Forest Nurseries and Gathering of Forest Products (NAICS 113210): An Investor's Primer

1. Overview

This industry does two very different things under one federal code. First, forest nurseries grow tree seedlings — mostly pine — that are shipped out by the millions to replant land after it is logged, burned, or storm-damaged. Second, gathering of forest products covers people who harvest things from standing forests without cutting the timber: pine needles (pine straw), wild ginseng root, moss, bark, cones, sap, and similar goods [1].

Why it matters: seedlings are the front end of the entire U.S. timber supply chain. Every acre of managed forest that gets harvested has to be replanted, and demand for seedlings is now being pushed higher by a large government reforestation backlog and by corporate tree-planting for carbon. The gathering side is small and fragmented but locally meaningful — especially pine straw as a landscaping material and ginseng as an export crop.

For investors, there is no clean public "stock" for this niche. The closest pure play is a foreign-listed micro-cap. Most public-market exposure comes indirectly, through large timberland REITs (real estate investment trusts that own forest land) that run their own captive nurseries. Private investors have more direct routes: owning or operating a nursery, leasing pine-straw rights, forest-farming ginseng, or investing in timberland funds that internalize replanting. Sections 4 and 10 cover the specifics. Facts below are cited; forward-looking views are labeled Judgment.

2. What it is and how it's structured

NAICS (the North American Industry Classification System, the government's business-category scheme) code 113210 covers establishments that (1) grow trees for reforestation and/or (2) gather forest products such as gums, barks, needles, moss, ginseng, rhizomes, fibers, and truffles [1].

Two sub-businesses:

• Seedling nurseries. Bareroot nurseries grow seedlings in open fields and lift them dormant; container nurseries grow them in greenhouses in plugs. This also captures related seed collection and seed-orchard work. Output is sold by the thousand to timber companies, landowners, and government replanting programs. Nationally, roughly 70% of seedlings are bareroot, and over 96% are conifers (pines, Douglas-fir); only about 3.5% are hardwoods [2].
• Gathering / non-timber forest products (NTFP). Pine straw (baled pine needles), wild American ginseng, moss, bark, cones, greenery, mushrooms, and similar goods collected by hand, usually seasonally, often by individuals.

What it excludes (adjacent NAICS codes):

• Logging — cutting and transporting standing timber — is 113310, not here.
• Timber tract operations (owning/managing forest to sell standing timber) is 113110.
• Ornamental and landscaping nursery stock, plus short-rotation woody trees and Christmas trees, is 111421 (Nursery and Tree Production). NAICS 113210 is specifically forest (reforestation) seedlings.
• Support activities for forestry (contract tree planting, timber estimation, forest firefighting, pest control) is 115310.
• Sawmills and wood manufacturing are in sector 321. Tea and maple-sap gathering fall under crop farming, and maple-syrup processing is manufacturing [1].

Ownership mix is unusually varied. Producers include private commercial and native-plant nurseries, captive nurseries owned by large timber companies, and a substantial government segment: 38 state and territorial nurseries plus federal U.S. Forest Service and tribal nurseries [4]. The U.S. Forest Service itself operates six financed nurseries and two stand-alone seed extractories [5]. The gathering side is overwhelmingly individual, seasonal, and informal.

3. How big it is

Our federal figures (U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023):

• Employer establishments: 185 [6]
• Paid employees: 932 [6]
• Annual payroll: $57.4 million [6]
• First-quarter payroll: $13.5 million [6]
• Derived average: about 5 employees per establishment (932 ÷ 185) [6]
• SBA (U.S. Small Business Administration) small-business size standard: $20.5 million in average annual receipts [8]

The SBA threshold is a qualification standard for federal small-business programs, not a measure of industry revenue. No official figure is available in our data for industry revenue, profit, total seedling production value, capacity utilization, or nonemployer receipts — payroll should not be read as sales, and we do not estimate the missing values here.

These numbers materially undercount the real industry — read this caveat. County Business Patterns (CBP) counts only private employer firms with paid employees classified in this exact code; it largely excludes government employees, and businesses with no paid employees are tracked separately in Nonemployer Statistics [7]. Three big pieces of this industry fall outside the count:

1. Government nurseries. The 38 state and territorial nurseries alone grew about 123 million seedlings in 2022 [4], but as government units they sit largely outside the private-employer payroll count. Federal and tribal nurseries add more.
2. Captive nurseries. Large timber companies grow seedlings for their own reforestation; that employment typically rolls up under the parent's forestry or manufacturing code, not 113210.
3. Individual gatherers. Ginseng diggers and pine-straw rakers are mostly non-employer sole proprietors and seasonal labor, invisible in an employer-payroll count.

The physical scale tells the real story. U.S. forest nurseries produced more than 1.27 billion tree seedlings for the 2023 planting season (including about 38 million container seedlings imported from Canada) [2], and roughly 1.4 billion the prior season [3]. About 82% of planting is in the Southern states, 14% in the West, and 4% in the East [2]. So a headline of 932 employees and $57 million in payroll sits underneath an operation that plants well over a billion trees a year — the federal business count is a small slice of the true footprint.

4. The investable universe

There is no U.S.-listed pure-play forest-nursery stock whose financials isolate NAICS 113210. Public exposure is indirect.

Major private and other owner-operators (where much of the real activity sits):

• Green Diamond Resource Company — family-owned, ~2.2 million acres under management, with the long-running Korbel nursery and genetic-improvement program [14].
• Sierra Pacific Industries — family-owned, managing more than 2.4 million timberland acres in California, Oregon, and Washington [15].
• Roseburg Forest Products — closely held, with timberland across Oregon, Virginia, and North Carolina [16].
• Stimson Lumber — privately held, managing more than 500,000 acres [17].
• The Westervelt Company — non-public forest operator with more than half a million acres [18].
• Plus 38 state/territorial forestry nurseries, the U.S. Forest Service and tribal nurseries [4][5], university and conservation-district nurseries, independent commercial growers, and — on the gathering side — thousands of individual pine-straw and ginseng harvesters.

Institutional timberland managers (TIMOs). A timberland investment management organization usually manages forest assets for pension funds, insurers, and endowments rather than owning all the land itself — a distinction that matters when assessing exposure. Major names include Manulife Investment Management, Resource Management Service, Forest Investment Associates (~2.03 million acres, ~$5.23 billion of assets under management [19]), Campbell Global (J.P. Morgan), BTG Pactual's Timberland Investment Group, and Molpus Woodlands Group. In 2026, Gresham House completed its acquisition of a majority interest in Molpus, creating a platform with roughly $8 billion of assets and more than 2.2 million acres globally [20]. Much of this industry is public-sector or informal, which is exactly why the public-equity menu is thin.

5. How the money works

Nurseries — a volume business with thin per-unit margins and long-lived assets. Seedlings sell by the thousand, differentiated by species, genetics, stock type, and region. Bareroot loblolly pine has run roughly $70 per 1,000 seedlings at state price guides [21]; containerized stock costs more per tree but survives better, so buyers trade price against survival rate. Owners make money on the spread between price and the cost to grow (land, seed, labor, fertilizer, substrate, irrigation, freight), multiplied across enormous volume. Key economic levers:

• Genetics premium. Improved and varietal seedlings, backed by decades of tree breeding, command higher prices and drive better downstream timber yield. The underlying seed orchards are the crown-jewel asset and take many years to establish — a real barrier to entry.
• Yield and loss. Sellable yield, cull rate, and cost per plantable seedling drive economics; a crop lost to freeze, drought, or disease is largely a write-off because seedlings are perishable and seasonal (bareroot stock is lifted and shipped only in the dormant winter window).
• Demand is downstream-linked. You replant what gets harvested, so seedling volume tracks timber harvest — which tracks lumber and housing — plus government reforestation and carbon-driven planting.
• Captive vs. merchant. For a Weyerhaeuser, the nursery is a cost center feeding its own land, valued for matched genetics and reliable supply rather than as a standalone profit line [12]. Merchant nurseries (like ArborGen) sell to third parties and live on that market; useful merchant metrics include capacity vs. seedlings sold, order fill and contract-renewal rates, and field-survival guarantees.

Gathering — low capital, seasonal cash income.

• Pine straw: the landowner earns roughly $50–$125 per acre per year for raking rights, or sells bales at about $0.25–$1.25 each depending on species (longleaf commands the most) [22]. Pine straw is a roughly $200-million-a-year mulch business in the Southeast [22], and one of the few ways to earn income from a pine stand between timber harvests.
• Ginseng: diggers sell wild dry root to licensed buyers and exporters; wild root fetches high prices per dry pound, and most of it is exported to East Asia. It functions as a rural economic safety net more than a scalable business [23].

6. What drives demand

• Timber harvest and the housing cycle. Replanting volume follows how much forest is cut, which follows lumber and homebuilding demand. Healthy timber prices support planting; weak markets delay harvests and nursery orders. This makes the nursery business cyclical.
• The reforestation backlog and federal funding. The U.S. Forest Service has identified more than 4 million acres of national-forest land potentially needing reforestation — roughly 2.3 billion trees — largely due to wildfire [24][25]. The 2021 REPLANT Act (Repairing Existing Public Land by Adding Necessary Trees), part of the federal infrastructure law, removed a $30-million annual cap on the Reforestation Trust Fund and freed up an average of about $123 million a year for national-forest replanting [24][25].
• Disaster restoration. Wildfire, hurricane, insect, and disease damage all generate replanting demand — increasingly year-round.
• Public restoration and climate adaptation. Native-plant restoration, watershed and habitat work, and climate-resilience programs add grant- and contract-driven demand beyond commercial timber.
• Carbon and afforestation. Corporate net-zero commitments and carbon markets fund planting on land that wasn't previously forested — net-new seedling demand — though project economics hinge on credit prices, verification standards, and permanence rules.
• Landscaping (pine straw) tracks Southern residential and commercial landscaping, loosely tied to construction. Ginseng demand is driven mainly by East Asian buyers.

A widely cited 2021 study (Fargione et al., Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, co-authored with American Forests) concluded the U.S. would need to increase nursery seedling production roughly 2.4-fold — about 1.7 billion more seedlings a year, to over 3 billion by 2040 — to meet reforestation potential [26]. That is the structural bull case for the nursery side. Judgment: it is a forward-looking projection, not booked orders, and actual demand will stay uneven because public funding, seed availability, labor, site preparation, and customer harvest decisions do not move together.

7. Regulation

• Ginseng (CITES). Wild American ginseng is listed under Appendix II of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora). Harvest is governed by state seasons and permits, and export requires U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service certification [23]. Tighter rules can constrain supply.
• Plant health. The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) runs domestic plant-health programs and quarantines; nurseries shipping across state lines can face inspection, certification, treatment, and movement restrictions for regulated pests and diseases [27]. Advanced tree genetics, including any genetically engineered varieties, also fall under APHIS review and can draw public opposition.
• Pesticide and worker safety. The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) agricultural Worker Protection Standard (WPS) covers nursery and forest workers and pesticide handlers, with training, protective-equipment, notification, and application-exclusion-zone requirements [28]. Planting and pine-straw crews often rely on seasonal H-2A guest-worker labor.
• Import traceability (Lacey Act). The Lacey Act prohibits importing illegally harvested plant products and requires declarations for covered imported plant materials [29].
• Public-land gathering. Commercial collection on National Forest System land generally requires permits, with rules varying by product, quantity, and location [30].
• State and local rules. Nursery certification, reforestation seed-source/seed-zone standards, water use, forest-practice rules, and endangered-species protections vary substantially by state.

Compliance can be a competitive advantage for established operators; violations can trigger crop destruction, shipment holds, fines, or lost customers.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The industry is split in two competitively. Seedling production is regional and moderately concentrated. Seedlings must match local climate, soil, genetics, planting windows, and disease conditions, and shipping costs plus plant-health rules limit distant suppliers — so reliable water, seed supply, skilled labor, and customer relationships are the key competitive assets. A historical review of 2013 Southern U.S. production found private nurseries supplied about 51% of seedlings, industry-owned nurseries 38%, and state nurseries 11% [31] — regional and dated, not a current national share. Today ArborGen is the dominant merchant supplier in the South (~27% of that market) [10], with high barriers (decades-long seed orchards, seed-zone expertise, genetics programs) protecting incumbents. Gathering, by contrast, is highly fragmented — thousands of individual rakers and diggers, no meaningful consolidation, low barriers to entry.

Consolidation is more visible in the adjacent timberland-ownership and investment-management layer than in nurseries themselves: six industrial nurseries formerly run by International Paper eventually became part of ArborGen [31], and more recently the January 2026 Rayonier–PotlatchDeltic merger [13] and Gresham House's acquisition of Molpus [20] concentrated large timberland holdings and managed assets. That trend matters because large integrated landowners internalize their own seedling supply. No reliable current concentration ratio exists for NAICS 113210 as a whole, and our federal data do not support calling the operating niche either highly consolidated or unconsolidated.

9. Risks

• Cyclicality. Nursery demand is tethered to timber harvest and housing; a downturn cuts replanting volume.
• Biology and weather. Drought, freeze, disease, pests, or poor seed viability can wipe out a perishable, seasonal seedling crop. The same fires and droughts that raise reforestation demand can also destroy seed sources and inventory.
• Policy dependence. A meaningful chunk of upside relies on sustained federal reforestation funding (REPLANT), which is subject to future budget decisions [24][25].
• Labor and inputs. Reliance on seasonal and H-2A guest-worker labor exposes nurseries and gathering crews to labor-cost and immigration-policy risk; water, freight, and chemical costs and low utilization can compress thin margins.
• Scale limits. Seedling economics are low-margin per unit, and scaling up fast is constrained by multi-year seed-orchard lead times.
• Import competition. Canadian container seedlings supply part of U.S. demand (about 38 million in 2023) [2].
• Gathering-specific risks. Ginseng faces overharvest concerns and CITES tightening [23]; pine straw depends on Southern landscaping demand.
• Disclosure and liquidity. Public companies bundle nursery activity into timberlands, making valuation and peer comparison hard; private nurseries, timberland funds, and direct land can carry long holding periods and appraisal-based valuations.
• Reputation and traceability. Illegal collection, invasive-species transmission, or questionable carbon claims can damage commercial relationships; genetically engineered stock faces regulatory and reputational headwinds.

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public-market routes.

• Timberland REITs — Weyerhaeuser (WY), Rayonier (RYN) — give diversified exposure to forest land, timber, and increasingly carbon, with the seedling nursery as an internal support function rather than the earnings driver [12][13]. These pay dividends and trade on the housing/lumber cycle; judge them on timberland cash flow, land value, debt, harvest plans, and carbon optionality — not nursery revenue alone.
• ArborGen Holdings (NZX: ARB) is the only near-pure-play on forest-seedling genetics, but it is a foreign-listed micro-cap (~NZ$48M) with limited liquidity and added currency and listing risk — a speculative, hard-to-access position, not a core holding [11].

Private-market routes (often the better fit for this industry):

• Own or operate a bareroot or container nursery, or supply improved genetics.
• Lease pine-straw raking rights on Southern pine land, or buy pine land where straw income bridges the years between timber harvests [22].
• Forest-farm ginseng under hardwood canopy — a long-payback, niche cash crop [23].
• Invest in timberland through TIMOs, separately managed accounts, or natural-capital and carbon funds, which internalize reforestation.
• Back specialty gathering businesses with secure permits, traceable supply, and differentiated buyers.

Due diligence should center on water and seed/genetics access, customer contracts and backlog, capacity utilization and cull rates, labor, disease controls, insurance, wildfire exposure, regulatory compliance, and the quality of management's biological and financial records.

Judgment (outlook). The structural case is a large, partly funded reforestation backlog plus corporate carbon demand set against a nursery system that credible studies say must roughly double capacity by 2040 [24][25][26] — a genuine multi-year tailwind for seedling producers. The near-term reality is lumpier: replanting volume still swings with the housing and lumber cycle, the policy-funded upside depends on federal budgets holding, and capacity can't scale quickly because seed orchards and skilled labor take years to build. The most durable businesses combine regional biological expertise, pre-sold demand, reliable infrastructure, strong compliance, and multiple revenue streams. Pine straw should track Southern landscaping demand steadily; ginseng stays a supply-constrained, export-driven niche. For most investors this remains a theme played indirectly through timberland — public investors get only indirect access, while private investors can capture more of the operating economics but must accept greater illiquidity and execution risk.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau / NAICS, "2022 NAICS Definition — 113210: Forest Nurseries and Gathering of Forest Products" (definition and exclusions, including tea/maple-sap and maple-syrup). https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=113210&year=2022; NAICS Association, "NAICS Code 113210." https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?code=113210
2. USDA Forest Service, Reforestation, Nurseries and Genetic Resources (RNGR), "Forest Nursery Seedling Production in the United States — Fiscal Year 2023," 2024. https://rngr.net/publications/tpn/67-2/forest-nursery-seedling-production-in-the-united-states2014fiscal-year-2023
3. USDA Forest Service / RNGR, "Forest Nursery Seedling Production in the United States — Fiscal Year 2022," 2023. https://rngr.net/publications/tpn/66-2/forest-nursery-seedling-production-in-the-united-states2014fiscal-year-2022
4. USDA Forest Service, "State and Tribal Nurseries," 2023. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/forest-management/vegetation-management/nurseries/state-and-tribal
5. USDA Forest Service, "Nurseries and Seed Extractories," 2026. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/forest-management/vegetation-management/nurseries
6. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP), 2023 (NAICS 113210: establishments, employment, payroll). https://data.census.gov/table/CBP2023.CB2300CBP
7. U.S. Census Bureau, "County Business Patterns — About / Methodology" and "Nonemployer Statistics," 2025–2026. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/about.html; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics.html
8. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards," 2023 (NAICS 113210: $20.5 million receipts). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
9. ArborGen Holdings, "Our Business" (16 nurseries, ~10 seed orchards, ~500M seedling capacity), 2026. https://www.arborgenholdings.com/our-business
10. ArborGen, "About ArborGen" (~27% U.S. South seedling market, ~31% loblolly pine), 2024. https://www.arborgen.com/about-arborgen/
11. Simply Wall St, "ArborGen Holdings (NZX: ARB) — Company Profile and Market Cap," 2025. https://simplywall.st/stocks/nz/materials/nzx-arb/arborgen-holdings-shares
12. Weyerhaeuser, "2025 Annual Report / Form 10-K" and "Sustainable Forestry, a Continuous Cycle" (>10M acres; ~130–150M seedlings/yr, ~20M to outside customers). https://www.weyerhaeuser.com/timberlands/forestry/sustainable-forestry/
13. Rayonier Inc., "Rayonier and PotlatchDeltic Announce Closing of Merger of Equals" and First Quarter 2026 Investor Release (~4.1M acres; merger closed Jan 30, 2026). https://ir.rayonier.com/news/news-details/2026/Rayonier-and-PotlatchDeltic-Announce-Closing-of-Merger-of-Equals/default.aspx
14. Green Diamond Resource Company, "About" / "Businesses: Timber" (~2.2M acres; Korbel nursery), 2026. https://www.greendiamond.com/about/
15. Sierra Pacific Industries, "About Us" (>2.4M acres), 2026. https://spi-ind.com/Home/AboutUs
16. Roseburg Forest Products, "About Us," 2026. https://www.roseburg.com/who-we-are/about-us/
17. Stimson Lumber, "Timberland and Log Acquisition" (>500,000 acres), 2025. https://stimsonlumber.com/timber-and-log-acquisition/
18. The Westervelt Company, "Corporate," 2026. https://westervelt.com/
19. Forest Investment Associates (~2.03M acres, ~$5.23B AUM), 2026. https://www.forestinvest.com/
20. Gresham House, "Gresham House Completes Acquisition of Majority Interest in Molpus Woodlands Group," 2026. https://greshamhouse.com/news-media/gresham-house-completes-acquisition-of-majority-interest-in-molpus-woodlands-group/
21. South Carolina Forestry Commission, "ArborGen Taylor Nursery Seedling Price Guide," 2021 (~$70 per 1,000 bareroot loblolly). https://www.scfc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/spg21.pdf
22. The Washington Post, "Why pine needles are a $200 million industry in the Southeast," 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/31/pine-needle-mulch-north-carolina/; Mississippi State University Extension, "Pine Straw Mulch Production." https://extension.msstate.edu/natural-resources/forestry/forest-management/pine-straw-mulch-production
23. 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
24. USDA Forest Service, "Reforestation" (>4M acres backlog; REPLANT Act removed the funding cap), 2026. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/forest-management/vegetation-management/reforestation
25. National Forest Foundation, "What the Passage of the REPLANT Act Means for Tree Planting on National Forests," 2022 (~2.3B trees; ~$123M/yr; $30M cap removed). https://www.nationalforests.org/article/what-the-passage-of-the-2021-infrastructure-bill-means-for-tree-planting-on-national-forests/; American Forests, "The REPLANT Act." https://www.americanforests.org/our-programs/policy/replant-act/
26. American Forests, "New Study: U.S. Needs to Double Nursery Production," 2021 (Fargione et al., Frontiers in Forests and Global Change; 2.4-fold, ~+1.7B seedlings, >3B by 2040). https://www.americanforests.org/article/new-study-u-s-needs-to-double-nursery-production/
27. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), "Plant Health Domestic Programs and Manuals," 2026. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant-pests-diseases/manuals
28. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Agricultural Worker Protection Standard (WPS)," 2026. https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-worker-safety/agricultural-worker-protection-standard-wps
29. USDA APHIS, "Lacey Act Declaration Requirements," 2025. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant-imports/file-lacey-act-declaration/requirements
30. USDA Forest Service, "Special Forest Products / Permits" (commercial gathering on National Forest System land), 2026. https://www.fs.usda.gov/r06/siuslaw/permits/mushroom-permits
31. Auburn University Southern Forest Nursery Management Cooperative, "Forest Nursery Practices in the Southern United States," 2016 (2013 shares: private ~51%, industry ~38%, state ~11%; International Paper nurseries into ArborGen). https://nurserycoop.auburn.edu/pubsanddocs/reprints/Forest_Nursery_Practices_in_the_Southern_United_St.pdf