By Sarah Yeoman | 5.5-minute read
When forester and manager of Zena Forest Products Ben Deumling was a kid, he’d get lost wandering the dense white oak forests of the mid-Willamette Valley. His parents started forestry practices here in the mid-1970s, and as soon as Ben was big enough to carry a chainsaw, he says he was following his dad into the woods.
“This was a place that I, from a very early age, fell in love with,” Ben says. “I don't know that I could pinpoint a particular moment, but I always knew deep down that this is where I wanted to be.”
Ben is now raising the third generation of his family that has stewarded the 1,300-acre Zena Forest. This land is an oasis—one of the only remaining contiguous blocks of Oregon white oak woodland.
“The Oregon white oak ecosystem that's developed through centuries and millennia of management by humans, by the Native Americans… is the most complex ecosystem in North America,” Ben says.
Previously the dominant ecosystems in the Willamette Valley, Oregon white oak savannas and woodlands now only cover 10% of their historic range. However, even one oak tree can support a large amount of species, including insects, fungi, and birds. Globally, oaks support roughly 2,300 species—more than any other tree genus in the world.
“Oregon is unique. It's singular in that it really is the timber capital of the world,” Ben says. “We grow trees like nowhere else in the world; growing big, large, old trees is our superpower.”
Best known for their work on the new Portland International Airport (pictured), Zena Forest Products mainly produces high-quality flooring products with white oak, Oregon ash, and bigleaf maple. Roughly one-third of the wood they use is cultivated and harvested on their property. The rest is sourced from private and public land owners around the state, as well as US Fish and Wildlife Service restoration projects. Ben says Zena has branched out to include restoration forestry throughout the state, salvaging logs of 11 local species harvested from these environmentally important projects.
“We work with all different landowners to try to give all their logs and species and materials that come out of these restoration projects a home and give them a second life as a beautiful piece of flooring,” he says.
Location matters
Every business faces challenges, but as a rural forestry operation, Zena has its own unique set.
“We're working with natural resources, and when you tie your business to natural resources, you need to make sure that you are scaled appropriately to what the resource can provide,” Ben says.
When they set up the sawmill 18 years ago, it seemed like the right idea to put it in the forest—where the trees are. However, Zena has scaled from no employees at that time to 10 today.
“As this business has grown, this idyllic, lovely location in the middle of the forest is less and less practical,” Ben says.
The sawmill sits in a thick copse of trees and is only reachable by one narrow and steep gravel road that winds through the forest. Zena is slowly moving its operation to industrial-zoned land that has better access to power, roads, and other infrastructure.
“It's all the things that you would want for an industrial business,” Ben says. “I really wish that 20 years ago folks had told me, ‘don't put your business out in the middle of the forest. Put your business where it's supposed to be in an industrial area close to town.’ And I've learned that the hard way.”
Land conversion is a longer-term problem that Ben and his team face as the towns and agricultural businesses near them expand.
“It's very, very hard to practice commercial forestry in a landscape where there's too many houses around,” Ben says. “Being as close as we are to town, we struggle with trespassing and vandalism.”
Losing the trees, he says, is both a massive loss of ecological refuges in Oregon and it also impacts his and other foresters’ longevity.
“If we continue to lose those forest resources in our region due to conversion, I'm going to have less and less raw material to work with,” he says.
The business incentive for Zena is to try and encourage more landowners to plant more forests on their lands to steward more trees in the future.
“That might seem self-serving, but trees are a commonwealth benefit. Trees don't just benefit the sawmill; they benefit all of us Oregonians in a myriad of ways,” he says.
Normally, Ben says, land conversion is a one-way street where larger properties get divided and parceled, then subdivided into more parcels. The Zena Forest is a unique example of land conversion in reverse. Between the early 1980s through the 2000s, 15 separate parcels of land were purchased at different times and pieced back together to create contiguous woods that are now protected with a conservation easement to keep it a working forest.
“It has to stay as forest lands, which is wonderful for us because we get to keep doing what we're doing, what we've always done, and we know that it will be protected long into the future,” Ben says.
Longevity for legacy
Preserving forestlands for business and ecological purposes is just one part of conducting a forestry operation that also stewards Oregon. The importance of biodiversity and the complexities of forests is also something Zena, and Ben personally, value in their daily work.
“I use the words ‘complex’ and ‘resilience’ a lot when I talk about the work we do in our forests,” Ben says. “And as the climate changes, our disturbance events get greater and greater.”
Wind storms, ice storms, floods, bark beetles, drought, disease—all of these things are natural in a forest ecosystem, but climate change, Ben says, can exacerbate them to be catastrophic. Having complexity on the land—like a mix of bigleaf maple, which is a natural fire break; a range of species that can slow down a beetle infestation; and dense growth that can diffuse wind storms and mitigate damage—promotes resiliency in a forest.
The longevity of the forest and the long-term effects of stewardship are deeply intertwined for the Deumlings and Zena. As Ben says, trees grow on a timescale that is really difficult for humans to wrap their heads around. That sense of legacy in stewarding natural resources is critical.
“All the work that I'm doing to plant trees that my great-grandgrandkids and great-great-grandkids will be able to harvest—none of that's any good if there's no one around to continue to take care of this place,” he says. “I hope that my kids will want to continue to take care of this place… and all the forests of western Oregon.”
Ben’s hope is that Zena can make the endeavor profitable and worthwhile to pursue, to inspire more people to become stewards of Oregon’s forests.
“I know it’s hard work,” he says. “But for the right person, it’s wonderful work.”
