With the world’s fourth largest forested land area, the U.S. has more than 765 million acres of planted and natural forests, as well as 58 million additional acres of woodlands.
About two thirds of all U.S. forested land is timberland, producing or capable of producing industrially utilized wood, according to industry researcher Statista.
Forest resources provide for a strong forest products industry in the U.S., with logging industry revenue amounting to an estimated $13.8 billion and sawmills and wood production revenue amounting to an estimated $51.6 billion in 2025.
For generations, the nation’s forests have provided the wood used in a countless multitude of products and uses from books and periodicals, and packaging materials to toothpicks, drinking cups, ice cream, and cosmetics.
With all its uses, though, the lumber utilized in residential construction, commercial buildings, and infrastructure projects remains the core utility of the wood harvested in the country with the demand driven by population growth, urban expansion, and an industry-wide shift toward sustainable, enviro-friendly construction practices.
Ongoing progress in the development of new lumber technologies is seeing an increased use of engineered wood products (EWP) over other building materials, rise in reconstruction, renovation, and remodeling of old buildings, and surge in focus on affordable homes drive the growth of the global engineered wood market, says Allied Market Research.
The global engineered wood market size accounted for $269 billion in 2024 and is expected to exceed around $451 billion by 2034, growing at a combined annual growth rate of 5.32 percent from 2025 to 2034 with North America expected to develop at the fastest rate.
Engineered wood is produced by joining particles, fibers, veneers, and wood strands with different materials to craft an artificial composite material. The engineered wood market encompasses a number of products ranging from roof trusses to plywood.
The growing availability of engineered lumber such as cross-laminated timber (CLT), glued laminated timber (GLT) and medium density fiberboard (MDF) allows for the more economic construction of high-rise wooden buildings, reducing the carbon footprint of both lumber production and construction.
Several lumber producers ─ large and small ─ are investing considerable effort and funding in utilizing new technologies to improve on age-old construction materials standards.
Global giant lumber Weyerhaeuser has pioneered the development of several types of such EWP.
One example is its TimberStrand LSL. Its production process combines technology and innovation that produce high-performing engineered lumber using small-diameter trees that are not strong or straight enough on their own to be of structural value as conventional sawn lumber products.
Weyerhaeuser is investing about $500 million in the construction of a new, state-of-the-art TimberStrand facility in Arkansas to expand the company’s EWP capacity in the U.S. South.
The company says that operations at the new plant will commence in 2027 with an annual production capacity of approximately 10 million cubic feet, which is comparable to the company’s existing TimberStrand facility in Kenora, Ontario, Canada.
In New York, the County of Oswego Industrial Development Agency has said it will assist in the development of a three-building, 26,000-square-foot fabrication and manufacturing facility to produce engineered wood trusses for residential and commercial buildings.
Located in the city of Oswego, the $9 million project will involve expanding and re-equipping the former steel fabrication plant with a 1,050-square-foot addition to the main building to accommodate a variety of equipment including saws, presses, a gantry system, conveyors, stacking machinery, computers, forklifts, and delivery vehicles.
The new facility is slated to begin operations by September 2026.
Lyons, Oregon-based Freres Engineered Wood Products has taken the mixing of the engineered lumber/eco-friendly concepts to a new level.
Late last year, the company began operations out of a new 60,000-square-foot lumber warehouse that is constructed entirely of prefabricated engineered plywood. The building has multiple loading docks and can store upwards of 6,000 panels, the company says.
Construction of the warehouse with prefabricated wood walls reduced construction costs by almost 20 percent and expedited the warehouse’s completion by three months.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based Forest Resources Association, the surge in the availability of engineered wood products is due in no small part to the integration of artificial intelligence into the production process.
That technological integration, the organization says, “has transformed the efficiency and quality of wood products. AI-powered machines are capable of accurately cutting, shaping, and grading timber with no wastage.”
Furthermore, “AI has enabled real-time quality monitoring in the industry which can identify the smallest anomalies in wood that the human eye cannot notice. Also, AI proves to be a good solution to optimize inventory management processes.”
In mills, “scanning and increasingly AI are used to optimize the output of lumber from a single log, and are used in lumber grading, as well,” the group says.
In November 2024, Lithuania-based industry software developer EasyODM launched its AI algorithm-powered machine vision software which features capabilities for dynamic and static inspections, on-premises data processing, and a no-code tool set.
The first-of-its-kind software can capture visual data of wood products using your existing video monitoring hardware and software; extract relevant characteristics such as grain pattern, color, texture, and surface defects from the images.
The unique software can also train models using labeled images to differentiate between acceptable wood and defective wood; and detect deviations or abnormalities in the wood surfaces, including cracks, chips, knots, and other defects.
Despite the growth in certain areas of utility, the U.S. lumber and wood products industry is not without its challenges, says the Forest Products Association (FPA).
“Overseas competition in the pulp and paper sector ― primarily from South America and Asia are of growing concern,” the group says. “Wood fiber can be grown more quickly and passed through all sectors of the supply chain cheaper than in the US. Many foreign mills are newer and more state-of-the-art facilities than those in the U.S.”
At the top of the list, though, is the chronic cross-border lumber clash between the U.S. and Canada ― an ongoing dispute that inevitably elicits strong reactions even in the best of economic times.
“It’s a complex relationship, with some individuals benefiting from an integrated relationship with Canada and others facing competition,” says the FPA. “The U.S. and Canada have long-standing trade disagreements regarding softwood lumber that predate current tariff issues by decades.”
Canadian lumber imports are subject to duties which are similar in function to tariffs, but subject to a different legal process, and the recent increase in these duties “has caused a significant movement of lumber into the U.S. in order to avoid higher duties” ─ a move, the trade group says, “has resulted in a glut of lumber in the U.S., depressing prices for all market participants.”
According to Zoltan van Heyningen, executive director of the U.S. Lumber Coalition, “One of the biggest challenges for the U.S. industry is Canada’s unfair softwood lumber trade practices. Strong and effective U.S. trade law enforcement is critical to allow the U.S. industry to invest and grow to its natural size.”
Van Heyningen decries what he says is “Canada’s practice of subsidizing its domestic industry and dumping practices” stating such activity is “extremely disruptive in the U.S. market, and harmful to U.S. lumber producers.”
Additionally, he says, the Canadian lumber industry “with the help of government subsidies, maintains significant excess lumber production capacity and production that floods into the U.S. market, often shocking the system, depressing prices when it does. ”
The domestic U.S. softwood lumber industry, he says, “is more than capable and has the natural resources to grow further. Strong and effective U.S. trade laws enforcement is critical to that growth.”
“The U.S. softwood lumber market continues to be deeply suppressed by Canada oversupplying the U.S. market,” says Andrew Miller, chair and owner of the Oregon-based Stimson Lumber Company.
The company has operations in four states in the Pacific Northwest, operates six mills in Oregon and Idaho, and owns and manages more than 600,000 acres of forest land. The company is spending $50 million to install a 350-foot, high-velocity sawmill line at its Forest Grove, Oregon, facility that can process younger, smaller trees into usable wood.
The new sawmill line is set to open early next year and could triple production by the end of that year.
Commenting on the U.S.-Canada lumber tariff issue, Miller states that, “The Canadian government continues to prop up its industry’s excess capacity and production by announcing more than one billion dollars in new subsidies.”
He posits that “a carefully targeted Section 232 tariff designed to dismantle Canada’s unneeded and disruptive softwood lumber capacity would foster more growth of the U.S. lumber industry and production to create a long-term stable domestic supply of lumber to build U.S. homes.”
Until the U.S. government “takes aggressive steps to address Canada’s excess lumber capacity and production that is being dumped into the U.S. market, we will continue to see damaging fluctuations in the U.S. lumber market.”
