Federal vs state timber: how the programs differ

Federal and state timber programs run on different mandates, and the mandate is why a state price and a federal price should not be laid side by side. All three agencies this site tracks sell public timber at auction, but they do it for different reasons, at different scales, and in different units. Here is how they differ, reported as the agencies describe themselves.

Why each sells

Washington DNR manages state trust lands and sells their timber to generate revenue for named beneficiaries, K-12 school construction, state universities and county services, a trustee's duty the state's courts have affirmed. The Forest Service manages national forests under a multiple-use mandate, where timber is one use among recreation, water, wildlife and grazing rather than a revenue duty. BLM sells timber from the O&C lands of western Oregon under the 1937 O&C Act, which directs a sustained yield and sends half the receipts to eighteen counties. Trust revenue, multiple use, sustained yield: three different reasons to hold an auction.

Size, terms and units

The programs differ on the ground too. State DNR sales are frequent and run on a fixed monthly auction calendar. Federal sales come on their own schedules and can carry longer contract terms and heavier road and restoration obligations. The unit splits the same way the reasons do: DNR and BLM scale in MBF, the Forest Service scales in CCF. That alone means a DNR price per MBF and a national-forest price per CCF are different measures of wood, before you reach the differences in tract, species and terms.

Why the prices are not comparable

Put those together and a cross-program price comparison falls apart in three ways at once. The units differ, MBF against CCF. The obligations differ, a sale loaded with road-building and restoration work carries a lower stumpage than a clean tract of the same wood. And the purpose differs, an agency selling for trust revenue appraises differently from one selling under multiple use. This is why the board keeps state and federal sales in their own units and never blends them into a single average, and why the honest read is within a program, not across it. Public-lands timber policy is contested ground; this site reports what the agencies published and takes no side in it.

See them side by side

The board above carries state and federal sales together but labels every one by agency and unit, so you can see them next to each other without mistaking one unit for the other. Read down a single agency's rows to compare like with like. One coverage note: the BLM notices we currently ingest carry advertised sales rather than per-sale winning bids, so those sales appear on the calendar rather than in these results. BLM does publish bureau-wide fiscal-year and monthly revenue and volume totals plus quarterly contract data, but not the per-sale winning bids, purchasers or no-bid outcomes we would need for results rows, so BLM stays a calendar source here. For the unit split in full, see what is an MBF, and for the extraction method behind every row, see the methodology page.