Wisconsin loggers hope new cooperative effort can help industry after mill closures

PHOTO: Tork Mason, USA Today NETWORK-Wisconsin

“There's a new plan to try to help loggers navigate an increasingly tough industry in Wisconsin and its surrounding states.

Timber Professionals Cooperative Enterprises formed about a year ago, and the group is currently working to buy a chip mill in northeast Wisconsin, according to Dennis Schoeneck, TPCE's president.

This is a first step, Schoeneck said, toward creating a network of places "for loggers to have a vested interest in where they take their product."

Over the years, loggers have lost customers as local mills closed. They've also faced rising costs and an aging workforce. Basically, ‘the industry has been very, very tight,’ according to Henry Schienebeck, executive director of the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association.

‘In the past, that pulpwood market for the paper industry was huge. It was a big part of everybody's daily business,’ Schienebeck said. Now, he can think of very few local mills, he said, that still buy roundwood and turn it into kraft pulp.

Schoeneck understands these realities, as the owner and operator of Enterprise Forest Products and Forest Products Transit in the Rhinelander area. Still, he stresses that TPCE is not about him or its seven-member board, made up of representatives from Wisconsin and Michigan.

‘It’s really focused on just trying to do something different for our industry,’ Schoeneck said.”

Quote from Appleton Post-Crescent