Page 14 - Georgia Forestry - Issue 4 - Fall 2021

Diversification into blueberry farming helps generate revenue during the spring, when timber prices sometimes decrease.
Land
Diversification
Blueberries and forestry management aren’t the only ways that Superior Pine generates revenue. The organization also owns a realty company.
“If we buy something under the realty division, we try to clean it up, get it pro- ducing, and then sell it,” Griffin says. “Typically, our goal is to try to improve the land and then either keep it or sell it depending on size and location.”
Lately, Superior Pine has stepped up its acquisitions and dispositions, selling non-strategic tracts near its home base of Fargo. It started the process in 2011, trading out of about 38,000 acres of its original property and making two pur- chases totaling approximately 30,000 acres in Alabama, according to Stone.
Much like adding the blueberry farm or exploring carbon offsets, the goal is diversification.
“The family wants to diversify,” Griffin says. “They’ve got most of their invest- ment in one contiguous 200,000-acre block in two counties between two oceans in South Georgia. So, with the threat of hurricanes and wildfires, they decided that they would sell some here and then redeploy that money in other areas.”
Fargo sits in an especially vulnerable place next to the Okefenokee Swamp. When the area burns, Griffin says Supe- rior Pine needs to be ready to fight the
fire at its property line.
But lately, hurricanes and storms
have been a bigger worry. “When you’re dealing with Mother Nature on a daily basis, it affects your operations and your budgets,” Griffin says. “In the last year, we’ve had over 100 inches of rain, and the annual average is about 50 inches. We’ve been getting hammered.”
Superior Pine isn’t alone. Brooks Mendell, Ph.D., president and CEO of Forisk and a board member at Superior Pine, says severe weather events, like wildfires, are forcing companies to think hard about geographic diversification.
“Fifty years ago, even 30 years ago, people were looking for large contiguous blocks of forest land because it’s more efficient,” Mendell says. “But now one of the top two or three issues is to mitigate risk with natural events. This is a theme that’s coming up across companies.”
While Superior Pine might want to sell some forest land, others are eager to pur- chase it. With many people leaving cities for areas like rural Georgia during the pandemic, there has been a lot of inter- est in Superior Pine’s smaller tracts for homes. “We’re getting premium prices and we’ll continue that as long as the prices remain strong,” Griffin says.
Superior Pine is redeploying that money to forests further inland in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina, where it currently owns the land.
“We think those markets are pretty decent,” Griffin says. “We don’t think we
will be impacted as much in those areas with the weather and wildfire risks.”
However, the same market that allows Superior Pine to sell excess tracts at a healthy profit also makes it difficult to collect more land. As a result, when a tract becomes available, a lot of groups are looking at it.
“There is so much competition from everyone,” Griffin says. “Everybody wants to own more land now. With the concerns about inflation and land own- ership, timberland ownership is a good inflation hedge.”
Challenges
Ahead
Even as Griffin pilots Superior Pine into new markets, the company still needs to navigate a tumultuous market for its forestry products.
With more than 100,000 acres, Superior Pine finds itself in the Top 100 forestry companies in the US and Canada. But it is still well below the massive con- glomerates, according to Mendell.
The company’s forest produces wood used for building materials, lumber, plywood and many different paper prod- ucts. “Primarily, a lot of our trees are delivered to pulpwood processing facil- ities due to the great prices” Griffin says.
With the rise of online shopping during the pandemic, the demand for paper products has risen sharply.
12 | GEORGIA FORESTRY
PHOTOS BY FUEL FILMS