Vermont Forest Products Association

07/23/2026

Vermont's forest economy just lost a major market, with grave implications for both forest health and our regional and local economies.

On July 18, Finch Paper announced the closure of its pulp mill in Glens Falls, NY. Finch was buying nearly 2,000 tons of Vermont roundwood a week, representing a significant portion of our pulp market.

Pulpwood comes out of every sustainably managed timber harvest. When loggers cut sawlogs, they're also removing lower-quality, defective stems. When there's no market for low-grade wood, the economics of a well-designed harvest break down, making it more difficult to carry out the forest management work that supports healthy, climate-resilient forests, improves wildlife habitat, and sustains our working landscape.

This market withdrawal affects loggers, truckers, mills, landowners, and foresters across the region, with particular impact on western Vermont, and is expected to reduce market competition and affect the viability of future timber sales.

In the short term, FPR is working with partners across the region to assess the impact of the closure, connect affected logger contractors and other forest businesses with business assistance resources, and identify alternative markets for wood that has already been cut or is part of an active harvest operation. In the long term, we continue implementing the Forest Future Strategic Roadmap by advancing strategies to strengthen wood energy, expand low-grade utilization, and diversify markets for Vermont’s wood products.

If you have been affected by the Finch closure, please take our survey at tinyurl.com/mr6zxa3x to help us accurately quantify the impact and identify the best opportunities to provide support, and visit our website to access resources at fpr.vermont.gov/forests/forest-economy/finch-paper-pulp-mill-closure-resources.

07/20/2026

A Message from Steve Hardy, President, Vermont Forest Products Association, on the Closure of Finch Paper and Exit from Pulp Production in Our Region:

News that Finch Paper in Glens Falls, New York, will stop making its own pulp and buy it instead from outside suppliers is another devastating gut punch to the Vermont forest products industry. For generations, Finch has been one of the largest buyers of low-grade wood in our region, taking the crooked, diseased, and otherwise unmarketable logs that come out of every well-run timber harvest. When a buyer that size steps back, the ripple effects reach every log landing in our state.

Pulpwood markets play an instrumental role in all forestry operations. They are the financial mechanism that makes good forestry possible. A forester marking a timber sale has to remove poor-quality, damaged, and overcrowded trees to improve the stand's health and long-term value. Without a buyer for that low-value wood, that work becomes harder to justify economically. Landowners are left with fewer options. They can subsidize it themselves, skip management all together, or high-grade the property by taking the best trees and leaving the rest, exactly what good forestry is meant to avoid.

The consequences reach beyond timber value. Forests that go unmanaged trend toward even-aged, single-story stands with less habitat diversity, more vulnerability to invasive pests and disease, and weaker long-term carbon storage. Vermont's biodiversity, water quality, and recreational forests all depend on foresters and loggers staying active across the landscape.

Finch's move is not an isolated event. It joins a growing list of resource-processing capacity leaving our region. Each had its own reasons, but together they point to the Northeast having become too costly and uncertain a place for resource-based processors to reinvest in.

That should be a four-alarm fire for anyone who cares about Vermont's working landscape, and for policymakers in Montpelier. Nearly everything our forests produce needs an industrial process nearby to become usable, and those plants need affordable energy, skilled labor, reliable transportation, and a regulatory environment they can plan around. When it gets harder to operate here, production shifts elsewhere, and we end up shipping wood away to be processed, then buying it back, adding fuel, trucking, and lost opportunity that loggers, truckers, farmers, and landowners absorb.

Vermont's elected officials and candidates for office, at every level, need to recognize the scale of what's happening in our rural economy. This isn't one mill making one business decision. It's a pattern, and it's telling us that owning and managing forestland in Vermont is getting harder to justify financially. If we want working forests to survive, we need to fix

what's within our control including streamlining permitting timelines, strategic investment in technical education pathways into forestry and trucking careers, implementation of tax policies that are competitive with our neighbors, and extending agricultural-style support programs and laws to support forestry. None of these alone will solve it, but addressing them one at a time is how we stop the bleeding.

The Vermont Forest Products Association will track how this transition affects regional wood markets in the months ahead, and will keep pressing policymakers to treat the loss of processing capacity as the emergency it is, before Vermont loses more of the infrastructure a working forest economy depends on.

07/14/2026

07/02/2026

06/19/2026

06/18/2026

⭐️ Introducing award winner Lydia Dickey of .

Lydia is a graduating senior at the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center, HACTC in , and was nominated by her Natural Resources instructor Dan Gibson.

Lydia: “Ever since I was little, I have always loved being outdoors, and could often be found scampering up a tree. Today, that love has culminated in my study of forestry and arboriculture.”

Learn more about Lydia and all the winners: https://vlt.org/newsroom/2026-land-stewards-awards/

📸: Courtesy of Lydia.

04/20/2026