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.
Court Stanley, President of Port Blakely Tree Farms, first heard about the service when he received a phone call from Gordon Culbertson, Forest2Market’s Pacific Northwest Regional Manager. Stanley and Culbertson had known each other for years, and so when Culbertson called, Stanley listened. And he liked what he heard. “The data Forest2Market offered was much more robust than any other service available. The breadth and depth of the data gives us a much more accurate picture of how we’re performing.”
Being a participant in the benchmark service requires Port Blakely to contribute 100 percent of the data from their timber transactions directly from their log accounting system to Forest2Market’s database. The implementation went smoothly. “We had to change a few things within the system, but the Forest2Market staff made the process as painless as possible,” said Stanley.
And the results help Port Blakely Tree Farms accomplish its mission of sustainability and innovation.
Stanley and his marketing team use the reports to fine tune marketing and manufacturing efforts. “We analyze the data in the reports and adjust our management techniques and improve our profits as a result,” said Stanley. “We look at the trends and where the value is for both length and diameter. From there, we identify the optimal products to sell. And then we make decisions about how we want to grow and harvest our timber in the future.”
In addition, Port Blakely uses Forest2Market’s benchmark as a key performance indicator for its board. “I anticipate the ways in which we use the benchmark during board meetings will evolve over time,” said Stanley. “Right now, our board expects a trustworthy, quantifiable measure of our performance. With Forest2Market’s Delivered Price Benchmark, we can provide it.”
Overall, Stanley says, Port Blakely has been happy with the partnership: “We’ve been pleased with both the benchmark product and with the service we receive from Forest2Market.”
Gordon Culbertson, Pacific Northwest Regional Manager for Forest2Market, appreciates comments like these: “Forest2Market is not a by-stander. We’ve worked in the industry for decades, and it’s our goal to help the industry survive and thrive. Over those decades, we’ve gained the expertise we need to provide our customers with a clearer vision of what’s going on in the market, and this helps increase profitability and viability. We’re pleased to work with companies like Port Blakely Tree Farms, whose values, longevity and success are a credit to our industry.”
Forest2Market offers delivered price benchmarks in four regions of the United States. To learn more about this service, please visit our Forest2Mill products page.
Suz-Anne Kinney
Forest2Market: July 14, 2023
