This hints that there is market space for managed forests with slower-growth trees that would yield wood better suited for high-end woodworking. Assuming a 3-to-1 ring density from current fast-growth to this slower variety, one could expect prices similarly higher accounting for the longer growth plus financial cost of the land.
Current "fast growth" lumber is already operating on a ~10-20 year time frame.
Getting to something old growth like will probably need like over 60 years at a minimal.
Reclaimed wood (depends on your application) is currently only like <5 times as expensive as new growth product.
While it's definitely true that the supply of reclaimed wood will dwindle, meaning that if you start such a project today, you'll probably be able to command a significantly higher price multiplier in 2090... I think that sentence alone explains why this doesn't happen at any significant scale.
The downside for that is that it would require growing the trees more slowly, which means, given the volume needed, we'd probably need more trees, probably responsibly grown within other existing forests that already have partial canopy cover, which means we'd need to have larger reforestation efforts, which would in turn have some sort of effect in terms of slowing down the pace of climate warming due to more carbon sequestration... I'm sorry, was I talking about downsides?
> This hints that there is market space for managed forests with slower-growth trees that would yield wood better suited for high-end woodworking. Assuming a 3-to-1 ring density from current fast-growth to this slower variety, one could expect prices similarly higher accounting for the longer growth plus financial cost of the land.
We're probably talking about trees that would more than a human generation (and perhaps several) to reach marketable size.
There's market demand for consuming that kind of old growth wood, but it's wager that it's impossible for the market to produce it. As an institution, it's just too short sighted.
How does the wine industry overcome this with really old bottles of wine? Who are the people that are preserving bottles of wine for 30 years before selling them? And why wouldn't there be a market for a similar thing in the lumber industry?
> How does the wine industry overcome this with really old bottles of wine? Who are the people that are preserving bottles of wine for 30 years before selling them? And why wouldn't there be a market for a similar thing in the lumber industry?
30 years is less than a human lifetime. Also, that's not the time you need for old growth, it's what you need for regular timber:
> The industry is doing better now. Timber farmers plant trees, thin them out every few years to allow the better trees to grow and then harvest when trees are around 25-35 years old. They then harvest, replant and start the process all over.
The wine (and also e.g. scotch) industry runs its core business on not-that-old product, on which it makes almost all of its money, and may keep a relatively tiny niche of really old stuff for sentimental (for the owner), PR or branding purposes. It doesn't work that way for commodities - a forestry or lumberyard selling a few really old oak logs doesn't help them charge a premium for their 20-year old lumber in a way that works for a winery or distillery.
Wine is aged best around 20 years. 30 years you cannot tell a difference (remember that some years were better than others so you might be able to tell because of that). By 100 years the wine is clearly going downhill and probably isn't drinkable anymore.
> it's wager that it's impossible for the market to produce it.
Where markets fail for being too shortsighted, we can always introduce governments or international bodies. Once you plant the trees, there is little upside in cutting them down and more upside in letting them reach maturity.
OTOH, these boutique managed forests will be vulnerable to the development of cheaper alternatives (such as compressing multiple crappy logs into a good one).
Even pension funds can't think on that length of time. Really only institutions like university can. Lots of Oxford colleges are known to look at these time scales. It has been around for As someone said Harvard will probably be around longer than the united States.
> Even pension funds can't think on that length of time.
An interesting way to legislate conservation is to mandate pension funds to set aside a fraction of their portfolio for investments that take longer to mature, such as slow-growth managed forests.
