Individual forest owners see the big timber industry giants and wonder how stumpage prices could be so low and discouraging to practicing forestry on private land. In the timber industry, mills won't do anything that doesn't eventually make a profit - this is business. Yet at the forest, prices paid for trees are so low that most forest owners have not seen timber management as a money making business. Timber income has been on an occasional windfall basis, take what money you can when possible. To complicate this further is the treatment many individual forest owners have received from selfish, short sighted, and unscrupulous timber buyers and loggers, who have left the owners feeling cheated and taken advantage of.
Every bad experience is multiplied as people tell their neighbors what that logger did.
Today, the timber industry is working to correct these problems with logger training, massive PR campaigns and actively setting a good example. Don't expect anything else to get widespread results. Timber buyers need to pay the full market value to the forest owner. The practice of trying to maximize the personal profit of the timber buyer at the expense of the forest owner, discourages forest management more than any other factor.