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Harvest Quantities

Forests in the U.S. South yield a variety of hardwood and softwood timber products. Softwood products constituted 69 percent of harvest output in 2001, the latest year for which comprehensive data are available (fig. 1). Saw logs and pulpwood products accounted for 41 and 42 percent of total harvest, respectively. Softwood saw logs are the largest product class (30 percent), followed by softwood pulpwood (27 percent) and hardwood pulpwood (15 percent). These three product classes represented roughly 72 percent of harvests in 2001 and have represented at least 68 percent of harvests since the 1970s (fig. 1).

Timber harvests from southern forests trended strongly upward during the last half of the 20th century (fig. 1). Between 1962 and 1996, annual harvesting more than doubled from about 4 billion cubic feet to almost 10 billion cubic feet, while the product mix remained relatively constant. Pulpwood’s share of production ranged from 39 to 44 percent and softwood’s share ranged from 64 to 71 percent of production, with no consistent trends.

Charting total production on an annual basis reveals that growth in harvests for all products was very steady, with only a few exceptions (fig. 2). For example, output dipped during a brief recession in the mid-1970s. Growth in harvests was at its strongest from 1982 through 1998, with output expanding at a rate of 3.3 percent per year. After this long period of strong growth, total harvest quantity fell by approximately 9 percent between 1998 and 2002. Harvest quantity in 2002 was approximately equal to that in 1995. This represents the largest and longest downturn in harvesting over the historical period (1952–2002).

Trends in the three largest product classes (fig. 3) show that the harvest decline between 1998 and 2002 was largely explained by reductions in pulpwood production. Softwood and hardwood pulpwood harvests declined by 11 and 21 percent, respectively, while softwood sawtimber harvests were stable. We are unable to construct an annual time series of hardwood saw-log production (the fourth largest product class) using a comparable technique, but the periodic data (fig. 1) suggest that hardwood sawtimber harvests were relatively stable over this period.