Virginia loggers hope steps taken by President Donald Trump will breathe new life into parts of the Commonwealth they feel have long been abandoned.
“We don’t need Canada’s lumber,” Trump told reporters earlier this month before signing two executive orders that he says will help America become less dependent on foreign forest industries. Canada is the largest exporter of lumber into the U.S.
The lumber industry in the United State has a long history and has been financially rocky in recent decades. Unregulated cutting up to the 1980s damaged land and water systems. Regulations followed. Then international trade agreements saw production shipped overseas, further denting an industry that literally built America.
But loggers in Virginia have stuck with it. Among them is Vance Wright. “The biggest thing about logging, farming, saw milling, it's a lot of family-owned business,” he says.
Wright is co-owner of Charles A. Wright Logging in La Crosse, near the North Carolina line. His family has long harvested trees like loblolly pine, a valuable soft wood that’s plentiful in Virginia’s southside and is likely in the walls of your home right now.
We headed out to one of his logging sites on a rainy Wednesday in March.
“We’re just producing a dirty chip: limbs, top, bark, everything goes down there,” Vance tells me as we tour a multi-acre logging site with four massive machines cutting, chipping or collecting trees as they fall.
“They’re working like a team, like football or baseball. Everybody’s got their play and they’re working on their position,” he adds.
Virginia’s logging industry is different from those on the West Coast. According to the Virginia Department of Forestry, 80% of trees here are privately owned among more than 450,000 landowners. Out west, federal lands rule and are more likely to be impacted by Trump’s push to open federal forests to harvest.
Private ownership means loggers like Wright have to build relationships with landowners or work with logging consultants to get access to harvestable wood. They offer a lump sum before they harvest or pay by what they harvest afterword. Both have risks.
It’s not a speedy process, either. Forest tracts can grow up to 30 years before they’re worth harvesting.
“We’re long-term planners in this business,” Wright says. “You hope the market is still booming”
Much of Virginia's wood these days goes into plywood, fluff for diapers, pulp and paper, pallets and even as energy, called biomass, which some see as a renewable energy source.
“Forestry brings money into rural Virginia,” Wright says. “No other industry hardly does. We bring income to rural Virginia, to landowners, to employees, and good paying jobs.”
After the wood is collected by Wright’s team some of it heads over to Meherrin River Forest Products, a saw mill he co-owns with Don Bright.
A tour of the lumber mill shows a mix of high and low tech. Laser guided machines measure logs as a massive bandsaw slices them into boards. Those boards go through more processing before dropping off into a loading site where dozens of workers lay them out to be cured and then shipped locally and overseas.
Trump’s shortest-term impact on logging may be with tariffs. But logging and timber have long been subject to different international trade deals. And while those international markets arguably killed Virginia’s manufacturing, think Martinsville’s now-shuttered furniture factories, it also opened doors to new opportunities.
“I’ve heard estimates as high as 50% of our wood getting exported,” Bright says. “Shipping those jobs overseas instead of right here in Alberta, Virginia.”
He said Asian markets love American logs. They get shipped to Asia, turned into products and then those finished products are shipped to Europe and other places.
Bright heralded the future of biomass as an alternative market for their products.
“Solar energy is a big hot topic right now,” the mill owner says, noting the natural course of tree growth, aided by sun and rain. “Trees are the original solar energy.”
Virginia became a hub for biomass after Enviva Biomass opened a pellet facility in Southampton County. And it added a small but significant new source of income for folks like Bright. But the pellet industry took a hit on the international market, the company entered bankruptcy late last year and only emerged in December.
And traditional solar is encroaching on what could be additional logging land. Wright says the logging industry can offer about $75 an acre a year to procure a harvest; solar farms offer 20 times that amount.
Terry Rephann is an economist with UVA who's studied Virginia's logging industry. He said the multitude of factors plaguing Virginia logging may be hard for Trump to overcome. Among the issues: 450,000 different landowners make production at scale -to meet competition with other players- difficult.
But there was a time when logging had a boom: during the housing bubble in 2008. The industry did well before the burst. Loggers were getting paid first in the supply chain.
Now, in 2025, economists and industry watchers think another housing boom could see the demand for American lumber increase. But high interest rates complicate the issue.
“Until we get interest rates down and we can free up that pent up housing market demand, we’re gonna have a difficult time,” Scott Dane with the industry group the American Loggers Association warned.
Rephann, like Scott, said a housing boom could help.
“When you have housing construction it also drives a demand for furniture, cabinetry, doors panels,” he told Radio IQ. "Reviving housing is going to revive logging activity more than just about anything.”
Ron Jenkins is with the Virginia Loggers Association. He said a small, mid-COVID housing boom saw Virginia’s industry ramp up, and Bright hit record production at his sawmills around then too. But once interest rates caught up other saw mills closed again.
“The demand is not there, the profit margin is not there,” Jenkins said of what he heard of recent mill closures.
Trump’s plan, in Jenkins eyes, makes sense: increasing tariffs increases demand for American goods and brings that demand back to Southside Virginia.
"I pray this will be a turnaround, if any of these policies are worth a dime," Jenkins said. "To bring back more into the USA and hopefully Virginia will have a share of that.”
But interest rates need to come down too, if not first. And how do you bring down interest rates? Rephann has an answer but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.
“A recession would, oddly enough, dampen down inflation expectations and the Fed would react,” he said. “The recessionary risks would offset the inflationary risks and that would stimulate the housing market.”
Eating lunch at a local Cracker Barrel, Don Bright tells me he hopes Trump does something, and with some consistency, to bring back the demand for his lumber.
“I think that’s probably the most fair thing. If a country has a tariff, we have a tariff,” he said. “But the up and down, we can’t keep up with it.”
At the moment, Trump’s tariffs are estimated around 40% on imported Canadian lumber and his administration is looking into whether the continued import of lumber amounts to a national security risk.
Home builders aren’t loving the tariffs either. the National Home Builders Association recently estimated they’re adding thousands of dollars to the cost of new construction.
But the Federal Reserve might offer some hope. Interest rates are still expected to drop before the end of 2025. But other fears exist too.
“Forecasters have generally raised… their possibility of a recession somewhat, but still at relatively moderate level … [it] has moved up, but it’s not high,” Fed chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
