Can you make a living off of a forest land?

[slowp]

I'm not being condescending, I am being realistic. You are being hysterical with your Chicken Little doom and gloom attitude.The Forest Service isn't going anywhere. They will need new people. The earth keeps turning, the sun will rise tomorrow, etc. It's a temporary hiring freeze. If we have a smaller, leaner, more efficient Federal workforce after this, so much the better

OK. I'll eat popcorn because I should never worry about anybody but me. That's the new 'Murcan way.

 

[HavinFun]

The job advice I give to folks is to do what you love or really want to do. In any profession, once you know the ropes, you’ll see where the money is and can go that route. When you do what you love for work it isn’t work and you are getting paid to do it!
In a saw class I took with professional loggers I was interested to know how much money could be made in doing that. I was a little shocked to see how “lean” the earnings were in that specific field. When I mentioned it to one of the fellows there he said “welcome to the world of logging”. This is not to discourage you but to help you set your sights on where you want to be in 15 to 20 years and what it will take to get you there doing what you love. Best of luck.

 

[fields_mj]

Back in the 50's a friend of our family bought around 250 acres in central Indiana. About 1/3 of it was tillable, another 1/3 was wooded, and the other 1/3 was creek bottom/pasture/gravel pit(very small)/barn lot and yard. He had grown up running his dad's sawmill, and during WWII, his job was to inspect lumber that was being used to build gliders for the war. A year after he bought the place, he had the mature walnut logged off which paid for the property. I doubt that a person could do that today. Under just the right conditions (ie valuable hardwoods that are ready to log), maybe you could make enough of a dent to make the purchase worth while, but with the cost of land these days I think it would be challenging at best. In his case, he still worked at a factory, he ran a few dozen head of cattle on the property, and he leased the tillable ground. He and his wife lived a modest life, but they never needed money. I don't know how many times it was logged over the years, but the last time they did any major logging was in the 90s when I was in Highschool. I remember they made $25k off of it at the time. Not a lot in today's economy, and it wasn't enough to have bought the property again back then, but it would have put a nice dent in the principal on a loan.

Whether or not a person could make it work depends on how they define success. IMHO, the key to doing something like that is finding things that you can leverage in other ways. For instance, a lot of local farmers have either trucking or excavating companies that the can use some of their equipment when they aren't planting or picking. Owning a business DOES have a LOT of tax benefits as well. There are LOTS of things that you can legitimately write off that the rest of us have to pay income tax on. Understanding how do to that so that you minimize your tax footprint while maximizing your business growth without taking too much risk is important, and goes a long way towards achieving success regardless of how you measure it.