Forestry and Logging (United States) — NAICS 113

An investor's rollup primer. NAICS (the North American Industry Classification System — the code set the U.S., Canada, and Mexico use to classify businesses) code 113 is a three-digit "subsector" inside the Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting sector. It bundles the three things you do to a forest before the wood reaches a mill: grow the trees (1131), raise the seedlings and gather what the forest yields without cutting it (1132), and cut the trees down and haul them out (1133). This page compares those three children, then covers the subsector as a whole. For company-by-company detail, prices, and full playbooks, follow the child primers.

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1. Overview

NAICS 113 is the "field" end of the forest-products economy — everything that happens on the land, before a log becomes lumber, paper, or panels (those downstream steps are a different sector, Manufacturing). It has three parts that look like one business from a distance but behave very differently up close:

• 1131 Timber Tract Operations — owning forestland and growing the standing crop, then selling the standing trees ("stumpage") to loggers and mills.[1]
• 1132 Forest Nurseries and Gathering of Forest Products — growing tree seedlings (mostly pine) for replanting, plus harvesting non-timber goods from standing forests (pine straw, wild ginseng, moss, sap, cones).[1]
• 1133 Logging — the physical harvest: crews fell, cut-to-length, sort, skid, load, and haul logs to their buyers.[1]

The investor's headline is a paradox that this level exists to explain: the child that employs almost nobody is where the money is, and the child that employs almost everybody is where you cannot invest. Logging (1133) is roughly nine-tenths of the subsector's payroll and establishments but is a fragmented, low-margin service trade with no public stock. Timber Tract Operations (1131) is a sliver of the headcount but is where durable, ownable value sits — timberland, held through Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs — companies that own income property and pass most profits to shareholders) and Timber Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs — professional managers who run forests for pensions and endowments). Nurseries and gathering (1132) is a tiny support niche with a large physical footprint and almost no direct investment surface. Across all three, you invest in the forest and the mills, not in the work done to them.

2. What's inside — the three children and how they differ

The three four-digit industry groups partition the subsector cleanly: their federal counts sum exactly to the 113 totals (see Section 3), so there is no overlap and nothing missing. What differs is everything that matters to an investor — relative size, direction, who owns them, and how (or whether) you can buy in.

Table A — the three children contrasted. Share is shown as establishments / annual payroll as a percentage of the 113 subsector (2023).[2]

The through-line: size and investability run in opposite directions here. Logging is the biggest operating footprint and the smallest opportunity; timber-tract ownership is the smallest operating footprint and essentially the whole opportunity. The three also differ in economic character — 1131 is a real-asset holding whose returns come partly from trees literally getting bigger; 1133 is a diesel-and-iron service margin; 1132 is a high-volume, thin-margin agricultural nursery bolted to a seasonal foraging trade.

3. Size — this level's rollup figures

Our ground-truth extract for NAICS 113 is the U.S. Census Bureau's 2023 County Business Patterns (CBP), which counts employer establishments, their paid employees, and payroll — not revenue, output, harvest volume, timberland acreage, or asset value.[2]

Table B — NAICS 113 subsector (CBP 2023).

Integrity check. The three children's extracts add up to these totals exactly — establishments 471 + 185 + 7,261 = 7,917; employees 3,781 + 932 + 42,916 = 47,629; and payroll and Q1 payroll reconcile the same way — confirming the partition is complete and non-overlapping.[2] Logging alone is ~92% of establishments and ~89% of payroll, so the subsector's headline numbers are, to a first approximation, the logging numbers.

Undercount caveat — large and one-directional across every child. CBP counts only private employer firms whose primary code is 113; it excludes the self-employed, non-employer businesses, and most government workers. The gap runs the same way in all three children, for different reasons:

• 1131 understates the most in economic value: the largest timberland owners are REITs and TIMO-managed forests reported under real-estate/financial parent codes, and ~3.7 million families plus governments hold most U.S. forestland — none counted here. The investable timberland economy spans tens of millions of acres and tens of billions of dollars of institutional capital that this payroll figure does not see.[3][4]
• 1132 understates in physical scale: government nurseries (state nurseries alone grew ~123 million seedlings in 2022), captive nurseries rolled into timber-company parents, and thousands of seasonal individual gatherers sit outside the count. Physical output tops 1.27 billion seedlings a year.[10]
• 1133 understates in operator count and revenue: industry research that captures sole proprietors puts the true total near 43,000 logging businesses — roughly six times the 7,261 employer establishments — and industry revenue (the value of wood delivered, not wages) near $16 billion (2025), versus $2.5 billion of payroll.[8]

Read the $2.81 billion as wages for the on-the-ground forestry-and-logging labor step, not the size of the forest economy — which, counting land value, standing inventory, and delivered wood, is an order of magnitude larger.

4. Investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

Across all three children the value funnels to the same short list, and it is not the logging or nursery operation — it is the timberland asset (child 1131) and the mills downstream of the subsector.

• Listed timberland REITs — the core, and the whole public route. Weyerhaeuser (New York Stock Exchange: WY), the largest U.S. timberland owner at ~10.4 million U.S. acres, and Rayonier (NYSE: RYN), enlarged by its January 2026 all-stock merger of equals with PotlatchDeltic (~$8.2 billion; combined ~4.1 million acres, six sawmills). Both are REITs that also own wood-products mills, so neither is a pure play. Acadian Timber (Toronto: ADN) is a small cross-border option.[3][6][7]
• Wood-products & packaging names — how you own the mills the loggers feed. Louisiana-Pacific (LPX), Boise Cascade (BCC), West Fraser (WFG), International Paper (IP), Packaging Corp (PKG). These sit just outside NAICS 113 (in Manufacturing) but are the realistic public proxy for logging demand.[8]
• The near-pure nursery play is foreign and tiny. ArborGen (New Zealand Exchange: ARB) is the largest merchant seedling supplier in the U.S. South (~27% of that market) but an illiquid micro-cap. There is no U.S.-listed pure-play for nurseries, gathering, or logging.[7]
• The big money is private. TIMOs and REITs together own or manage roughly 40 million U.S. acres; governments (led by the U.S. Forest Service) and millions of family owners hold most of the rest but are not investment vehicles.[3][4]

Where value does not sit: the logging trade (no firm above ~5% share, too fragmented and low-margin to list) and the gathering trade (thousands of individual rakers and diggers). Tickers and yields belong to the REITs and mills — not to the operating work counted in 113.[8]

5. How the money works

Three economic models live under one code:

• Timber tract ownership (1131) — two return engines. Biological growth is the unusual one: trees add volume every year and cross value thresholds from low-value pulpwood to mid-value "chip-n-saw" to high-value sawtimber, so the crop appreciates whether or not you sell — and lets an owner "store timber on the stump" when prices are weak. Timber sales (stumpage) are the cash engine, plus ancillary income (hunting/mineral/solar leases, carbon credits, land sales). The private-market scorecard is the NCREIF (National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries) Timberland Index, up ~10.7% annualized since 1987 with low volatility and a positive inflation correlation. Public owners are REITs, so profits flow to shareholders largely as dividends with little corporate income tax.[5]
• Nurseries & gathering (1132) — volume and seasonal cash. Nurseries are a volume business with thin per-unit margins: seedlings sell by the thousand and the crown-jewel asset is a multi-year seed orchard behind improved genetics. Gathering is low-capital, seasonal income — pine-straw raking rights earn a landowner roughly $50–$125 per acre per year between harvests; wild ginseng is a supply-constrained export niche.
• Logging (1133) — a thin cut-and-haul spread. Revenue is harvested volume × grade × local price; costs are diesel, iron, labor, insurance, and compliance. Contractors are squeezed when mills tighten quotas. The durable economics are in the tree and the land, not the machine that cuts it.

The unifying investor point: only engine one (owning the trees and land) is capitalizable at scale. REITs report it as EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) and pay it out as dividends; the other two are trades you either run yourself or reach through the landowner.[5][8]

6. Demand drivers

All three children are derived, cyclical demand — nobody wants a log, a seedling, or a felling crew for its own sake, only for what the wood becomes.

• Housing and construction dominate: most U.S. softwood lumber and structural panel use ties to homebuilding and remodeling, so housing starts and mortgage rates are the main swing factor for sawtimber, logging volume, and (with a lag) replanting orders.[13]
• Packaging, paper, and tissue give pulpwood a steadier, less housing-sensitive pull — though U.S. pulp-and-paper is structurally shrinking, weighing on Southern pulpwood prices.[13]
• Reforestation policy drives the nursery leg: a large federal replanting backlog and the 2021 REPLANT Act freed roughly $123 million a year, and a widely cited study argues U.S. nursery output must roughly double by 2040 — a genuine multi-year tailwind, but a projection, not booked orders.[10][11]
• Emerging demand — mass-timber construction, wood-pellet/biomass energy, and carbon markets — offers potential new legs for both landowners and nurseries.[10]
• Interest rates cut both ways: they move housing demand and the cap/discount rates used to value timberland.

7. Regulation

Federal regulation of growing and cutting trees on private land is comparatively light; exposure is highly local and safety-driven:

• Worker safety (heaviest on logging). OSHA's Logging Operations standard (29 CFR 1910.266 — OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) governs felling, personal protective equipment, and first aid. Logging is the most dangerous occupation in America — a fatality rate around 110 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers in 2024, roughly 33× the national average.[9][15]
• Environmental practice. The Clean Water Act's silviculture exemptions apply federally, but harvest plans, stream buffers, roads, and replanting are governed largely by state Forest Practices Acts or voluntary Best Management Practices (BMPs), strictest in California, Oregon, and Washington. The Endangered Species Act can restrict activity around listed species.[3]
• Federal-land access. U.S. Forest Service timber-sale policy and National Forest Management Act / Endangered Species Act reviews swing regional supply — historically the biggest single force on Pacific Northwest harvest.
• Nursery & gathering rules. Nursery shipments face plant-health inspection under USDA APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service); pesticide and seasonal-worker safety fall under the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) Worker Protection Standard; wild ginseng is listed under CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) Appendix II, with state seasons and federal export certification.[1]
• Tax & trade. The REIT structure carries specific federal tax treatment (Form 1120-REIT); most states offer preferential "current-use" property-tax assessment; and U.S.–Canada softwood-lumber duties (near ~35%) plus a 10% Section 232 tariff (from October 2025) support domestic log prices while raising builder costs.[14]

8. Consolidation

A barbell, and the three children are moving in different directions:

• Timberland (1131) is consolidating fast. The defining 25-year shift was separating trees from mills: integrated companies divested millions of acres to tax-efficient REITs and TIMOs. At the top, roll-up has been relentless — Weyerhaeuser absorbed Plum Creek (2016); Potlatch merged with Deltic (2018) and bought CatchMark (2022); and Rayonier merged with PotlatchDeltic (2026), narrowing the listed pure-play field to essentially two names.[3][7]
• Logging (1133) is not consolidating — it is thinning out. The count of firms has been shrinking (~1.8% a year) under thin margins, aging owners, and few new entrants, and the mills that buy their logs are closing too. What is disappearing is harvest capacity, not concentration.[8]
• Nurseries & gathering (1132) is split. Seedling production is regional and moderately concentrated (decades-long seed orchards protect incumbents like ArborGen); gathering is highly fragmented with no meaningful consolidation. The visible consolidation is in the adjacent landowner layer — which matters because large integrated owners internalize their own seedling supply.[7]

Net: a few large, professionalized landowners at the top; a shrinking base of small logging crews and nurseries below; and millions of family forest owners spread across the bottom.

9. Risks

• Cyclicality and interest rates drive sawtimber demand, logging volume, and replanting orders — the whole subsector is pro-cyclical and rate-sensitive.[13]
• Southern oversupply and pulp-mill closures pressure Southern stumpage and pulpwood with no quick fix, and strand the crews that fed those mills.[8][13]
• Physical and climate hazards — wildfire, hurricanes, insects, disease, drought — can destroy mostly uninsured standing inventory and perishable seedling crops; geographic diversification is the main hedge.[5]
• Safety and labor. Logging's extreme fatality rate is a real operating and insurance risk; nurseries and gathering lean on seasonal H-2A guest-worker labor.[9]
• Policy, trade, and funding dependence. Softwood-lumber duties and the Section 232 tariff can reverse; reforestation upside depends on federal budgets holding; ginseng faces CITES tightening.[10][14]
• Illiquidity and duration. Direct timberland is a long-hold, hard-to-sell asset with lagging appraisals.
• Data risk. Public-company results blend timberland with manufacturing and real estate, and federal employer statistics exclude the many non-employer operators — so the reported footprint is itself incomplete.[2]

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Buy the forest and the mills, not the operating work. Across all three children the practical menu collapses to one place:

• Public route. Timberland REITs — Weyerhaeuser (WY) or the merged Rayonier (RYN), with Acadian Timber (ADN) as a small cross-border option — for liquid, small-minimum exposure paid largely as dividends (each also carries some wood-products manufacturing). For geared exposure to what logs become, the wood-products and packaging names (LPX, BCC, WFG, IP, PKG). Broad forestry exchange-traded funds (ETFs — baskets of stocks that trade like a share) such as WOOD and CUT exist but mostly hold forest-products manufacturers, so they are a diluted proxy. The one near-pure nursery play, ArborGen (NZX: ARB), is a speculative, hard-to-access foreign micro-cap. There is no listed way to own logging contractors or gatherers.[3][6][7]
• Private route. Institutions access timberland through TIMO-managed separate accounts and commingled funds benchmarked to the NCREIF Timberland Index (large minimums, long holds); individuals and family offices buy tracts directly, layering in stumpage, hunting and pine-straw leases, carbon projects, and periodic land sales, and can capture the operating economics of a nursery or a logging business that public markets never offer.[5]
• How to judge a listed owner: asset quality over headline yield — owned vs. managed acres, inventory age, sawtimber-vs-pulpwood mix, debt per acre, and net asset value per share versus market price.

Outlook. Near term is soft: elevated mortgage rates have held down housing and sawtimber prices, Southern pulpwood is structurally weak, and mill and logging-capacity attrition continues.[8][13] The longer-term bull case rests on a U.S. housing recovery meeting years of under-building, the reliable tailwind of biological growth, and new monetization from carbon, mass timber, and a large (partly funded) reforestation backlog.[10][11] The best opportunities are property-specific — disciplined acquisition price, mill access, modest leverage, and credible non-timber upside matter more than acreage alone. Watch: housing and the rate cycle; the durability of Canadian lumber duties and the Section 232 tariff; further mill and logging-capacity loss; pellet and mass-timber demand; and continued REIT–TIMO consolidation. For the complete company tables, economics, and sources, read the 1131, 1132, and 1133 child primers.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau / NAICS, 2022 NAICS definitions for subsector 113 (Forestry and Logging) and industries 113110, 113210, 113310. https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=113&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 (NAICS 113 and children: establishments, employment, annual and Q1 payroll; employer-only coverage and methodology). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
3. Forisk Consulting, "North America's Top Timberland Owners and Managers, 2025 Update," 2025 (~40 million acres held/managed by REITs and TIMOs). https://forisk.com/north-americas-top-timberland-owners-and-managers-2025-update/
4. USDA Forest Service, National Woodland Owner Survey Dashboard, 2024–2026 (~3.7 million family owners; ownership mix). https://research.fs.usda.gov/products/dataandtools/national-woodland-owners-survey-dashboard
5. Nuveen, "Timberland Market Review" (NCREIF Timberland Index returns, volatility, and inflation correlation), 2024. https://documents.nuveen.com/Documents/Nuveen/Viewer.aspx?uniqueId=0ada740b-2b56-4176-8726-84659f1bcd81
6. Weyerhaeuser Company, Form 10-K for FY2025 (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), 2026 (~10.4 million U.S. acres). https://investor.weyerhaeuser.com/
7. Rayonier Inc., "Rayonier and PotlatchDeltic Announce Closing of Merger of Equals," January 30, 2026 (combined ~4.1M acres, six sawmills); and ArborGen Holdings profile (~27% U.S. South merchant seedling market). https://ir.rayonier.com/
8. IBISWorld, "Logging in the US — Industry Analysis and Market Size," 2025 (revenue ~$16.1B; ~43,000+ businesses; no firm >5% share; ~1.8%/yr decline in establishments); wood-products/packaging names as downstream buyers. https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/logging/78/
9. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries 2024 (logging fatality rate ~110 per 100,000 FTE; ~33× the national average). https://www.bls.gov/iif/
10. USDA Forest Service, "Reforestation" and RNGR "Forest Nursery Seedling Production in the United States — FY2023" (>1.27B seedlings; >4M-acre backlog; REPLANT Act ~$123M/yr). https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/forest-management/vegetation-management/reforestation
11. American Forests, "New Study: U.S. Needs to Double Nursery Production," 2021 (Fargione et al., Frontiers in Forests and Global Change). https://www.americanforests.org/article/new-study-u-s-needs-to-double-nursery-production/
12. USDA Forest Service, "American Ginseng, in the Forest and in the Marketplace" (CITES Appendix II; USFWS export certification), 2023. https://www.fs.usda.gov/features/american-ginseng-forest-and-marketplace
13. Southern Ag Today, "Pine Sawtimber Prices Soften as Pine Pulpwood Continues to Fall," 2026 (TimberMart-South data); U.S. Census Bureau, "Monthly New Residential Construction," 2026. https://southernagtoday.org/2026/01/26/pine-sawtimber-prices-soften-as-pine-pulpwood-continues-to-fall/
14. Internal Revenue Service, "Instructions for Form 1120-REIT," 2025 (REIT tax treatment); U.S.–Canada softwood lumber duties and Section 232 tariff. https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1120rei
15. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, "29 CFR 1910.266 — Logging operations." https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.266