By James Ronald Skains
Journal Correspondent

Travis Taylor, longtime piney woods logger was elevated to the position of First Vice President of the American Logging Councio at the recent 17th annual meeting held in Minocqua, Wisconsin.

"The way the American Logging Council is structured, you start out as a member of the Board of Directors, then become the Secretary of the organization then, a vice-president and finally the President if you stay involved with the ALC long enough," Travis Taylor told the Piney Woods Journal.

"In September 2012, I will move up to President of the American Logging Council," Taylor acknowledged. "This will give Louisiana the opportunity to host the annual 2013 ALC National Conference 2013. We are looking at Natchitoches as a location, or Shreveport."

Taylor, a past President of the Louisiana Loggers Council and a recipient of the Logger of the Year Award, began his forest industry career in 1968 after graduating from Louisiana Tech Forestry School. He first went to work with Joe Burns Forestry Group based in Danville, Louisiana. After a couple of years of forestry duties, Taylor decided to become a logging contractor for Burns Forestry.

"We have never before faced such a crisis in the logging industry as we do today," Taylor pointed out. "Our logging forces are shrinking dramatically, and there is nothing on the horizon to stop this shrinkage due to our economic crisis."

"This crisis is not something new, it has been building up for several years but has reached the critical point in 2011," Taylor explained. "The bottom line is that the logging industry as a whole has not been profitable for several years.''

"Secondly, few if any new people are entering the industry because of it being so unprofitable,'' Taylor elaborated. "Over the course of at least the last sixty years, the logging business has been a family tradition with each generation producing another generation of logging. However, that tradition is coming to a screeching halt for two reasons," Taylor noted. "First is the unprofitability of the business, and the other is the initial cost to get into the logging business."

"It costs nearly a million dollars now days to set up a modest size logging operation," Taylor explained. "To get your equipment financed, you have to come up with 25% which is a lot of cash money to gamble on a non-profitable industry."

"I'm going to use my next two years to help recruit new members to the American Logging Council and to urge existing members to participate more," Taylor acknowledged. "With members in some 30 plus states, the ALC can become a political and economic force which seems to be necessary to get anything done in the current state of affairs in our country."

"A recent survey through the Southern Logging Times, discovered that over 40% of the loggers in the United States had never heard of the American Logging Council,'' Taylor confirmed. "I think that is particularly sad because we just held our 17th annual conference as a national organization.''

"I want to see our leaders in the ALC to become more involved with local and state logging organizations," Taylor continued. "Also, on the local level, loggers need to get involved in business organizations and political activities. Up in the big woods of Maine, one logging contractor is also a State Senator, out in Idaho, the Executive Director of the Idaho Loggers group is a State Senator, and in Florida, the brother of a logging contractor is a Congressman," Taylor confirmed. "So loggers don't just have to confine themselves to activities in the woods, but need to get involved in local and state affairs."

"One of the big problems that we face within the timber industry is the lack of understanding by the procurement side of the mills," Taylor explained. "The procurement side of the timber industry only sees the outside of our logging operations and personal life. Over the past several years as the industry has contracted due to lack of sales of lumber and paper. The procurement people see our million plus dollars' worth of equipment still working in the woods, our trucks hauling logs and chips up and down the road and convince themselves that the logging contractors are doing okay financially," Taylor emphasized. "What they don't understand is the price that we have paid to continue operating," Taylor elaborated. "We have burned up most of the equity in our equipment and trucks and can't afford to buy new equipment. Plus, we have property that we accumulated during the years we were making money in order to keep our operations going," Taylor said. "In addition, in order to survive up to this point, most of us have reached into our savings and retirement accounts and pulled out money to keep our logging operations going. For the last ten years, the logging industry has been told repeatedly that biomass to be used for energy will be our salvation," Taylor noted. "However, the biomass projection is still the same. In five years, the technology will be available to successfully convert biomass into energy at a profit."

"This biomass story is getting more difficult every day to believe that it will ever really help the logging industry," Taylor added.

"One thing that we are doing to try to turn the logging industry around is what we call the TREE Legislation that a group of us are trying to get through Congress," Taylor pointed out. "TREE stands for The Revenue Enhancement Enactment which would give people buying new homes a $10.00 per square foot tax credit if the lumber used in the house is grown and manufactured here in the United States. We believe this TREE Legislation, based on the concept that the tree is the great economic engine in America, would create 450,000 new housing starts each year and create more than 1.2 million jobs, many in the forest industry," Taylor explained. "It would at least cause the mills to produce more lumber which would mean more loads of logs going to the mills every day."

"Although the picture of the logging industry is indeed grim, there are positive things that we can do," Taylor emphasized. "We loggers can no longer sit back and wait for someone else to turn things around for us. We have to take the lead. And that is my personal goal as I move up into senior leadership in the American Logging Council, make a difference," Taylor concluded.

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