(pennlive.com)
Jeremy Roupp is a third-generation lumber man.
Growing up in northwestern Lycoming County, his family owned a sawmill and logging business.
Lumber was a lucrative business for many of the family-owned operations in that region of Pennsylvania. The state’s thriving lumber economy was in large part propped up by the dominance Williamsport, which a century ago provided the backbone of the U.S. shipbuilding industry.
Over the decades, Roupp has seen the precipitous decline of the industry — from the impact of the housing and economic crisis of 2008, tough trade agreements, fickle consumer demand and, more recently, the inundation of cheap alternatives into the U.S. market.
Now, however, retaliatory tariffs and the loss of export markets to global competitors are threatening the survival of the industry.
If the Trump administration does nothing to alleviate the pressure on the industry, Roupp said, its future vitality is in question.
Roupp is amplifying the concerns of an industry that overwhelmingly voted for the man who imposed the retaliatory tariffs: President Donald Trump.
Recently, some 48 hardwood companies and industry organizations from Pennsylvania sent a letter to the Trump administration urging it to include the U.S. hardwood sector in tariff relief programs.
The lumber and hardwood industry may be showing a bit of a stepchild inferiority complex, with its bigger cousin — the farm sector — getting bailouts.
“It’s a little unfair when they get funds for their crops or something and we don’t get anything from that when we can’t sell our wood overseas or we have lower consumption,” said Roupp, director of export sales at Bingaman & Son Lumber in Kreamer.
Hardly a month goes by that a Pennsylvania hardwood company does not go under, he said.
Once coveted for its dozen or so native hardwood species, particularly cherry, the bedrock of high-priced furniture like Queen Anne and Chippendale, the Pennsylvania lumber and hardwood industry is tanking.
An industry that boasted 15 billion board feet of annual production in 2008 has dwindled to devastatingly low levels.
“We’re going to be lucky if we produce 5 billion board feet,” Roupp said.
In 2024, production, in fact, fell to 4.5 billion board feet.
Industry officials — including 452 mills, manufacturers, loggers, and distributors from across the country — are appealing to the Trump administration about the critical role the hardwood industry plays in supporting rural economies and communities, and downstream American manufacturing industries.
In Pennsylvania, lumbering is intricately tied to its communities.
The hardwood industry is overwhelmingly populated by a local workforce, unlike many agricultural businesses that rely on seasonal or temporary laborers. The majority of operations are family-owned.
Approximately 60,000 lumber jobs hang in the balance in Pennsylvania — from loggers and truck drivers to furniture companies.
Roupp said he recently counted some 20 companies that have gone under and are liquidating their inventory.
“A lot of them are in Pennsylvania, some in other states as well, but a lot of them in Pennsylvania are closing because they can’t continue to sell at losses,” he said. “The industry is going to continue on for the lucky ones that can last and hold out, but we’re losing jobs, particularly in Pennsylvania. We’re losing jobs because these companies are having to close locations, reduce production, reduce costs where they can and just try to survive.”
Industry officials are pointing out to the Trump administration that the vitality of rural America relies on the U.S. hardwood industry, which supports 1.8 million jobs and drives economic activity in communities from Appalachia to the Pacific Northwest.
The pressures on the industry, even before the tariffs, were mounting. Between 2022 and 2024:
- U.S. hardwood exports declined by $930 million.
- Hardwood lumber exports fell 20% or $663 million.
- Hardwood log exports declined 11% or $209 million.
- The sector has lost 40,000 jobs – a 10% decline in its workforce.
The biggest hit came in 2018 when the hardwood industry was left out of that year’s tariff relief measures.
“In 2018, many farmers rightly received relief packages to offset their losses from trade disputes. Yet policymakers must remember that hardwood producers are farmers, too,” Kirby Kendrick of Kendrick Forest Products in Edgewood, Iowa, wrote in an op-ed in Agri-Pulse. His family has operated a sawmill for three generations.
“Our livelihoods depend on the land, and our industry is just as vulnerable to the same global forces that affect traditional agriculture.”
The current wave of tariffs are compounding matters.
“We’re having to sell our product at reduced prices, reduced margins and then sometimes no profit and negative margins to compete and get it sold overseas in primarily China,” Roupp said.
China is the largest importer of Pennsylvania lumber and hardwood products and the state ships a higher volume of lumber to China than to any other country.
“But this year we had zero profit margin,” Roupp said. “We only are shipping there what we can’t sell elsewhere. We don’t have any other alternatives for it and we have to move it off just to free up free space or to offload product that we don’t have other options for.”
Nearly 50% of the industry has closed in recent years, fueled in large part by insufficient consumption in the U.S. A year after Trump’s first trade war in 2018, U.S. exports to China went in the negative margin. Basically, companies lost money on products shipped to China.
Even as retaliatory tariffs are having a contradictory economic impact on Pennsylvania’s lumber, not every sector plays by the same rules.
Commodities like energy and potash from Canada, for example, are subject to a lower tariff rate than the overall rate imposed on goods from Canada.
Meanwhile, other industries, including U.S. automakers and the agricultural sector, have received relief to offset the cost of tariffs on imported materials.
Earlier this month, as farmers clamored about the input costs and shrinking export opportunities, Trump approved a massive $12 billion relief for them.
Farmers are expected to begin receiving funds by the end of February, according to the Trump administration.
The irony of the industry’s situation can be boiled down to politics: The overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s lumber and hardwood industry — as well as its rural communities — voted for Trump.
“Our industry backs 90% of these decisions,” he said of the Trump administration. “A lot of what has happened had to happen. We believe that in our industry, the majority of us are in favor of getting things set straight, putting in place the policies that he’s putting in, even though some of them have hurt a lot.”
The signatories on the letter warn that without swift action, further losses could permanently weaken domestic production capacity.
Lumber, industry leaders note, is a critical component of a supply chain that keeps manufacturing strong in the domestic market.
“Without a robust domestic hardwood sector, we risk increasing reliance on foreign materials and losing the skilled workforce and infrastructure that underpin American competitiveness,” said Dana Lee Cole, executive director of the Hardwood Federation. “Supporting the U.S. hardwood industry means supporting U.S. manufacturing.”
The stark realities of the modern world can’t be denied.
U.S. appetite for high-grade lumber has waned — at least the willingness to fork out for higher-priced wood. Consumption in the U.S. for the grade lumber is only 1.2 million or 25% of total production in the hardwood lumber grade.
“We need these export markets and we need their economies, to be healthy so they can import our product at levels that we can all be profitable at,” Roupp said.
U.S. lumber manufacturers have to sell to China to even hope to turn a profit. But they have to sell at a lower price. So even though they may be paying only 10% when they import the U.S. product, once they produce the flooring and send it back to the U.S. — the largest importer of flooring — they are being hit with an import tariff.
“That’s multiplying the cost of that material coming back into the U.S., which drives inflation and lowers demand because the prices are going up and consumers in the U.S. can’t afford to purchase it,” Roupp said.
The U.S. consumes only about 1.5 billion board feet, which is roughly one-third of total production. That means the U.S. hardwood industry depends heavily on export markets for profitability, with the remainder of sales going overseas.
“We as suppliers selling the raw material to China can’t afford to take double the hits to get down to a range where we can sell the product,” Roupp said.
He and his fellow industry leaders now just want a break, but Roupp has no illusions that the lumber industry compares to the agricultural sector in being positioned for a bailout.
“I mean the guys shipping soybeans are putting thousands of containers on vessels every month and we as a company, we’re shipping five or six hundred containers a year. They’re doing it monthly. In scale we’re very small, but in scale the smaller often hurt the worst.”