Developing thinning as a solid service.

Story by: Dan Shell

MONROE, Ore. — Capitalizing on customer service and a demand for forest management from smaller landowners that much of the forest products industry passes by, Garren Hitner and Ethan Fielder of Century Forest Management in western Oregon are working with those landowners on all types of forest management activities.

The two Oregon State University School of Forestry graduates are leveraging their degrees and their respective families’ backgrounds in the timber industry to build a company of their own, Century Forest Management, that operates thinning and ground-based logging crews but can also handle whatever forest management activity a landowner needs.

“A lot of logging companies work for large landowners and timber owners, and many times small landowners have a hard time finding loggers who can do what they need,” Hitner says. “Our goal is to target these smaller landowners and be a one-stop shop for them and be able to handle all aspects of forest management.”

In addition to attracting small landowners, the two loggers are just the kind of people much of the forest in- dustry is looking for: younger folks— both are 35—who are highly moti- vated and able to help with the transition from an aging logging contractor base to a new generation. “Seeing the need for younger contractors also figured into our thinking,” Fielder remembers. (According to the 2024 Timber Harvesting Logger Survey, loggers under age 40 were only 9% of the contractor base.)

Hitner and Fielder met at OSU in the forestry school, had several classes together and became friends and roommates for a while. They even talked about forming a company to do what they’re doing now, but it wasn’t in the cards for two fresh out of college kids looking for jobs when they graduated in 2012.

The two went their separate ways after school. Hitner went back to southern Oregon and worked with his family who owns timberland and a small logging company. Fielder, who comes from a third-generation logging family of original Willamette Valley pioneer homesteaders, got a job with Roseburg Forest Products as a forest engineer, doing unit layouts and managing roadbuilders and surveyors.

Then the two ran into each other at the Oregon Logging Conference five years later. Hitner brought the logging company startup idea up again and both agreed to give it a go, beginning like many under inauspicious circumstances: Garren had a D3 Cat and they soon bought a shovel. “That’s what we started with—and cutting with power saws,” Fielder remembers. “We just grew from there.”