What is an MBF?

MBF means a thousand board feet, the standard way state timber is measured and priced. A board foot is a piece of wood one foot square and one inch thick, a hundred and forty-four cubic inches, or a twelfth of a cubic foot. The M is the old Roman thousand, so MBF is a thousand of those boards and MMBF is a million. A state sale's price per MBF is its headline stumpage number.

Log scale is not lumber tally

A board foot of standing timber and a board foot of finished lumber are not the same thing measured twice. Standing and bucked logs are estimated by a log rule, a table that predicts how many boards a log of a given small-end diameter and length should yield. The lumber tally is what the mill actually cuts. The two rarely match, because a log rule has to guess at saw kerf, slabs, edgings and taper before a single board exists. In the Pacific Northwest the rule is the Scribner Decimal C, which rounds each log to the nearest ten board feet and drops the last digit. West of the Cascades scalers use a long-log version built for forty-foot logs, east of the crest a short-log version for twenty. Same species, different scale, a slightly different board foot.

MBF and CCF measure different things

The Forest Service does not use MBF. It scales national-forest timber in CCF, a hundred cubic feet of solid wood, and quotes its prices per CCF. Cubic scale measures the wood itself, board-foot scale predicts the lumber inside it, so the two are genuinely different measures and a price in one cannot be set beside a price in the other. If you need a rough bridge, one MBF runs on the order of two to two and a fifth CCF, which puts a federal per-CCF rate a bit under half the equivalent per-MBF number, but that ratio shifts with species and log size. Treat it as back-of-envelope only. The board never blends the two, it labels every price with its unit and leaves them apart.

Worked example

Take any state or BLM row on the board above. Its volume is in MBF and its price is in dollars per MBF, so multiply the two and you have the total the buyer bid for the standing timber. A three-hundred-MBF tract at a few hundred dollars per MBF is a low-six-figure sale. Now find a Forest Service row: its volume is CCF and its price is dollars per CCF, a smaller-looking number for the same physical wood, because the unit is different, not because the timber is cheaper. Read the unit before you read the number.

For the money side of that number, see what is stumpage, and for the full vocabulary the board uses, see the glossary. The site reports volumes and prices as the agencies scale them.