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Politicians can demand more logging in the Black Hills, but they can’t make trees grow faster • South Dakota Searchlight [1]
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Date: 2025-03-07
Does the Black Hills need a viable timber industry to help manage its forests? Absolutely. Recently, U.S. Senators John Thune and Mike Rounds, U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson and South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden have been pressuring U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to increase timber harvesting in the Black Hills National Forest.
Paradoxically, this may lead to the demise of the Black Hills timber industry.
The quantity of trees suitable for logging — known as the standing timber inventory — in the Black Hills National Forest has been in contention for at least 10 years. The forest has been heavily impacted by the mountain pine beetle, wildfires and overlogging, leading to a significant reduction of the standing inventory of trees. Larger trees were particularly hard hit. The mountain pine beetle and loggers both like larger trees.
Several studies have been conducted to determine how many trees are left in the forest. Timber industry representatives have never accepted the results. To finally address this issue, in 2023, the Black Hills National Forest undertook an intensive Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) project. This project was supported by both of the states with land in the Black Hills National Forest, Wyoming and South Dakota.
LiDAR uses lasers deployed from aircraft to provide an extremely accurate representation of the forest. Concurrent to the LiDAR flights, over 1,600 field plots were studied on the ground. This field data collection was accomplished in partnership with the Wyoming State Forestry Division, South Dakota State Forestry and Pennington County staff. The plots are used to “ground truth” the LiDAR data. In January, the ground-level field plot data was released after an external audit by the University of Wyoming.
The field plot data included some interesting statistics.
It showed that for pine trees greater than 5 inches in diameter, there were an average of 90 trees per acre. This indicates that the forest is very open.
The average spacing of 90 trees per acre is about 22 feet between trees. For reference, when the Forest Service plants trees, it plants about 430 per acre at a spacing of 10 feet between trees.
Yes, there are still some dense stands out there, but on average, it is a very open forest.
The field plot data also revealed that the average diameter of pine trees greater than 5 inches is 9.8 inches. For reference, the lower cutoff for sawtimber (trees suitable to cut into lumber) is 9 inches. This shows that the forest is now, on average, a very young forest. It will take decades to turn this around.
Members of the timber industry want to return to the higher harvest levels of the past so they can run at full capacity. For those sawmills that rely on sawtimber-size trees, there are simply not enough left in the forest for them to do that sustainably. The Forest Service is required by the National Forest Management Act to manage its timber for long-term sustainability. Forest Service employees are offering lower levels of timber for sale, but not because they’re lazy or mismanaging the forest. They’re simply following the law.
In response to a commentary I wrote last year, Rep. Johnson did a Q&A with South Dakota Searchlight, which asked him to explain his statement that “roadblocks” were standing in the way of bigger timber harvests. Johnson mentioned his conversations with the Forest Service and the timber industry regarding 75 open positions in the Black Hills National Forest.
“We talked about what can be done to streamline that bureaucracy,” Johnson said. “It takes more than six months to go from an open position to a field spot. That is clearly a bureaucracy problem.”
The Trump administration and its new Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, recently fired at least 2,000 Forest Service employees nationwide, reportedly including some in the Black Hills National Forest. None of our high-ranking South Dakota politicians have yet expressed any concern about this.
If the amount of timber harvested in the Black Hills returns to levels that are not sustainable, the timber industry could cut itself out of business. The forest already has few options for finding more timber. Widespread clear-cutting may not be that far down the road.
I suggest you take a drive in the forest and get off the paved roads. Look closely at the spacing between the larger trees. There are many dense thickets of small trees (which are a fire hazard), but they aren’t considered part of the timber inventory. It will take up to 100 years for them to grow into sawtimber. Look at the diameter of the larger trees. There aren’t many of them anymore. They are, for the most part, gone.
Republican politicians will likely be successful in demanding more timber harvesting from the Trump administration, but they cannot make trees grow faster. If you visit the forest and don’t like what you see, consider contacting your elected officials.
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https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2025/03/07/politicians-can-demand-more-logging-in-the-black-hills-but-they-cant-make-trees-grow-faster/
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