New management for 400,000 acres of timberland in Klamath County means the region can expect to experience new growth in the timber industry. Green Diamond Resource Co., the timber company that purchased several thousand acres of land last year from the Klamath Falls timber company JWTR, plans to boost its timber harvest in the next decade.
Green Diamond, which is headquartered in Seattle, owns 1.4 million timber acres in three western states: Oregon, Washington and California. Of that, roughly 630,000 acres are in Oregon: 400,000 acres in Klamath County; 150,000 acres in Lake County; and 40,000 acres in Jackson County.
The company also recently purchased a swath of land about 15 miles northwest of Klamath Falls, making the company managers of nearly 1 percent of Oregon’s land base. Green Diamond sells its wood to local processors, such as Thomas Lumber Co., Collins Pine and Columbia Forest Products, and to markets further away in Lakeview.
Andy Elsbree, vice president and general manager of Oregon Operations, said when Green Diamond purchased its Oregon land, the company reduced its harvest by at least 40 percent of JWTR harvest levels. “In six years, we’re going to start to ramp the cut back up, and it will ramp up for the next 50 years,” Elsbree said. “Right now, we are probably looking at ramping it up four times over the ensuing decades. That’s what our cut will be, so our employment will go up maybe three times that.”
Elsbree estimates Green Diamond’s Klamath Falls outfit has 55 company employees and about 35 contract employees. He said once the company starts ramping up production, more employees will be needed to remove the trees from the land and another 50 to 75 employees will be needed to transport and process wood products.
From the Herald and News: https://www.heraldandnews.com/klamath/new-growth-new-timber-harvests/article_4c81413a-7f59-58c0-9b12-db1b735eb9fb.html