F&W Forestry’s Regional Timber Market Insights | Fall 2026
This is the third installment of F&W’s quarterly regional timber market series, and it arrives at a moment of heightened strain across the company’s operating footprint. Record diesel prices have emerged as the defining theme this quarter—mentioned by nearly every manager from Maine to California—squeezing logging and trucking margins and putting steady downward pressure on stumpage prices even where mill demand has held up. Dry weather compounded matters across much of the country, filling mill inventories and reducing demand. In the Northeast, those pressures are compounded by the closure of Finch Paper’s pulping facility, a serious blow to hardwood and softwood pulpwood markets across New York and New England that managers there describe as potentially lasting.