began using Forest2Market (F2M) services to better understand its customers and the market value for timber in that area.
Forest Capital, an independent investment firm that acquires and manages large-scale, investment-grade forests totaling more than 2.1 million acres across North America, quickly identified the need for more precise and timely market data to support its investment and marketing decisions. The F2M online timber pricing and benchmarking data gave the timber operator the tools it needed to be successful in a new and unfamiliar marketplace.
"We were trying to find the right-size tree that would bring the most value to the market," said Matt Donegan, co-president of Forest Capital. "F2M's pricing data showed us exactly what size trees we needed to produce, enabling us to make significant, value-enhancing adjustments to our harvest schedules."