A perfect example of two big outfits that used to be highly profitable now neither being profitable ‘enough’. And are the assets both have sold in recent years equal to those they have bought, or are they both still living off their capital rather than the income it’s supposed to be able to generate?

Canfor will look after Canfor no-body elce they dont care about people just profits

I don’t think Canfor is really interested in the panel market. They are mainly a dimensional lumber and pulp producer. LP is the OSB producer of choice out there.

It makes sense from a business stand point and it was a long time in coming IMO.

I’ve never heard a good explanation of why we can’t use beetle kill wood that is no good for 2×4’s and use it for OSB instead?

Ainsworth was going to build a plant in Salmon Valley before the housing market bust… I wonder what ever happened to that and if IPG has ever gotten back to them on that one?

Well….don’t quote me but I don’t think you can use Pine and Spruce for OSB. I know Peace Valley uses Poplar and the odd Birch…..definitely primarily Poplar.

Doesn’t Ainsworth use pine in their original OSB plant at 100 Mile House? I believe poplar and aspen are preferred where those species are plentiful because they’re generally cheaper to process, i.e. they’re larger trees and consequently yield more flakes when they’re linearly fed into the machine that slices them. I doubt you’d get much yield of suitable flakes from dry beetle kill pine if it was past the point of being any good for 2x4s. Maybe a product like particleboard could be made from it, but not OSB. There isn’t much value in green wood that’s made into OSB most places in the world. In Europe, fuel pellet producers can pay more for green wood than OSB and MDF producers can, and are squeezing the latter out of the market. So its a product that doesn’t have a lot of margin in it to begin with.

I see that’s interesting… if a balanced forest was planned I wonder if there was a way to create the value?

Well, when it comes right down to it, OSB sells because it’s cheap. It’s done to plywood what plywood did to shiplap, and shiplap to the log cabin. So far as a balanced forest is concerned timber is harvested on a faster and faster rotation, which products like OSB enable. The Germans are already making extruded lumber. Not sawn from sawlogs but formed by squeezing ground wood fibre from any size or species of tree through a set of dies, kind of like the old Presto logs were made.

One thing seems certain to me, we will never be able to operate proper sustained yield forestry until we conquer the problem of inflation. Tree Farm Licenses were a well intentioned attempt when they were first introduced, but continuous inflation made sustainability impossible.