This is Forest to Frame, where we explore how restoring forests creates beautiful spaces. A podcast dedicated to conversations with industry leaders shaping the future of the forest industry. And now, here's your host, Russ Vaagen. All right, well, welcome to the Forest to Frame podcast. We've got a special guest today, Brian Luoma. Brian and I have been friends for a number of years and feel very grateful to know Brian. He's got a wealth of experience in the forest sector and many other things. So with that, I'll just let Well, thanks, Russ. I appreciate the invitation to join your podcast. As Russ said, I'm Brian Luoma. I retired from the Westervelt Company in Tuscaloosa, Alabama as their CEO at the end of 2023, but I've got a long career in the industry. I spent 30 years with Louisiana Pacific Corporation beginning in California back in the mid 80s where I got my forestry education at Humboldt State University and then went right to work for LP. and spent about half of those 30 years in California, about five years in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, a couple of years in Wisconsin. And eventually, LP brought me around to Nashville, where they had moved their headquarters then back in from Portland, Oregon to Nashville. So I spent about 14 years there. But the bulk of my career has been kind of broken into different chunks. The first half or so, I was land manager and a professional forester. In fact, I'm still a licensed forester in the state of California. Then bought and sold logs and did all that bit and then moved into business general management. I had a strip in manufacturing. I ran the engineered wood products business at LP for about 8-years and the siding business for a couple of years. Then I had a chance to join the Westervelt company as their CEO in 2017. And then, as I mentioned, I retired there in 2023, and now I'm just sort of a free agent, if you will. I guess I'm a retired guy, but I'm still involved in the industry with the Softwood Lumber Board and the Working Forest Initiative. I sit on the board of the Congressional Sportsman's Foundation. among other things, so I'm just operating more like an ambassador, I guess, for Westerveld, if you will, but I don't really have any official affiliation with anybody at this moment. So, you know, maybe that makes me suited for doing this kind of work because I can just say what's on my mind and give my own opinion and I don't have to worry so much about what affiliations you're going to think about that. So, with that, Russ, thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. That's a very interesting background, at least I think it is. One of the things I would ask you to elaborate on for those that don't know, I've had the chance to visit you in Tuscaloosa and see the operations of Westerville. Maybe talk a little bit to those who don't know whether they're, you know, not exposed to the southern lumber world or just, you know, haven't really heard of Westerville. Talk a little bit about The Westerville family and the mills there, what's that company all Sure. Thanks. Yeah, I'm glad you asked Russ because it's probably the most proud part of my career for me is the time I spent there at Westerville. The Westerville company was founded in 1884 by a man named Herbert Westerville. The company is named after him, but for years, the company was called Gulf States Paper. And then after the company sold off its last paper mill, wasn't in the paper business anymore, it changed its name to the Westervelt Company. So that was in the early or mid 90s, I think, something like that. But they're in their fifth generation of ownership now, or family leadership. So, you know, it's 140 year old company. That's, you know, in his fifth generation, his current CEO is the owner's son or the majority shareholder's son, Cade Warner, who succeeded me in a young superstar and he's doing really, really well, but he represents the fifth generation. And the whole history of the company, I was only the sixth CEO, Cade's now the seventh, in 140 years. So that shows you the continuity of a family-held company that's really committed to sustainability and longevity. But the long and short of what Westervelt's all about, it's a significant landholder in the Southeast. The company owns about 600,000 acres of timberland. Every one of those acres leased with a recreation contract as well. So conservation and recreation are a really big component of what Westervelt does on the land, in addition to sustainable forestry. We built a brand new sawmill while I was there, so we have two lumber mills now, maybe probably approaching 600 million feet, I'd say, of production, maybe a little less than that, but pretty close. Also run an environmental mitigation business that they call Ecological Services. It's mitigation banking based in California, but I think they've got business now maybe 7 or 8 states across the country. So again, it's, you know, conservation and mitigation is a big thing. And then the other kind of core business is the recreation business. Westervelt runs 2 commercial hunting lodges, one in Aliceville, Alabama, deer and wild turkeys. There's about 10,000 acres of that 600,000 dedicated to that lodge and those habitats. And then the company owns a farm on the North Island of New Zealand called Poronui, and that's a red stag hunting and several other species, including actually pheasant hunting now, which is very new. A world-class trout fishing stream that runs through the middle of that farm. And then there's an agricultural component there where they run cattle and sheep if there's enough grass. But the bulk of what Pornuia is all about is really red stag breeding. And so they'll do maybe 50 hunts, maybe something like that. And I think the goal is like 50 red stag hunts a year. And it's one of the premier lodges in New Zealand. So that's something we've been It's a pretty diverse little company, really. I always said about Westerville, to me, it was when I joined it, and I didn't know that much about it, it was in the sector, I knew about them, I knew Timberland and the sawmill and all that, but the mindset there and the commitment around sustainability and conservation has always been there. It didn't become a core value, you know, when everybody started talking about sustainability, it's just always been there for Westervale. And I always say it's kind of where sustainable forestry and conservation meet. And they've done that right for 140 years. And I was just there for a short time, but I'm proud of the fact that I was able to, you know, help, you know, promulgate that into kind of the next level. And now, Cade Warner and his team, the executive team of you know, taking it on and they're going to a whole new level. I mean, a level that I probably couldn't have done. I just don't have the, you know, I just didn't have the vision like that, you know, the next generation has. So I'm real proud of them. I'm real proud of my history there. I'm real proud of what they're doing Yeah, and I had the chance to visit you guys down there while you were kind of starting that transitional process from you to Cade. And there are a few things that stuck out from that visit. One, just historically, you mentioned the paper bag, but the lay flat paper bag was invented by, well, what? What is now Westervelt was the original company way back when, and you don't think about how impactful that must have been, but imagine going to the store or the market and not having easy access to bags or what have you, or they're all piled up. Seeing that machine that was patented that folded the bags and made them out of the paper, that was pretty fascinating. You also talked about the commitment to the stewardship and just good forestry and environmental stewardship in general, going to the Westerville Lodge there and seeing that. And that was one of the first sustainable hunting lodges that was out there. And it's really an active forest management plot as well. It's a large chunk of ground. But you got a lot of things going on there. And it's very interesting to see, especially coming from the West, when things are a little bit more wild, and you got a lot more federal land and other things going on to see how that, you know, has done. And then just the the history there of the company. It's the team that, you know, you've handed off to Cade and that he's building from there. I think it's a company that there's a lot of things to be proud of there. It's pretty, pretty neat and stuck out to me because, you know, being from, you know, growing up with Boggan Brothers Lumber and, you know, family independent company that operated, which, you know, When I was a kid, that was commonplace. But nowadays, a lot of the industry is dominated by big multinational corporations like Louisiana Pacific and others. They have their place, but it's a different feel when you have a family or a few individuals making decisions for a long term and not necessarily being persuaded by quarterly shareholder value. And it's always interesting to see different leadership teams take on how they do that. And I was very impressed and glad that I got the opportunity to see it. You touched on a couple of other things, and one thing that is coming up is the renewal of the checkoff program as part of the Softwood Lumber Board. From my perspective, I work with WoodWorks because of the mass timber side, which they're very integrally connected. You want to talk a little bit about your time at the Softwood Lumber Board. For those that don't know, what it is, what you guys, when you were the chair there, or part of the board of directors, trying to achieve with the Softwood Lumber Sure. Yeah, so the Softwood Lumber Board checkoff came to be in 2012, I believe, and that was, you know, taken on as a mission by, you know, some of the visible leaders in the softwood lumber industry at the time, I actually wasn't in the industry at the time, or the lumber industry, I was still at LP. And I was, I think I was running the engineering wood product business then. So I was, you know, I was sitting on like the American Wood Council board. So I kind of saw this thing come out of the ground, but I wasn't really involved in it. So I didn't know that much about the inner workings of it. Like I wasn't going to the meetings originally, and that sort of thing. until I joined the Westervelt company. And then, of course, as the CEO at Westervelt, they drafted me onto their board in, I think, around 2018 or so. And then I got to really learn about what it was about. And I didn't know anything about checkoffs, really. I mean, we all heard of the dairy checkoffs and the beef checkoffs, and the ones that got a lot of TV time because they're consumer-oriented. softwood lumber isn't really consumer-oriented. My question is, what are we doing here? We got the thing approved, now everybody that makes more than 15M feet in North America gets to contribute to it. What are we doing here? What I learned is that while we all struggle uh, to, you know, have, you know, the demand sort of side, sort of outstrip the supply side. So we, you know, we're on the better side of the pricing and returns that, you know, we just needed, we needed help in the demand creation side. And as an industry, we're just, you know, as a collection of individual companies that we just couldn't do that. And, uh, none of us, you know, some are better than others, but collectively we weren't good at it at all. And. as an industry, lumber industry. And I think that's what the founders sort of recognized and why they pursued the checkoff in the first place. And so, then I got into it a little bit and what I realized is that there was all kinds of opportunity and with the right people at the softwood lumber board, and you've had some evolution over time from when it started to obviously to where it is today, But you had some really good people in there that, you know, they rolled up their sleeves and went to work on just, you know, general assessment of markets and where growth could occur. And, you know, then, you know, mass timber entered the scene and it got some momentum and people like that. And, you know, it fit right into the narrative of, you know, building, what can we build out of wood beyond single family and multifamily residential? And know, as an industry, we hadn't figured any of that out. And so, Shopify has been really instrumental in getting, you know, those markets outside of residential off the ground. Because you know this as well as I do, Russ, you've been in this your whole life, but, you know, the residential market just, it does what it does. We can't, you know, we can try as hard as we want as an industry. We're not going to do much with the demand creation side of single-family residential, right? There's factors that we can't we can't mess with. But when it comes to tall wood buildings, and hybrid buildings, and warehouses, and commercial buildings, and school dorms, and big markets where wood is appropriate, those are the things the software lumber board's been really good at helping develop. And they moved the needle in terms of demand. And since its inception in 2012, I think The last numbers I saw since 2012, almost 16 billion feet of incremental demand creation. Well, there's I noticed something in the stats, and that is that There's about a little more than between imports and what's produced in softwood that goes into the US market. It's about $15 billion a year, if I'm not mistaken. In total. In total. So that means over the course of this program, incremental demand has added another year's worth of demand, if you will, over that period. That's pretty remarkable. I don't know what that total number is, And I don't know for sure. It's just a little bit of research that I looked at here. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. And I think the other thing too, as you know, and being in this industry, you have ups and down years because of the supply and demand of what's going on in the economy and housing, etc. So, you know, for some companies, you know, Vaagen Brothers, Westervelt, for example, to have a national level marketing campaign is a non-starter, right? You're going to do some things with your customers and some other stuff, but you're not going to go out there and be able to really move the needle. But the whole plan is let's you know pull ourselves together and it's worked and and you know I like I said before my my experiences with woodworks and a little bit with think would and it's pretty fascinating how. We've changed the conversation with how we use wood. And then the other part about it is, yeah, there's the checkoff part, but it's being in part of WoodWorks, our company and others, we all are partners, so we fund it separately. So it's kind of a pool of funds that we've created this momentum. So yeah, the checkoff started it and it's continuing the momentum, but other people have jumped on board to help move the needle even more. And I think it's, I think it's a great thing. And I hope it, you know, continues far beyond just, you know, the next updated boat, Yeah, I, what you said there is right. I think there's a, there's several entities that are all linked together here with the SLB as sort of the, you know, the center of the spoke, spoke and wheel here. Right. So I think like, American Wood Council existed before SLB came out, you know, existed. But, you know, the funding from the lumber manufacturers that goes into SLB, I think funds, that funds half of the American Wood Council, maybe a similar number for woodworks. And the work that they do is invaluable, right? So like SLB can't stand alone. Although it's doing some good things on its own, but it can't do it all, right? So American Wood Council and the codes and standards and, you know, always been critically important, but much more effective, I think, when it's connected to SLB and WoodWorks and the SLB programs and same with WoodWorks and WoodWorks is just reaching so many people now, you know, in terms of conversions and getting projects that might've been steel or concrete or something else converted to wood. And I don't know, there's some amazing number of conversions that they've done. I don't know, just in the last five or six years, it's like 2,500 projects. It's a major thing. And then SLB has got some of its own internal programs that are very effective, but they all work together, right? So if we as an industry lose our mind and don't re-vote the SLB, we just put the whole program, we put all of them in a stream. It doesn't mean they go away, but it's going to be a lot tougher to get the results we've been getting. In fact, we You know, it's kind of analogous to the fact that when mass timber first started, I remember hearing some comments of people, well, we don't want to cannibalize stick framing for mass timber. I heard that, you know, and which, you know, from a mass timber guy, I'm like, how crazy is that? You know, we're gonna, we don't want to trade, you know, a two by four every 16 inches on center for, you know, three layers of two by material contiguously across the whole structure. But I think it was a thinking and education change. And that's what I see with this whole thing. The industry now sees that, hey, we've got a host of engineers employed that are out there coaching and teaching architects and engineers how to use wood differently, whether it's light framing or whether it's mass timber. And I also think because of mass timber, and I'd love to get your take on this, I think we're having realistic conversations of how important wood is in this whole, you know, the carbon emissions and the environment and climate change, wood's a solution. And I'm seeing more and more real environmentally aware architects and developers land on mass timber and wood versus the other materials because it is so good for the environment and people are now digging into it. what you and I and others have been talking about for years, we're doing really good for stewardship all across the landscape. And I always say in North America, it's a good, better, best. There's no black market. There's no super nasty things that are happening in the forest sector. There are some that are more sustainable or more aware and more aesthetic than others. And now we've got ways that you can actually go and choose which you would like to support because now we can kind of tie that back and forth instead Yeah, I think that's well said. It's, you know, we all know it. So, you know, wood's renewable, right? And it's a carbon carbon play and it's all linked together, right? So you've got, you know, we're all committed to sustainable forestry, which has got its own carbon benefits in terms of storage and transfer. And then, you know, long-term storage in these, you know, mass timber, you know, products that are going into these buildings long-term. And if you think about it, I mean, mass timbers, CLT, for example, and this is nothing more than value-added lumber. Right, so what we're interested at the SLV and the lumber sector is having as much demand for lumber as we can get and if it's light frame or if it's mass timber or if it's whatever, I mean there's even new systems that people are talking about, right? These hybrid systems with podiums and steel construction with mass timber mixed with it and I mean, those things we And create opportunities for developers and designers to design with more wood and take credit for the carbon storage. And probably the gap in this whole process that I'm seeing as a member of the Working Forest Initiative right now is just still a lack of understanding across the general population in our country about what the forest management, sustainable forest management is really all about. We're still back talking to them about the fact that we plant trees after we cut them. That's how basic that is, right? So we haven't even gotten to the topic of carbon and, you know, renewal and that sort of stuff. So we've got to keep working on that. But I think the story that goes with wood construction and all these more visible sort of applications, especially mass timber in tall buildings, commercial buildings, warehouses, etc. It's going to help us with Yeah, I think, you know, people are waking up in the West, you know, we've got wildfire issues that, as you know, are a result of lack of management at scale on federal lands and other lands. And if you don't have infrastructure, those private lands aren't being managed because you can't afford to do it. And we're starting to realize that with the statistics that these forests are dying at a higher rate than the combination of growth and harvest. And that's really, those are the kinds of things that we need to awaken to as a country, especially on our federal lands, and get to a point where our forests are healthy. But it also leads to, we need more demand for the product that's gonna come from it, because we're gonna increase the byproduct of restoring forests and managing forests, our logs, which then become lumber and other engineered wood products. And we need as much of it as we can do to get the work done. Um, we are kind of running on some time here. Uh, Brian, I think we could, uh, we could probably fill a whole Joe Rogan podcast with the things we'd like to talk about, but we'll keep it a little shorter here. I'd love to have you back at some point to talk about what you're doing with the sportsman stuff and some of the other things. And so maybe we can get to that, but any, um, Oh, and then one other thing I would say is we, you know, talking about the Softwood Lumber Board, they have a wealth of information on their website. So just, you know, search the Softwood Lumber Board, go look at it and they can answer any questions. I'm always impressed with the stuff that comes out of there. And I would urge anybody that has an opportunity to vote on the checkoff. It'd Well, I would agree, Russ. And I think, you know, there's been so much momentum generated already and And that, you know, this team at the SLB is set up to take us into the future at even a higher level. Right. And they would just be, we'd be stepping on our own toe right now. I think if we didn't, uh, you know, re-up the boat here and keep this going, I mean, at some point, you know, they've got, SLB has got a strategy, which I actually participated a little bit in developing, or at least sat in on, you know, to get to like 3 billion feet of incremental demand per year by say 2035. and almost half of that being in a light frame. So this isn't just a mass timber mission, this is just build with wood mission in any way we can. So I think this would be a mistake on the industry's part, not that we haven't made plenty in our history, but I think at this point Yeah, I agree. Well, any parting words of No, it's been fun talking about topics that are near and dear to my heart and trying to, even though I'm retired, with the things I'm still involved in, I'm living in every day. And so I appreciate the opportunity to give some thoughts. And like you said, we probably could have done an hour here, maybe somewhere down the line. If we thought somebody would listen for an hour, we might do that. Anyway, it's been an honour and I appreciate the opportunity to be with you. I appreciate your friendship and I'll look forward Likewise, and I would just say that I want to thank you for your contribution to a lifetime of work in our industry and You know, most people I talk to know exactly who you are and are very appreciative of what you've done. But for those that don't, I just want to say thank you to you for all your efforts and your continued efforts. I mean, you don't have to continue to work on these things. You could, you know, ride off into the sunset, but they're important to you and your contributions are going to be felt for years to come. I really just appreciate it. And thank you for Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review and tell a