Support Activities for Agriculture and Forestry (NAICS 115): A Rollup Primer

NAICS 2022 code 115. NAICS = North American Industry Classification System, the standard code set U.S. statistical agencies use to define industries. This is a subsector (3-digit level) — one rung above the industry groups below it. It contains three child industries: 1151 (crop support), 1152 (animal support), and 1153 (forestry support). This page synthesizes those three child primers plus our ground-truth federal statistics for the subsector; its distinctive value is the contrast across the three, not a repeat of each. For the full treatment of any one child, read its own primer.

1. Overview

NAICS 115 is the for-hire service layer that sits on top of American primary production — everything done around growing crops, raising animals, and managing forests, by specialists who are paid a fee or work on contract but do not own the land, the animals, or the timber and do not sell the resulting food, fiber, or lumber themselves.[1] It is the outsourced "hands and know-how" of the land economy: custom planting, spraying and harvesting crews, cotton gins and produce-packing houses, farm managers, cattle-breeding and semen firms, farriers and shearers, tree planters, timber cruisers, and wildland firefighters.

Three facts frame the whole subsector for an investor:

1. It is small on paper and much larger in reality. The federal count of employer businesses (below) captures only the formal, payrolled slice; most of the actual work is done by self-employed operators or in-house by farms and government, none of which lands in these figures.[3]
2. No listed company represents NAICS 115, and only one narrow niche is directly investable. Every child is overwhelmingly private — cooperatives, family firms, sole proprietors, private-equity (PE) roll-ups, and a few venture-backed platforms. The single exception is a corner of forestry support: Bridger Aerospace (NASDAQ: BAER) is a listed aerial-firefighting operator that genuinely performs this work, but it is one niche of one child, with $122.8 million of 2025 revenue, extreme seasonality, and 87% of revenue from three customers — a narrow bet, not a proxy for the subsector.[22] Everywhere else, public-market investors reach the theme only indirectly, through equipment makers, input retailers, real estate investment trusts (REITs), a livestock-genetics leader, and a fire-retardant supplier.
3. The three children behave very differently. They ride three separate end markets (the farm economy, the cattle/dairy complex, and the forest economy), on different cycles, with different ownership and different economics. Reading the subsector is reading the contrast among them — which is what Section 2 does.

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

NAICS 115 splits into three industry groups (4-digit codes). Each is a one-to-one chain at the 5-digit level (1151→11511, 1152→11521, 1153→11531), so each child primer doubles as the primer for its 5-digit code. Only crop support splits further: 11511 breaks into six 6-digit sub-industries (cotton ginning, soil preparation, machine harvesting, postharvest activities, farm labor contracting, farm management), while animal and forestry support run straight through to a single 6-digit code each.[1]

Read across the row and four contrasts stand out:

• Size is lopsided. Crop support is roughly two-thirds of the subsector by payroll and employment; animal and forestry support are each about one-sixth. Crop support dominates because it touches the largest end market (all of U.S. row-crop and produce agriculture) with the most equipment and labor per job.[2]
• Animal support is the most fragmented. It has almost as many establishments as crop support (4,791 vs. 5,072) but only a third of the workers and a sixth of the payroll — because its typical unit is tiny (about 4.9 employees per establishment, versus 13.5 for crop and 7.6 for forestry). Thousands of one-person farrier shops and small boarding barns sit inside it.[2]
• The value is concentrated in different corners. In animal support, value pools in one IP-rich slice (cattle genetics and reproduction — bull studs, semen, embryos, genomic testing) with recurring revenue and pricing power. In forestry, it pools in certified, capital- or contract-gated niches: long-term fire retardant is effectively a single-supplier market — Perimeter Solutions holds a USDA retardant contract valued at about $1.12 billion — alongside aerial firefighting and professional consulting.[4][21] In crop support it is spread thinly across six sub-activities with no dominant firm anywhere.[4]
• The cycles are not the same cycle. Crop support rides farm income and crop prices; animal support rides the cattle cycle and dairy economics; forestry support rides timber harvests, housing starts, and — increasingly — wildfire severity and federal reforestation money. A bad year for one is not automatically a bad year for another.

What NAICS 115 excludes (and it shapes every number): actually growing the crop, raising the animal, or logging the tree is primary production (NAICS 111, 112, and 113) — a farmer or landowner doing this work on their own operation is farming, not running a support business. Veterinary care (541940), pet grooming/boarding (812910), seedling nurseries (113210), timberland ownership (113110, where the big timber REITs sit), and government forest administration (924120) all live outside 115.[1]

3. Size — the subsector's rollup figures

Our ground-truth federal source is the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP), the annual count of employer businesses (those with paid employees), for 2023. The three children sum exactly to the subsector:[2]

CBP does not publish revenue, margin, capacity, utilization, or market-concentration figures for this subsector or its children — agriculture (Sector 11) is excluded from the Economic Census — so we do not state any of those. Two derived observations the data do support:

• Seasonality is visible in the payroll split. First-quarter payroll is about 21% of the annual total — well below an even quarter's 25% — the fingerprint of work compressed into planting, harvest, and fire seasons. Forestry is the most seasonal (Q1 ≈ 19% of its year, and its headcount is a mid-March off-season snapshot), animal support the least (≈ 23%, reflecting year-round genetics, herd-data, and boarding work).[2]
• Pay levels differ by child. Average annual payroll per employee runs roughly $65,000 in forestry (hazardous fire work and professional foresters), ~$56,000 in crop support, and ~$45,000 in animal support (labor-heavy husbandry and boarding) — a rough proxy for skill and hazard mix, not a wage survey.[2]

The undercount is the single most important caveat, and it is large. CBP counts only firms with paid employees; by design it excludes the self-employed, businesses without an Employer Identification Number, agricultural-production workers, and most government employees.[3] Four independent signals show how far the ~11,886 employer establishments and ~$5.9 billion payroll understate true activity:

1. A single farm-expense line dwarfs the whole subsector's payroll. USDA's (U.S. Department of Agriculture) 2022 Census of Agriculture recorded 391,283 farms spending about $10.05 billion on "customwork and custom hauling" — one line item, larger than the entire employer payroll of all three children combined.[6]
2. Private revenue estimates run several times the payroll. IBISWorld sizes the "Crop Services" grouping alone near $32 billion of revenue across ~73,000 businesses — more than five times the subsector's total employer payroll — and "Forest Support Services" near $3.5 billion in 2024, against forestry's ~$1.0 billion of employer payroll.[7][8]
3. One trade's headcount exceeds a whole child's. Industry estimates put working farriers in the U.S. above 25,000 — more than the entire 23,365-employee count CBP reports for all of animal support — and no federal agency even tracks them.[9]
4. Where a second federal series exists, it lands far higher. Only forestry has one: the Bureau of Labor Statistics' industry-productivity measure, which adds unincorporated self-employed and unpaid family workers, reports 24,200 jobs in 2023, 25,500 in 2024, and 26,700 in 2025 against CBP's 15,361 employer-based jobs for the same year — roughly 1.6× on the broader basis, and rising.[5] The two series measure different things and are not contradictory; do not divide the BLS employment figure by the CBP establishment count, and note that no equivalent series exists for the crop or animal children, so this ratio cannot be extended to a subsector total.

Undercount is worst exactly where small or individual ownership dominates: cotton gins and one-person harvest and labor crews (1151), farriers, shearers, and independent breeding technicians (1152), and consulting foresters and seasonal guest-worker planting crews (1153). Treat the federal figures as the visible, formal, payrolled tip of a much larger dispersed activity.

4. Investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

There is no way to buy NAICS 115 directly. The honest map is where usable listed proxies cluster, and they cluster unevenly across the three children (tickers appear here and in Section 10 only):

• Crop support (1151) — the largest child, but the thinnest direct equity. Public exposure is entirely indirect and pools in two of its six sub-activities: postharvest packing, reachable through vertically integrated grower-packer-shippers and cold-storage REITs, and farm management, reachable through farmland REITs and diversified asset-manager parents.[29] Field operations and harvesting are essentially a bet on farm capital spending expressed through equipment makers and input retailers. Cotton ginning and farm-labor contracting have almost no clean listed exposure.[4]
• Animal support (1152) — one genuine near-proxy. Value concentrates in livestock genetics and reproduction, and the closest listed operator is Genus plc (London Stock Exchange: GNS / over-the-counter, OTC: GENSF), whose ABS division leads global cattle genetics and artificial insemination (AI — breeding without natural mating). Adjacent genomics and diagnostics exposure comes through Zoetis (New York Stock Exchange, NYSE: ZTS), Neogen (NASDAQ: NEOG), and IDEXX Laboratories (NASDAQ: IDXX). The real centre of gravity is private and cooperative — Select Sires, STgenetics, URUS Group, Hendrix Genetics, Dairy One — plus the atomized farrier/boarding/shearing tail.[4][20]
• Forestry support (1153) — two listed operators, the rest demand-side. Perimeter Solutions (NYSE: PRM) is the effectively sole supplier of long-term fire retardant to the U.S. Forest Service, on a contract valued near $1.12 billion; Bridger Aerospace (NASDAQ: BAER) flies Super Scoopers on government aerial-firefighting contracts, with $122.8 million of 2025 revenue and 87% of it from three customers.[21][22] Timberland REITs are demand-side proxies that hire these services rather than perform them, and the group is now a duopoly of Weyerhaeuser (NYSE: WY) and Rayonier (NYSE: RYN) — Rayonier closed its merger with PotlatchDeltic on January 30, 2026 to form a roughly 4.1-million-acre company.[23][24] The reforestation, consulting, and ground wildland-fire operators themselves are private, led by consolidators such as American Forest Management (over 5.7 million acres under management, 370-plus employees).[25]

The pattern across all three: with one partial exception in aerial firefighting, the public options are proxies, not the thing itself, and the actual ownership is private, cooperative, or self-employed.

5. How the money works

Three economic models run through the subsector, and which child (and which corner of it) you look at decides which applies:

• Fixed-cost / utilization processing governs equipment- and facility-heavy work — cotton gins, packing houses, soil-prep and custom-harvest fleets, firefighting aircraft, and materials suppliers. Each sells throughput priced above variable cost and lives or dies on utilization of an expensive asset during a short season; in aerial fire, profitability turns on flight hours and availability contracts.[4][22]
• Labor-and-time contracting governs the crew businesses — custom field crews, tree planters, shearers, wildland-fire contractors — priced per acre, per animal, per day, or per gallon, often with standby and mobilization on top, where the crew is the main cost and billable utilization is the profit lever.[4]
• Fee / IP intermediation governs the asset-light, knowledge-rich corners — farm management, forestry consulting, and, most distinctively, livestock genetics, which is a razor-and-blades, recurring-revenue model with a research-and-development (R&D) and intellectual-property (IP) moat (elite bull studs, proprietary genomic rankings, premium sexed and beef-cross semen). Genetics and data businesses scale better than the others because they own proprietary information; labor services are capped by hours and route density.[4]

Common to all three children: seasonality, cost pass-through rather than pricing power, and sensitivity to the primary-sector economics they sit on. This is a cyclical, farm-and-forest-income-driven service business — not rate-regulated utility, not REIT rent, not mining, so the economics of those sectors do not apply here.

6. Demand drivers

Each child rides its own end market, but they share a family of master variables:

• Primary-sector output and income. Planted acreage and crop mix, plus farm income and crop prices, drive crop support — USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) forecasts 2026 net farm income near $153.4 billion against record production expenses of roughly $477.7 billion, with genuinely soft crop margins in 2025–2026, a cautious signal for discretionary outsourcing.[12] Livestock inventories and the cattle cycle (a multi-decade-low herd) drive animal support, partly offset by dairy strength and the beef-on-dairy/sexed-semen shift toward premium genetics; roughly 6.6 million horses and a ~$177 billion equine economic footprint underpin the boarding and farriery tail.[4][10] Timber-harvest levels (tracking lumber, pulp, and housing starts) drive forestry replanting.
• Labor scarcity and guest-worker programs. A shrinking, aging farm and forest workforce drives both labor contracting and automation; the H-2A (seasonal agricultural) and H-2B (seasonal non-agricultural, used for reforestation) visa programs are direct throttles on capacity.[14][15]
• Land ownership and turnover. Roughly 79% of rented U.S. farmland is owned by non-farmers, and about 40% of U.S. farmland is rented — feeding demand for professional farm management; turnover among timberland investment management organizations (TIMOs), REITs, and families feeds forestry consulting.[13][24]
• Public money and policy shocks. Federal reforestation funding — the REPLANT Act uncapped the Reforestation Trust Fund against a backlog of more than 4 million acres, with the Forest Service completing over 231,000 acres in fiscal 2024 — and wildfire-suppression spending averaging roughly $3 billion a year (about $3.2 billion in 2023) drive forestry support directly; carbon markets add new measurement demand.[17][18][19]
• Weather — the shared wild card that can cut throughput across all three children at once.

7. Regulation

A common federal spine runs through the whole subsector, with child-specific layers on top:

• Worker safety and pesticides: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Agricultural Worker Protection Standard and pesticide-handling rules, plus Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) agricultural and farm-safety standards.[28]
• Guest-worker labor: the H-2A program (Department of Labor, DOL, certification plus a mandated wage floor, the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, or AEWR — whose methodology change effective October 2, 2025 is reshaping crop and animal labor cost and remains a live policy fight) and the H-2B program, whose statutory 66,000 annual cap is hit every year but is now frequently supplemented — roughly 64,700 additional visas were released for fiscal 2026 — so reforestation capacity turns on a discretionary annual decision as much as on the statutory number.[14][15][16]
• Child-specific layers: food-safety and applicator rules for crop packing and spraying; USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) control of live-animal and germplasm (semen/embryo) movement for animal support; and state forest-practice acts (Oregon, Washington, and California mandate post-harvest reforestation, effectively guaranteeing demand), Federal Aviation Administration oversight of aerial operators, and incident "carding" qualifications for forestry.[4][28]

8. Consolidation

The subsector is consolidating unevenly, and the pattern tracks the growing/shrinking split rather than the child boundaries:

• Where scale, IP, or certification matter, a few firms dominate. Livestock genetics is consolidating into a handful of players (Select Sires, STgenetics, the ABS division of Genus, the URUS cooperative). Fire retardant is effectively a single-supplier market (Perimeter Solutions). Forestry consulting has seen roll-ups — American Forest Management now manages more than 5.7 million acres. Postharvest packing consolidates by automation.[4][20][21][25]
• Everywhere else is a long tail of local independents — custom crews, farriers, boarding barns, shearers, small consulting foresters — fragmented, relationship-driven, with low entry barriers and a labor-constrained roll-up opportunity for private buyers.
• The customer side is consolidating too. The Rayonier–PotlatchDeltic merger (closed January 30, 2026, ~4.1 million acres) leaves forestry contractors selling into a smaller set of larger institutional landowners — fewer, bigger contracts, and more counterparty concentration for the private operators who win them.[23]
• The through-line is "bigger but fewer." USDA ERS finds inflation-adjusted receipts for agricultural support services rose 263% from 1978 to 2022 while the number of active establishments fell 10%.[11] A structural quirk unique to forestry: government is simultaneously the biggest customer and a direct competitor, insourcing or outsourcing crews by budget and politics.

No child has a firm with meaningful national share outside the genetics and fire-retardant niches, and federal data publish no concentration ratio for any of them.

9. Risks

The three children share a common risk core:

• Weather and seasonality — revenue compressed into weeks and hostage to acreage, yield, herd size, harvest levels, and fire-season severity.
• Primary-sector cyclicality and do-it-yourself substitution — soft farm income, a shrinking cattle herd, or weak lumber markets push customers to cut discretionary custom work or bring it in-house.[12]
• Labor cost and availability — scarce skilled operators plus H-2A/H-2B wage and visa volatility; a genuine cap on capacity and on any roll-up.[14][15][16]
• Thin margins and utilization/working-capital risk — expensive assets used a few weeks a year, and slow-paying government contracts.
• Public-budget and agency-capacity risk — most acute in forestry, where federal appropriations set the size of the market and the customer must also be able to administer the contracts: the Government Accountability Office found Forest Service work constrained by staffing, with the agency's workforce down about 20% during fiscal 2025 and some forest-program vacancy rates above 40%.[26]
• For public investors specifically, no pure-play / diffusion risk — and concentration risk in the one exception. Nearly every listed proxy buries this activity inside a broader business (equipment, produce, real estate, genomics, fire safety), so the link to NAICS 115 economics is loose and hard to isolate; the one directly exposed operator, Bridger Aerospace, carries the opposite problem — 87% of 2025 revenue from three customers and revenue that swings with fire-season severity.[22]

Child-specific tails — cotton-trade and food-safety exposure (1151), animal-disease and germplasm-trade shocks and IP risk (1152), wildfire-budget, seed-and-nursery capacity, and immigration-policy concentration (1153) — are developed in the child primers.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes are indirect across all three children. The usable proxies are: for crop support, ag-equipment makers, input retailers, cold-storage REITs, and farmland REITs; for animal support, Genus plc (GNS / GENSF) as the nearest operator, with Zoetis (ZTS), Neogen (NEOG), and IDEXX (IDXX) as adjacent genomics/diagnostics reads; for forestry, Perimeter Solutions (PRM) and Bridger Aerospace (BAER) as the two listed operators, with timberland REITs (WY, RYN) as diluted demand-side proxies. Analyze each on its own operating drivers, not on NAICS 115 payroll. There is no dedicated exchange-traded fund (ETF) anywhere in the subsector and no listed company whose business is the subsector — the closest direct plays are single-niche bets inside forestry support.[21][22][23]

Private routes are where the subsector actually lives — a private-market, cooperative, and roll-up story far more than a public one: building or buying a packing, custom-application, breeding, boarding, reforestation, or wildland-fire operation; rolling up aging-owner independents in soil prep, labor contracting, farm management, farriery, or forestry consulting; backing a scalable genetics, herd-data, or forest-carbon platform; or owning farmland or timberland near the value chain. Most operators fall under U.S. Small Business Administration size ceilings — for forestry support the threshold is about $11.5 million in annual receipts, a fair indication of how small the typical firm is.[27]

Outlook. Near-term, the three children diverge:

• Crop support faces a soft farm economy — government-propped income masking weak crop margins in 2025–2026 — so discretionary outsourcing and processing volumes stay under pressure, even as farm-labor contracting and farm management ride durable labor-scarcity and land-transfer tailwinds.[12][13]
• Animal support favors its high-value end: dairy stability, record cattle-market economics, and the beef-on-dairy/sexed-semen shift push demand toward premium genetics, offsetting flat-to-down unit volumes on a shrinking herd — constructive but selective.[4]
• Forestry support is structurally growing but perennially cyclical and constrained on two fronts: uncapped REPLANT Act (Repairing Existing Public Land by Adding Necessary Trees) reforestation funding against a ~4-million-acre backlog, elevated wildfire budgets, and emerging forest-carbon consulting all point up, while H-2B visa availability, federal appropriations, agency staffing, and weather make any single year hard to call.[16][17][18][26]

Across all three, the cleanest public exposure stays the equipment makers, retailers, REITs, and the two or three specialist operators that surround the work rather than perform the bulk of it — and the disciplined private operators with reliable crews and clean compliance records are best positioned to capture the value the federal statistics can barely see.

For full detail on any child — its sub-activities, specific investable names, and per-unit economics — see the NAICS 1151, 1152, and 1153 primers.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Manual and Sector 11 definitions — subsector 115 scope, the three industry groups 1151/1152/1153, the six 6-digit crop-support codes, and cross-references to primary-production and excluded codes. https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
2. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 — NAICS 115 and children (establishments, employment, annual and first-quarter payroll); Histometrics ingested federal ground-truth statistics for this subsector. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
3. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns — Methodology (employer-only coverage; excludes the self-employed, businesses without an EIN, agricultural-production workers, and most government employees). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
4. Histometrics child primers 1151, 1152, and 1153 (and their leaf primers 11511, 11521, 11531) — synthesized direction-of-travel, ownership, unit-economics, and investability judgments; internal working drafts.
5. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Industry Productivity Series via FRED, NAICS 115310 employment (24,200 in 2023; 25,500 in 2024; 26,700 in 2025 — includes unincorporated self-employed and unpaid family workers). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUAN115310W200000000
6. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2022 Census of Agriculture — farm production expenses, "Customwork and custom hauling" ($10.05B; 391,283 farms). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/
7. IBISWorld, "Crop Services in the US" (NAICS 1151 grouping; ~$32B revenue; ~73,000 businesses). https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/crop-services/89/
8. IBISWorld, "Forest Support Services in the US — Market Size" (~$3.5B, 2024). https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/forest-support-services-united-states/
9. American Farriers Journal, "No Government Agency Tracks Farrier Numbers" (25,000+ working U.S. farriers, untracked). https://www.americanfarriers.com/
10. American Horse Council, Economic Impact of the U.S. Horse Industry (~6.6 million horses; ~$177B total economic footprint). https://www.horsecouncil.org/economics/
11. USDA Economic Research Service, "The Growing Contribution of Support Services to U.S. Agricultural Production" (inflation-adjusted ag-services receipts +263% 1978–2022; active establishments −10%). https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/109259
12. USDA Economic Research Service, Farm Sector Income Forecast (2026 net farm income ~$153.4B; production expenses ~$477.7B; soft crop margins 2025–2026). https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-sector-income-finances/farm-sector-income-forecast
13. USDA NASS, "Most of the U.S. Rented Farmland is Owned by Non-Farmers" (~79% non-farmer-owned); USDA ERS, "Farmland Ownership and Tenure" (~40% of U.S. farmland rented). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2026/03-12-2026.php
14. USDA ERS "Farm Labor"; U.S. DOL / Congressional Research Service, H-2A Adverse Effect Wage Rates and the October 2, 2025 methodology change. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor
15. Journal of Forestry, "H-2B Guest Workers and the Critical Role They Play in US Forests" (2021). https://academic.oup.com/jof/article-abstract/119/5/467/6255284
16. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, "Cap Count for H-2B Nonimmigrants" (66,000 statutory cap); Federal Register, "FY2026 H-2B Supplemental Increase" (~64,700 additional visas). https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-2b-non-agricultural-workers/cap-count-for-h-2b-nonimmigrants
17. American Forests, "The REPLANT Act" (uncapped Reforestation Trust Fund). https://www.americanforests.org/our-programs/policy/replant-act/
18. USDA, "Celebrating Three Years of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law at USDA" (231,000 acres reforested in FY2024; ~4-million-acre backlog). https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2024/11/15/fact-sheet-celebrating-three-years-bipartisan-infrastructure-law-usda
19. U.S. Forest Service Research & Development / National Interagency Fire Center, "Government spending on wildfire suppression" (~$3B annual average; ~$3.2B in 2023). https://research.fs.usda.gov/srs/articles/government-spending-wildfire-suppression-rises-climate-change
20. Livestock-genetics owners: Genus plc (LSE: GNS), Select Sires, STgenetics, URUS Group, Hendrix Genetics, Dairy One (corporate/"about" pages). https://www.genusplc.com/
21. ExecutiveBiz / Perimeter Solutions (NYSE: PRM), "USDA Awards $1.12B Retardant Contract to Perimeter Solutions," 2024. https://www.executivebiz.com/articles/usda-perimeter-solutions-fire-retardant-contract-award; https://www.perimeter-solutions.com/
22. Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings (NASDAQ: BAER), Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025 ($122.8M revenue; 87% of revenue from three customers). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1941536/000194153626000005/baer-20251231.htm
23. Rayonier Inc., Form 8-K announcing PotlatchDeltic merger completion, January 30, 2026 (~4.1 million acres); Form 10-Q for first quarter 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/52827/000119312526032194/d63429d8k.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1806931/000005282726000078/ryn-20260331.htm
24. Forisk Consulting, "North America's Top Timberland Owners and Managers, 2025 Update," 2025. https://forisk.com/north-americas-top-timberland-owners-and-managers-2025-update/
25. American Forest Management, corporate site ("About Us" — more than 5.7 million acres under management, 370-plus employees); F&W Forestry Services. https://www.americanforestmanagement.com/about-us; https://www.fwforestry.com/services/
26. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Forest Management workforce and capacity review, GAO-26-107993, 2026 (Forest Service workforce down ~20% during FY2025; some forest-program vacancy rates above 40%). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107993
27. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards" (NAICS 115310: $11.5 million in receipts). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
28. U.S. EPA, "Agricultural Worker Protection Standard (WPS)," and OSHA agricultural standards (29 CFR 1928); USDA APHIS live-animal and germplasm movement rules. https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-worker-safety/agricultural-worker-protection-standard-wps
29. Farm-management and farmland proxies: Farmland Partners and Gladstone Land 10-Ks; Farmers National Company; Nuveen/TIAA Natural Capital. https://www.farmersnational.com/our-story