Support Activities for Forestry (NAICS 1153): An Investor's Primer

1. Overview

Support Activities for Forestry is the "hands and services" layer of the American forest economy — the specialist firms and crews that do the work around growing and harvesting trees without owning the timberland or running the sawmill: planting seedlings after a harvest or fire, cruising (measuring and valuing) standing timber, writing forest management plans, thinning and spraying young stands, controlling pests, and fighting and preventing forest fires, including dropping retardant from aircraft.[1][2]

This page covers NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 1153, a four-digit "industry group." Structurally there is only one thing to know: this level is effectively identical to its single child. NAICS 1153 contains exactly one industry, 11531, which in turn contains exactly one detail industry, 115310 — all three codes describe the same population of businesses under the same definition. The classification simply carries the same activity down three digit-levels without splitting it. This page therefore gives this level's own ground-truth statistics and points you to the child primer for full detail.

For the complete treatment — investable universe, economics, demand drivers, regulation, consolidation, risks, and how-to-invest — see the primer for NAICS 11531 (Support Activities for Forestry). Everything below is a summary.

2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

NAICS 1153 contains exactly one child industry:

Because there is only one child, the industry group (1153) and the industry beneath it (11531, which itself equals the detail industry 115310) are the same businesses with the same definition. There is no aggregation to perform and no second segment to weigh — the rollup is its child.

The work inside splits into three buckets: reforestation and stand tending (tree planting, seeding, site preparation, thinning, herbicide application); forest measurement and consulting (timber cruising, valuation, inventory, management plans, and increasingly carbon-inventory work); and forest protection (firefighting, fire prevention, aerial retardant, and pest and disease control).[1][2]

Note what this level excludes, because it shapes every data point: growing the seedlings (113210), owning timberland to sell standing timber (113110, where the big timberland real estate investment trusts, or REITs, sit), the actual logging (113310), and government forest administration such as the U.S. Forest Service and state agencies (Public Administration, 924120).[2][7]

3. Size (this level's rollup figures)

Because 1153 equals its single child, this level's statistics are the child's statistics. From the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (2023, employer businesses only) — our ground-truth federal source for this level:[3]

A second federal series counts the same activity on a wider basis and lands much higher: the Bureau of Labor Statistics' industry-productivity measure, which adds unincorporated self-employed and unpaid family workers to wage and salary employment, reports 24,200 jobs in 2023, 25,500 in 2024, and 26,700 in 2025.[4] The two are not contradictory — they measure different things, and the gap is itself the story of this level. Do not divide the BLS employment figure by the CBP establishment count; the concepts do not match.

Undercount — read before trusting any single figure. The employer statistics materially understate true activity, and the reasons matter more here than in most industries because small and individual ownership dominates:

1. Government does much of the work in-house. Federal and state agencies employ tens of thousands of wildland firefighters, foresters, and reforestation crews, all classified as public administration (924120), not 1153. The private figures capture only the outsourced slice.[2]
2. Seasonality hides the peak. The 15,361 headcount is a mid-March (off-season) snapshot; first-quarter payroll was only ~19% of the full-year total, evidence that employment swells during spring planting and summer fire seasons.[3]
3. Tiny and self-employed operators are excluded. Consulting foresters and one-person crews often file as nonemployer businesses, outside the employer counts above — the main reason the BLS series runs well above the CBP one.[4]
4. Guest-worker labor churns. Much reforestation is done by seasonal H-2B guest workers hired through contractors, whose numbers ebb and flow with season and visa availability.[6]

A private-sector industry-revenue estimate (IBISWorld, "Forest Support Services") puts the sector near $3.5 billion in 2024 — larger than the ~$1 billion payroll suggests, and still only the outsourced core of a much bigger effort once government crews are counted.[5] Treat the federal figures as the private, outsourced, employer slice.

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates)

With only one child, there is nothing to allocate across segments — value concentrates exactly where it does in 11531. In brief: there is no clean public forestry-services stock. Two listed operators track forest-support activity directly: Perimeter Solutions (NYSE: PRM), a fire-retardant and firefighting-foam supplier that is the sole provider of long-term retardant to the U.S. Forest Service, and Bridger Aerospace (NASDAQ: BAER), an aerial firefighting operator flying Super Scoopers on government contracts ($122.8 million of revenue in 2025, highly seasonal, with 87% of revenue from three customers).[8][9] Timberland REITs are demand-side proxies only — they own land (113110), not services — and the group is now a duopoly of Weyerhaeuser (NYSE: WY) and Rayonier (NYSE: RYN), Rayonier having closed its merger with PotlatchDeltic on January 30, 2026 to form a roughly 4.1-million-acre company.[7][10] The industry itself is overwhelmingly private: forest-management and consulting firms (American Forest Management, which manages more than 5.7 million acres with over 370 employees and exclusive contractors; F&W Forestry), timberland investment management organizations (TIMOs) that hire these services, and several hundred wildland-fire and reforestation contractors.[11][12][13] See 11531 for the full table and detail.

5. How the money works

Owners sell time, crews, and materials against forest work; the economics look like contracting and professional services, not manufacturing or real estate. Reforestation and stand work is priced per acre (thin margins — the crew is the cost); consulting and cruising is fee-for-service or a share of timber value (a billable-utilization business); fire suppression runs on day rates plus standby and mobilization (feast-or-famine by fire-season severity); aerial firefighting adds heavy fixed costs, where profitability turns on flight hours and availability contracts; and retardant/materials sell per gallon and per base.[8][9][13][14] Costs are dominated by seasonal labor (largely H-2B in reforestation) plus fuel, equipment, insurance, and the performance bonds government contracts require. Utilization and season length are the profit levers, and slow-paying government contracts strain working capital.[6][13]

6. Demand drivers

The same forces that drive the child industry drive this level in full: timber harvest levels (replanting follows logging, which tracks lumber, pulp, and housing starts); reforestation funding — the 2021 REPLANT Act (Repairing Existing Public Land by Adding Necessary Trees) uncapped the federal Reforestation Trust Fund against a backlog of more than 4 million acres, with the Forest Service completing over 231,000 acres of reforestation in fiscal 2024; wildfire severity and firefighting budgets (federal suppression has averaged roughly $3 billion a year and ran about $3.2 billion in 2023, against research finding annual burned area up tenfold and high-severity burned area fifteenfold between 1985 and 2022); prescribed fire expansion (prescribed burning already accounts for more than half of the area burned annually in the U.S.); forest-health shocks (bark beetles, invasive pests); carbon markets (new demand for measurement and verification); and landowner turnover among TIMOs, REITs, and families.[3][15][16][17][18][19][20]

7. Regulation

The defining regulatory dependency is immigration policy — seasonal reforestation labor runs largely on the H-2B temporary non-agricultural guest-worker program (statutory annual cap of 66,000, frequently supplemented; roughly 64,700 extra visas were released for fiscal 2026), so visa availability directly limits planting capacity.[6][21] Also material: labor and wage law (Fair Labor Standards Act, Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, with a history of Department of Labor enforcement and mandated wage rates for tree-planting jobs); worker safety under Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rules; environmental regulation (standard silvicultural runoff is generally exempt from Clean Water Act Section 402 permitting, though Section 404 wetlands rules and state law still bite, and prescribed burning must satisfy smoke-management requirements); state forest-practice acts (Oregon, Washington, California mandate post-harvest reforestation, effectively guaranteeing demand); and contracting/aviation standards (incident "carding" qualifications, Federal Aviation Administration oversight of aerial operators, EPA/state pesticide licensing).[22][23]

8. Consolidation

The industry is highly fragmented and localized — average employer establishment ~7.6 employees — with low barriers to entry for a labor crew (a truck, tools, and a bonded contract).[3] Consolidation is uneven: it is most advanced where scale and certification matter most (fire retardant is effectively a single-supplier market under Perimeter Solutions; forestry consulting has seen roll-ups led by American Forest Management, now above 5.7 million acres under management), while the labor-crew and small-consulting tiers remain a long tail of independents.[8][11] A structural quirk: government is simultaneously the biggest customer and a direct competitor, insourcing or outsourcing crews by budget and politics.[3]

9. Risks

Concentrated in the same places as the child industry: labor supply and immigration policy (any H-2B tightening constrains revenue directly, and the sector carries reputational and legal exposure from past guest-worker abuses, including a 2012 judgment exceeding $11.8 million against forestry contractors for wage theft); feast-or-famine seasonality (mild fire years or wet planting windows idle crews and aircraft); commodity and housing cyclicality; government-budget and contract concentration (shutdowns, cuts, re-competes — Bridger's three largest customers supplied 87% of its 2025 revenue); federal-project execution bottlenecks (GAO found Forest Service timber-sale work constrained by staffing, with the agency's workforce down about 20% during fiscal 2025 and some forest-program vacancy rates above 40% — a customer that cannot administer contracts cannot let them); seed and nursery capacity limits on how fast the reforestation backlog can actually be worked; safety and liability (fatal risk in fire and chainsaw work); climate change (more fire means more demand, but drought and heat raise costs, hurt seedling survival, and leave large severe-burn scars that increasingly fail to regenerate naturally); and thin margins and working capital strain from slow government payment.[6][9][13][24][25][26]

10. How to invest & outlook

Public-market routes are limited and none is a clean bet: the closest listed operators are Perimeter Solutions (PRM), a fire-safety chemicals and services company, and Bridger Aerospace (BAER), an aerial firefighting operator with extreme seasonality and government-customer concentration — both narrow, single-niche bets; timberland REITs (WY, RYN) and equipment makers (Deere, Caterpillar) offer only diluted, demand-side reads.[7][8][9][10] The industry is genuinely owned in private markets — buying or building reforestation, forest-management/consulting, or wildland-fire contracting businesses, most of which fall under the U.S. Small Business Administration's small-business ceiling (~$11.5 million in receipts for this industry).[27]

Technology's effect: drones, lidar, satellite imagery, and photogrammetry cut field time and sharpen inventory, fire mapping, and treatment monitoring — Forest Service trials found drone and airborne-laser tree counts closely aligned. Expect substitution away from some manual cruising and toward geospatial analysis, while field sampling, marking, and physical treatment remain irreducibly hands-on.[28]

Outlook: structurally growing but perennially cyclical and labor-constrained. Tailwinds — uncapped REPLANT Act funding against a multi-million-acre backlog, elevated wildfire budgets, and emerging forest-carbon consulting — point up; the swing factors — H-2B visa availability, federal appropriations and agency staffing, and weather/commodity volatility — make any single year hard to predict.[15][16][20][21] Disciplined private operators with reliable crews and clean safety and compliance records are best positioned; public-market investors are largely limited to indirect exposure.

→ For full detail on every section above, see the primer for NAICS 11531 (Support Activities for Forestry), this level's sole child.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Definition — 115310 Support Activities for Forestry," 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/
2. NAICS Association, "NAICS Code 115310 — Support Activities for Forestry" (definition, illustrative activities, cross-references), 2024. https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?code=115310
3. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 1153/11531/115310 (establishments, employment, annual and first-quarter payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Industry Productivity Series via FRED, NAICS 115310 employment, 2025. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUAN115310W200000000
5. IBISWorld, "Forest Support Services in the US — Market Size," 2024. https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/forest-support-services-united-states/
6. Journal of Forestry (Oxford Academic), "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
7. The Motley Fool, "Best Timberland REITs and How to Invest," 2026. https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/real-estate-investing/reit/timberland-reit/
8. 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
9. Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings (NASDAQ: BAER), Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1941536/000194153626000005/baer-20251231.htm
10. Rayonier Inc., Form 8-K announcing PotlatchDeltic merger completion, January 30, 2026; and 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
11. American Forest Management, corporate site ("About Us"), 2025; and F&W Forestry Services, "Forest Management Services." https://www.americanforestmanagement.com/about-us; https://www.fwforestry.com/services/
12. 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/
13. National Wildfire Suppression Association / FireRescue1, "Private firefighters join the fight," 2024. https://nwsa.us/; https://www.firerescue1.com/wildfire-and-wildland-urban-interface/as-wildfires-rage-private-firefighters-join-the-fight-for-the-fortunate-few
14. Alabama Cooperative Extension System, "Costs & Trends of Southern Forestry Practices, 2022," 2023. https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/forestry/costs-trends-of-southern-forestry-practices-2022/
15. American Forests, "The REPLANT Act," and Sen. Rob Portman, "REPLANT Act Signed into Law," 2021. https://www.americanforests.org/our-programs/policy/replant-act/
16. U.S. Department of Agriculture, "Celebrating Three Years of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law at USDA" (231,000 acres reforested in FY2024; ~4-million-acre backlog), 2024. https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2024/11/15/fact-sheet-celebrating-three-years-bipartisan-infrastructure-law-usda
17. U.S. Forest Service Research & Development / National Interagency Fire Center, "Government spending on wildfire suppression," 2024. https://research.fs.usda.gov/srs/articles/government-spending-wildfire-suppression-rises-climate-change
18. U.S. Forest Service Research, "High-severity fire area increased tenfold, 1985–2022." https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/69806
19. U.S. Forest Service Research, "Prescribed fire accounts for more than half of annually burned area." https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/68408
20. Penn State Extension / Washington Forest Protection Association, "Forest Carbon Market Structures and Mechanisms" and "Navigating Forest Carbon Markets," 2024. https://extension.psu.edu/forest-carbon-market-structures-and-mechanisms
21. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, "Cap Count for H-2B Nonimmigrants," and Federal Register, "FY2026 H-2B Supplemental Increase," 2026. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-2b-non-agricultural-workers/cap-count-for-h-2b-nonimmigrants
22. U.S. Department of Labor, Training and Employment Guidance Letter No. 27-06, H-2B forestry guidance. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/advisories/training-and-employment-guidance-letter-no-27-06
23. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Clean Water Act Section 402 — NPDES" (silvicultural exemption), and "Agriculture and Air Quality" (prescribed-fire smoke guidance). https://www.epa.gov/cwa-404/clean-water-act-section-402-national-pollutant-discharge-elimination-system; https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-and-air-quality
24. High Country News / Southern Poverty Law Center, "The changing politics of woods work" (forestry contractor wage litigation), 2017. https://www.hcn.org/issues/49-18/timber-how-the-outsourcing-of-forestry-jobs-seeps-into-our-public-lands-debates/
25. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Forest Management workforce and capacity review, GAO-26-107993, 2026. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107993
26. U.S. Forest Service Research, "Post-fire reforestation and natural regeneration failure." https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/67973
27. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards," 2023 (NAICS 115310: $11.5 million). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
28. U.S. Forest Service Research, "UAS inventory trials — drone and airborne-laser tree counts," and Cloud2Trees project (lidar and photogrammetry for forest inventory). https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/58969; https://research.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/projects/cloud2trees