Log sort years provide many benefits in the utilization and marketing of logs, wood, and fiber. Interest in commercial log sort yards has increased in the past decade in response to timber supply issues, changes in wood and fiber markets, and the need to recover more value from the available resource.

A spreadsheet-based model, LSY (Log-sort Yard Cash Flow Analysis), has been constructed to aid in the pre-feasibility and financial feasibility analysis of log-sort yards. It is meant to be referred to concurrently with this documentation and is available for downloading at no cost from the Forest Products Laboratory's website at: http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplgtr/fpl_gtr184/. The model is flexible, allowing up to 20 species and grades that each may be sorted into up to 19 products, giving a total of 380 different output possibilities. The mix of those species and grades can be allowed to change over time. Sort-yard operating hours and productivity and number and type of employees can be changed over time. Cash flows reflect automatic replacement of capital equipment when it is projected to wear out. Data on various pieces of capital equipment and equipment configurations can be stored so that cost comparisons can easily be made between different sorting systems.

This report provides a general overview of current log sort yard operations in the United States, including an extensive literature review and information collected during on-site visits to several operations throughout the nation. Log sort yards provide many services in marketing wood and fiber by concentrating, merchandising, processing, sorting, and adding value to logs. Such operations supply forest products firms with desired raw materials, which helps improve their bottom line by reducing the number of marginal logs processed. Ultimately, sorting logs leads to better use of the available timber resources. Successful log sort yards are self-sufficient and have well-established markets and a steady supply of wood. Log sort yard concepts and analyses described in this report have broad applications.