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WELLBORN – On Dwight Stansel’s Farm and Nursery in Suwannee County, rows of longleaf pine seedlings look like vibrant green bowling alleys, their tightly clustered bristles stretching to the horizon.
As farm manager Bobby Feeney walks a sandy gutter, he’s reminded of charting the same path in 1986, when the nursery first opened. “The first year, everything we grew, we grew in this one field,” he said.
The nursery expanded to meet growing demand, but today, as North Florida’s timber mills close and acreage fragments, “we’re about back down to that again.”
Taylor, Liberty, Nassau and Dixie counties were “critically dependent” on forestry, according to the most recent analysis by the University of Florida’s Food and Resource Economics Department, with the industry accounting for more than 20% of jobs in each.
Amid the economic challenges, some timber owners in these communities turn to a copper-colored side hustle: pine straw.
The woody needles can be raked annually, offering earlier, more consistent income than timber alone. Profit margins are slim, but generally enough to pay the land’s taxes: a compelling business for producers whose land is already planted in pine.
Parcelization
A hundred years ago, the air of rural Suwannee County smelled of pines, the Florida heat pushing tangy, earthy chemicals called terpenes from their needles.
A deep breath in a pine stand today garners a different scent: chicken poop.
Suwannee County is the state’s largest poultry and egg producer. The launch of Everlizer, a fertilizer company whose raw material is chicken waste, solidified the smell in 2015.
And while pungent, sulfurous chicken coops expand, sweet, woody forestland recedes.
Since 2016, forest land has shrunk by 1.2%, about 300 square miles in Florida: more than four times the area of Washington D.C.
“A lot of people clear cut in the last five years,” said Suwannee County forester Jacob Earnest. A clear cut, as opposed to a thinning, means that land managers harvest all their trees at once. The strategy met surging, pandemic-driven demand for both solid wood (sawtimber) and cardboard (pulpwood).
Some growers who didn’t harvest during the pandemic were forced to when Hurricane Idalia walloped the Big Bend in 2023 and Helene in 2024.
“A lot of people cut when the trees were probably too young because they just wanted to start over and not have to worry about pine damage and bark beetles that could eventually destroy the stand,” Earnest said.
Some people never started over.
According to the U.S. Forest Service, nearly a third of family forest owners are 65 years or older.
Various state and national cost-share programs “try to help incentivize replanting,” Earnest said, but it’s hard to compete with rising input costs and competing land uses. To some landowners – or their heirs – splitting land into small-acreage plots and selling to developers may be more attractive than maintaining a hundred-acre timber operation.
In Suwannee County, the decrease in acreage has been subtle.
“While it may not be a large amount that got sold off or isn’t being replanted, it’s still there,” Earnest said. “Parcelization is probably, in my mind, a growing concern.”
Mills closing
The drive from Live Oak to Perry is a 40-mile trek on a two-lane, tree-lined road. It’s quiet and scenic, with neat rows of pines flashing by.
Notably absent from Highway 27 are the 18-wheeler logging trucks that used to rumble through. Since Perry’s Foley Cellulose Mill closed in 2022, there’s no reason for them to make the trip.
The closure left 525 people without a job and decreased state timber industry revenue by $302 million.
“That was just a dagger to our heart.” Bobby Feeney on the Foley Mill's closure.
According to a 2023 land market report, “Industry experts anticipate that pulpwood prices in that region will experience a long-term cut of about 50% due to the [Foley] mill closure.”
To make matters worse, the Foley Mill was the first in a series of back-to-back closures. The West Fraser Sawmill, also in Perry, shuttered in spring 2023. In September 2024, the same company closed its Lake Butler operation.
“Every one of the mill closures hurts,” said Tamara Cushing, extension assistant professor in the School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatic Sciences at UF. “When you lose a mill, you lose competition.”
The closures drove up transportation costs and forced some landowners to sit on hurricane-damaged trees or transport them to pulpwood mills 40 to 120 miles away, in Valdosta, GA and Fernandina Beach.
While landowners may have been able to sell the trees as sawtimber for $30 per ton before damage, Cushing explained, after damage they may only be marketable as pulpwood, which fetches around $10 per ton. Between rising fuel prices and extra hauling costs to reach the next open mill, that number may be closer to $5 per ton.
“How do you look at a landowner and say, ‘you know, yeah, I understand your trees went down. You should replant’?” asked Cushing. “There's no mill anymore. We don't know if another one will come up.”
Pine straw as a solution
In a tumultuous timber market, baling pine straw can bail out landowners.
Both slash pines and longleaf pines produce marketable straw, the former more common and the latter more desirable.
It takes 20 to 25 years for a longleaf pine to grow tall enough to harvest. At that age, it can be used for smaller timber products: plywood, pellets and pulp. For bigger, older timber products like telephone poles, they’re “for your grandkids,” Feeney said.
Harvesting pine straw allows landowners to recuperate part of their investment earlier.
In an ideal longleaf pine stand, landowners can harvest annually from the time the tree is five to eight years old until it is cut down. An acre of trees, depending on how old they are and how closely they’re planted, can generate between 200 to 400 bales per year.
Researchers at the University of Georgia found annual pine straw collection increased landowners’ rates of return by more than a third.
Melissa Snodgrass, a pine straw producer in Suwannee County, has seen it firsthand.
Her father, originally a farmer and owner of a pest control company, began planting pines in the 1980s. As the pest control company grew, “he would plant some and then would be able to farm even less, so he’d plant this field next,” she said. “We acquired additional land over time, so we have our trees spread out.”
At first, the family grew pines solely for timber. Florida’s pine straw industry was young, having emerged in the 1970s as spotted owl protections drove the West Coast’s timber industry to the Southeast and pine needles rose in popularity for landscaping.
Snodgrass’ family started harvesting pine straw in the early 2000s.
They adapted their management strategy slightly, clearing out Live Oaks whose leaves and branches could contaminate the straw and adjusting pine spacing to fit harvesting equipment. Baling quickly proved to be worth the investment.
If growing seasons are good, over a tree’s entire lifecycle, “What we earn off the straw is equal to or possibly more than what the timber is worth at the end,” she said. Plus, “to get money in five to eight years is a whole lot better than waiting 20 or 25.”
Jared Jackson of Putnals Premium Pine Straw in Mayo agreed. “You're not going to make a big profit, but you're going to make a decent living at it,” he said.
Pine straw producers are “just your average working people,” Jackson said, “not people making millions or corporations.”
Jackson and his father both work in pine straw, the latter in and out of the industry since the 1970s. Back in the early days, “people were just giving [pine straw] to you because they didn’t want it,” Jackson said. With low input costs, small-scale operations were sustainable.
As the industry grew and transportation, machinery and chemical costs increased, landowners faced a choice: become a large-scale straw operation or lease land to one.
Putnals Premium Pine Straw chose to expand. Today, it is a pine straw wholesaler, selling about four million bales annually. Jackson estimated the company produces about two million bales per year in-house on company-owned or leased land, purchasing the rest from smaller growers.
Putnals sells to home and garden centers throughout the country. In the spring, most shipments travel north to midwestern clients looking to bring southern charm to their yards. In the fall, bales go to South Florida schools, subdivisions and apartment complexes.
End buyers pay $5 to $10 per bale, so “if you don’t move volume, you don’t make money,” Jackson said.
Like timber, pine straw boomed during the pandemic. “It rose from about 2020 to 2022. We had record numbers,” Jackson said, “but then in ‘23, it just died.”
As new construction slowed, sales fell. Then, hurricane Idalia came in the fall of 2023 with Helene on its heels in 2024, damaging pine straw crops and forcing landowners to bear the losses.
If he increased costs, Jackson said, he’d lose customers. “Nobody was going to pay 50 cents more per straw,” he added. “They'll just go down the road, get it from somebody else or somebody out of Alabama, wherever they have to.”
Alternatives
In her extension role, Cushing routinely helps pine landowners add extra streams of revenue to their operations.
“They're increasingly looking for diversified sources of money, right? Especially as a hurricane comes in and takes out the timber,” she said, “you have to have something to get you through those years.”
Pine straw isn’t her go-to.
Hunting leases can offer steady profits with little extra management. The amount a hunter is willing to pay varies on the size, quality and wildlife present on the land, but is generally enough to cover property taxes, she explained.
Still, hunting leases aren’t a good fit for everyone. They require high acreage, diverse plants to attract wildlife and a landowner okay with strangers tromping on their property.
Carbon credits can offer supplemental income, too. In these agreements, companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint will buy a “credit” from the landowner (through a string of middlemen), who commits to managing their land to sequester more carbon. Since carbon capture is long-term, contracts are, too, many 20 years or more.
Pine straw harvesting offers returns earlier, but requires flat land and more intensive management.
Ultimately, “it’s a very individual and personal decision,” Cushing said, one that depends on the landowner’s goals for their property and the urgency of their financial need.
Between mill closures, falling prices and hurricanes, that need is front of mind for many producers. “The whole industry is so in turmoil right now,” Snodgrass said. Still, she and others remain optimistic.
Snodgrass’ youngest pines, just two years old, have already survived four hurricanes.
“It's definitely a challenging time,” Cushing said of hurricanes and mill closures. But, she said, “it's not a new problem. We've survived. As an industry, it's not going away.”
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