For this Maine family, being a logging contractor means so much more than moving wood to the mills.

Story by: Jessica Johnson

RUMFORD, Me. – After five minutes with 69-year old Andy Irish, many things become obvious. He’s a hard worker. He loves his family and his home state of Maine. And he loves the logging business. Not just running his own crews and working for himself, but the industry. It also becomes obvious that if you ask Andy Irish a question, he’s going to tell you the whole truth—good, bad and ugly.

The truth Irish tells is important because he’s spent a career in the woods but also working to be a force for positive change in an ever-changing industry. “I’m always under the philosophy,” he says, “that the only way you can make money logging is to be more efficient than everybody around you.”

For Irish, not coming from a long line of loggers worked for and against him. He didn’t have a lot of generational knowledge to fall back on, but he also had the opportunity to blaze his own trail in an area where lots of guys were working in western Maine and New Hampshire with a cable skidder or two, a slasher if they were lucky. Everyone was just cutting trees. Now, Irish Family Logging is a fully mechanized operation with mainly Tigercat iron.

But times are incredibly tough in New England. Markets that were tight a few years ago have shrunk to nothing now. “In our basket, in Maine and New Hampshire, there were 14 pulp mills, paper mills in our service area. Fourteen. And most of them were within our reach,” he says. Almost all 14 are gone. As are almost all of the wood-consuming speciality mills in the area.

“In Peru, where I live, there was a huge Diamond International factory. They made clothespins out of white birch. And there were tons of these mills, not all as big, but everywhere in Maine. Moosehead Manufacturing up in northern Maine had huge factories making rock maple furniture. That stuff all slowly disappeared. They drained our economy,” he says.

He points to another example, a pulp and paper mill in Jay, Me. where a digester exploded in spring of 2020 that completely rocked the New England market taking 2 million tons away. What should have been a natural contraction of the workforce, with some exiting the business and some finding their footing, the government stepped in and helped everyone stay afloat.

That help didn’t help for long when the market never came back: “They kept everybody going until they just plain bled to death,” he says. Shuttered mills have been slowly killing New England’s loggers, but the current economy is the wolf at the door.