Lumber tariffs aren't the problem. I'm in Mississippi and timber prices are at an almost all time low around here, yet lumber prices are an all time high. You can't give away timber right now. All the Covid unemployment extensions and stimulus money have mill workers sitting home getting more money than they can make working, labor shortages are the problem.
30 or 40 years ago planting timber was thought, at least in some areas, to be a good investment if you had land that you weren't doing anything else with. I'm guessing a lot of Baby Boomers who had moved away from the small farms they or their parents grew up on and had inherited land they didn't have a purpose for decided timber would help supplement their retirement. It stinks that the market conditions have changed so dramatically that the small landowners can't sell their timber even with lumber and wood product prices sky high. The low timber prices predate the COVID pandemic, even with all the housing construction and hurricanes driving demand for wood products the last few years. Clearly that market is not an efficient one.
