Timber harvesters and haulers are the backbone of Maine’s $8 billion forest products industry. But the most forested state in the country is losing loggers, fast. Some are aging out of the profession, and some are just getting out. But there are efforts underway to buck that trend and cut a new trail for the next generation of loggers.
It’s early September and 18-year-old Noah Crummett is deep in an 800-acre woodlot in Hinckley, operating the joystick of a feller buncher. That's a giant tank-like machine with a burly circular saw on a boom arm that, as its name implies, grabs, fells and bunches trees into piles.
"Don to Noah, Noah on five," calls Donald Burr on the radio. "Yeah Don, I got you," Crummett responds. "Go ahead and shut the saw off and find a stump to stop it," Burr tells him.
Crummett is a student in the Mechanized Logging Operations and Forest Trucking (MLOFT) program, which is administered by Northern Maine Community College, and hosted at Kennebec Valley Community College's Alfond campus. The tuition is free, paid for a federal Department of Labor grant.
Following his instructor's orders, Crummett, who is lanky and soft spoken, climbs down own out of the cushy, climate-controlled, iPad and GPS-equipped cab.
"It's kind of like flying an airplane, I guess, because there's a lot going on," Crummett said. "It's kind of like an excavator, but there's a couple more buttons that you need to keep track of."
In just 20 weeks, Crummett and the 14 other students in this training certificate program, who are almost all young men, learn how to operate high-tech logging equipment, earn their commercial driver’s license, and get a firm foundation in wood products.
Instructor Donald Burr, who worked as a commercial feller buncher operator for more than 20 years, says logging is more than just maneuvering sophisticated machinery; it involves a lot of quick decision-making.
"You need to be able to look at a tree before you touch it, and go, 'This is what I'm going to do with it.' And then make the hydraulics, or boom or saw or whatever and make that happen."
Providing this kind of supportive and specialized training to the next generation of loggers is the point of the MLOFT program.
And it comes at a critical time for the industry, which is dealing with substantial attrition.
"There's a huge wave coming in the business," Dana Doran says. "We're trying really, really hard to attract and recruit new people."
Doran is the director of the non-profit Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast, which helped launch this program in 2017.
According to a 2023 University of Southern Maine study, the state is losing about 200 loggers every year.
Doran says the last decade has been tough on Maine's forest products industry.
"You've had loss of markets, you've had decline of pulp and paper, you've had decline of sawmills, and you've had an increase in cost," Doran says.
He estimates that in just the last five years, 40% of the state's logging capacity has vanished.
It's a far cry from the salad days of the 1980s.
Back then, Andy Irish says, "There were hundreds of people cutting wood. Real small companies with one cable skidder or two cable skidders, and maybe one all wheeler truck. Just hundreds of them everywhere."
Irish founded Irish Family Logging in Oxford County more than 40 years ago. He says that to survive, the company, now based in Rumford, has had to embrace newer, more efficient timber harvesting technology. And the steep costs that come with it.
"Everything we buy costs at least $500,000, and most of it $700,000," Irish says.
Which means, says his son and co-owner Jason Irish, that nowadays, you need $1.5 to $2 million just to go into business. And having enough capital is a big barrier to breaking into the industry.
"But the bank isn't going to give a normal person a million and a half to get started. So there's not that nowadays," Jason Irish says. "You have to have somebody that can back you, or you're not going to have a new logger go out."
Another challenge logging contractors talk about is on-the-job training, which for many employers, is cost prohibitive.
"Ten years ago, we figured it cost about $100,000 to train an individual," Tom Cushman says. "That’s lost production, that’s broken things, etc."
Cushman, of Maine Custom Woodlands in Durham, says even if companies like his could afford it, these days, it's hard to justify investing that much in young, green employees, who may switch to excavation, trucking or other better paying jobs in industries that require similar skillsets.
"The workforce - we have a lot of people that jump around a lot," Cushman says. "They're not focused on making a living or having a career."
Many in today's logging industry say the pressing labor shortage is not going to be fixed through high school vocational programs either.
Because child labor laws prohibit minors from operating hazardous equipment, the handful of forestry programs left are limited to teaching more traditional timber harvesting techniques, with chainsaws.
"We're kind of old school," says Rod Spiller, the instructor of the Forestry and Wood Harvesting at Foster CTE Center in Farmington.
"One thing we concentrate is on soft skills," Spiller says. "They need to show up on time. They need to dress appropriately. They need to know they can't be using their phones while they're running machines or cutting trees. They're showing respect. So we work on that quite a little bit."
Which is why MLOFT, the one-of-a-kind community college-based mechanized logging training program, is seen as a good option for those who are serious about a career in the woods.
Especially for those who don't have a background in it, like student Noah Crummett.
Inside the cab of the feller buncher, Crummett says, "My mom really encouraged me to get into it because she says it's free, and it's hands-on, and it sounds just like what you've wanted to do. My dad's pretty jealous, he's an electrician."
Over the last eight years, around 100 people have graduated from the MLOFT program, and about 60% remain employed in the industry.
Those numbers aren't nearly high enough to solve Maine's logger crisis. But for would-be loggers like Crummett, the program is a sturdy path to an entry level logging job with a starting salary of $50,000 to 60,000, and something else that in this economy, is even harder to come by: guaranteed job security.