If you have a stand with more than 50 mature hardwood trees, and all have diameters measured at at breast height (DBH) greater than 16 inches, then you have timber that you can probably sell.  

Typically, though, you can’t sell trees form your yard. You may have to hire a tree service to take them away. 

Harvesting timber is difficult, sometimes dangerous work. Logging companies employ skilled crews to do the work with heavy equipment that needs to be continually maintained. Thus they operate with significant overhead.

This makes it difficult to attract loggers to buy trees from your yard or other small parcel of land you may own. It’s rarely worth the cost for them to cut a small wooded lot. Unless they’re desperate, or just getting into the business, loggers won’t even look at a stand with fewer than 50 mature trees in it. Few will even return a phone call about it.

But we try to help everyone who takes the time to get in touch with us, so we’ll tell you how to tell if you have enough timber to sell for significant value.

To sell your timber in Ohio you need to have both volume and variety

And you need to have hardwood trees. Trees like pine, spruce, and fur trees have very little value to loggers here and you can’t sell them for very much money at all.

White oak and black walnut are always in high demand, and sawmills need many other species to meet the demand for lumber they can mill from timber.

Loggers are always looking mature hardwood trees among these species: