The scent of eastern white pine

Excellent old style reporting.  From Logjam! A journey to the heart of the lumber shortage. by Henry Grabar.  It does not cover the whole international demand side of the lumber industry but it does get very tactical at the production level.  

Also a great example of the enormous complexity of specialized inter-dependent elements of a business sector where changes in one narrow area can ripple across the whole sector with magnified consequences.

The late-pandemic supply chain crisis never smelled quite as good as it did on Wednesday morning in Searsmont, Maine. The air on the 80-acre campus of Robbins Lumber was thick with the scent of eastern white pine—the tallest trees in the Maine forest—being sliced into boards. Yet the warehouse, a cavernous hangar designed to store pallets of finished lumber for shipment, was virtually empty. The company cannot keep wood on the shelves.

“Traditionally, these tiers are about four deep with lumber on both sides—you can hardly get a unit of lumber down the middle,” said Alden Robbins, the company’s vice president. “Look at it now. We’re running at about a quarter of our inventory, and we’re running at full speed, that’s how much demand there is. And if we produced 10 times as much as we produce, we could sell it all right now.”