Mississippi felled 29 million cubic metres of logs across its forest estate in 2023, a single-state total that exceeded Australia’s national log harvest in each of the past four financial years, whilst the active Australian hardwood sawmill count has collapsed from 502 in 2006–07 to 146 in 2021–22.
That is according to a new Gottstein Fellowship report by Pat McCarthy, Family Forests in North America, published in April 2026 by the Joseph William Gottstein Memorial Trust Fund and drawn from a study tour through Mississippi, Wisconsin, Washington, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in August and September 2025.
The scale disparity matters because every serious forecast of Australian wood supply points to a widening gap between demand and domestic production that neither institutional plantation estates nor shrinking public native forest allocations can close, whilst private landholder forests have resisted 63 years of Australian grant programs and awareness campaigns. McCarthy’s report is the first comprehensive benchmarking study in more than a decade to map the support architecture that has made small-scale forestry a supply-chain mainstay across North America.
McCarthy, a Carbon Projects Specialist at Climate Friendly who previously worked in plantation forestry policy at the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and as a forester at HVP Plantations in north east Victoria, graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Science (Forest Science) in 2018. Reflecting on the fellowship experience, he told Wood Central: “It was a tremendous privilege to be able to step away from the usual day-to-day work pattern to both learn about the culture of family forestry in North America, and reflect on the opportunities and challenges in Australia.”
The report opens by quoting a 1963 Institute of Foresters of Australia symposium in which APM Forests general manager W. G. Chandler complained that, despite brochures, free seedlings, and hired machinery, Gippsland farm forestry had produced just 200 to 300 acres of planting. Six decades and at least half a dozen major grant programs later, ABARES has validated only 73,400 hectares of farm forestry plantings nationally, held by around 3,000 landholders, with Braden Jenkin’s 2018 benchmarking concluding bluntly that “farm forestry has failed to initiate, evolve or expand.”
McCarthy argues the Jenkin verdict still holds in 2026, reinforced by the average annual harvest from Australia’s private native forests, which ran at just 420,000 cubic metres across 2011–12 to 2015–16. Across the Pacific, an estimated 9.6 million family forest owners manage roughly 106 million hectares in the USA, whilst Canadian family forests account for a further 21 million hectares held by about 450,000 owners, making family ownership the single largest forest tenure category in the USA and supplying 42 per cent of the US annual log harvest.
Mississippi’s 224,000 family forest owners alone control 4.5 million hectares, supported by 67 local County Forestry Associations, 250 Mississippi Forestry Commission staff and the Mississippi State University extension service running on a US $47.9 million operating budget in the 2026 fiscal year. Wisconsin’s 20,000 Landowner Connections campaign, co-delivered by the state’s Department of Natural Resources and the Aldo Leopold Foundation between 2018 and 2023, reached 252,030 family forest owners and saw 21,172 of them engage a professional forester for the first time across 949,143 acres.
McCarthy’s report sets three recommendations against that benchmark, starting with targeted farm and private native forestry support in defined Australian regions that already have service providers, a developed resource base and a robust market, with private native forestry in Tasmania, south east Queensland and north east New South Wales, and farm forestry in Tasmania, nominated as the candidate regions. The second urges any future awareness campaign to be linked directly to funded next steps and guaranteed markets, whilst the third calls for local landowner values and attitudes to be identified and considered in the development of future programs.
Maritime Canada offers a funding model worth adapting, McCarthy argues, pointing to New Brunswick’s seven forest products marketing boards that distribute CA $10 million in 2025–26 Private Woodlot Silviculture Program funding to 42,000 family forest owners, and Nova Scotia’s Wood Acquisition Plan, which obliges Registered Buyers acquiring more than 5,000 cubic metres of family or industrial freehold wood to fund silviculture at CA $3 per cubic metre of softwood and CA $0.60 per cubic metre of hardwood. The scheme saw Nova Scotia’s 18 largest Registered Buyers fund 9,439 hectares of silvicultural treatment in 2024 alone.
McCarthy credits the fellowship structure itself with enabling the depth of the analysis: “The trustees and team members from the Gottstein Trust were very helpful as I planned my study tour and provided terrific feedback and support when I was drafting my project report,” he said. He extends that acknowledgment across the Pacific: “I am grateful to all the individuals and organisations in the USA and Canada who helped me with my project through meeting with me and sharing their perspectives and experiences; their generosity helped make undertaking the fellowship a worthwhile experience.”
According to McCarthy, a push to expand farm and private native forestry in Australia will demand a shift in attitudes, approaches and investment patterns across landholders, the full supply chain from nursery to processor and all three levels of government.
