Kurtis Vaagen: Protecting region’s forest requires collaboration

By Kurtis Vaagen

In many forestry operations, the traditional rule is that large diameter trees make the most money. My family has built a thriving business by doing the exact opposite: We focus on small trees, the ones less than 12 inches in diameter, that usually would have ended up in waste piles to be burned, that today come from thinning forests to make them healthier and more resistant to fire.

I’m part of the third generation of a family that owns Vaagen Brothers Lumber. We operate two mills in Eastern Washington, one in Colville and the other in Usk.

We started focusing on small timber in the 1990s. That’s when my father became concerned by how much waste he was seeing in traditional logging operations. He also believed that most working forests desperately needed to be thinned to enhance the remaining trees and to reduce fire risk. In the drier forests on the east side of the state where we operate, reducing wildfire risk by thinning is critical to creating healthier landscapes.

That’s why Dad bought our first “HewSaw,” a multiblade tool that, working with a digital scanner, can follow the slight curve of small logs. In a single pass, it can square logs off and saw them into usable boards while also producing wood chips, “hog fuel” (waste wood that can be burned for power) and sawdust. Before we had this small diameter infrastructure, the waste, what we call “slash piles,” were huge. It cost money to thin forests, so we didn’t do it as much. Fire risk was high; forest health suffered.

The highest value timber results from the treatment that the land gets, and increasingly that means thinning. We’ve created a business model that makes thinning profitable and eco-friendly.

At our Colville and Usk mills, we process about 100 truckloads of timber every day. We produce 140 to 170 million board feet of lumber each year. We provide approximately 250-300 good-paying jobs in rural communities, although Usk is running at 40% capacity because of a lack of available, affordable timber.

At the same time, we’re able to offer thinning treatments on acres that never could have justified that before. It would have been too expensive. But we can make it work because we sell absolutely everything that the logs produce. Of course, we have markets for the 2-by-4s and 2-by-6s that are the bulk of our output. But we also make sure that we have partners who want the by-products as well: wood chips, sawdust and hog fuel. We waste nothing.

The most important part of this way of doing business is that we take input from the environmental community and from our neighbors. That’s why I’m proud to serve as the president of the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition. This unusual coalition of forest owners, timber companies, conservationists and foresters formed in 2002, when the management of the 1.1 million acres of the Colville National Forest was mired in controversy. Since then, our coalition has worked to find common ground among all these groups, and with tribes who have known these landscapes since time immemorial.

As a result of this dialogue, we’ve made adjustments regarding where and how we do our thinning treatments. You can’t just go in and thin a tract of forest. It’s not that simple. It takes planning, partnership among different sectors, and a sense of history, of place, of biology.

In my family’s business, and in my work with the forest coalition, I believe that it’s key to collaborate with environmental organizations such as the Lands Council, Sustainable Northwest and Washington Conservation Action. I also believe that environmental groups need to collaborate with the logging and timber industry. Both sides need to listen because the solution often lies somewhere in the middle. Both sides need to look for common ground. It’s not my side versus your side. We have more in common than many people think.

Because the reality is that neither the logging and timber industry nor the environmental community nor our region’s tribes want to see our forests go up in smoke because they haven’t been well managed. We all want the forests of the Evergreen State to endure for our grandchildren, and for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.

That will require dialogue. That will require collaboration. That will mean being open to new ideas, new business models, new ways of managing. We must move beyond entrenched positions and do this. Our forests, our futures, depend upon it.

Kurtis Vaagen was born and raised in Colville, and serves as vice president of operations for Vaagen Bros. Lumber. He is also board president of the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition.