Cliff Buck’s logging businesses roll with the challenges of the times

“Ever been to the logwoods before?” Cliff Buck, 41, asks me as I walk on the frozen mud of a tree farm at sunrise. I shake my head, no. Cliff and his crew are busy at work on 250 acres of forest that stretches from Dawson Creek to Deep Run in Arapahoe.

Loblolly pine trees, 100 feet tall, stand in rows that appear endless, making me feel very small. One by one, each tree is controlled like a marionette, but with machines from below instead of strings from above. A man nicknamed Cool drives the equipment called a cutter that cuts the tree at its base, lifts it in place and moves it like a flag pole to then fall in a perfect pile with three others. The sound as it hits the ground is a deep and cracking thud, like thunder.

“Timber,” Cliff jokes. This isn’t something they normally say these days. “Back in the day, that’s what my grandfather would say when the trees were still cut by chainsaws.” (His grandfather, Junie Pipkin, also told him that you run toward a falling tree, not away from it, to avoid injury. A good piece of advice.)

When Cliff was 5 years old, his grandfather often took him to work, putting him on his lap as he drove the cutter. Today, Cliff owns two timber companies, Buck Timber Co. and Buck Logging Co. Two of his first cousins are among his nine employees: Stephen “Cool” Pipkin and Phillip Pipkin Jr., “Pig Jr.”, who is the foreman. They are fourth-generation loggers. Greg Miller is another experienced employee normally on site.

“It’s what we were born, bred and corn-fed to do,” Cliff tells me. “I fell in love with logging when I was young — the smell of pine and the people I meet.”

Another tree falls to the ground. I ask him how I should describe the sound.

“Sounds like money,” he replies.

One can’t live in eastern North Carolina without breathing in the fragrant forests of southern yellow pine. It is also impossible not to notice when these forests disappear, leaving behind fields of broken branches and rumpled earth.

“Trees are our only renewable resource,” Cliff says. This forest, like over 90 percent of the trees he cuts, will be replanted.

Nearly half of Pamlico County’s total acreage is occupied by forestland. According to a 2008 report by Mike Walden, a professor of NC State’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, forestry industries in Pamlico County add nearly $18 million to the county’s income a year. Clear-cutting forests has gained much disdain for displacing the natural habitat of animals living in the forests as well as for using older logging techniques that could leave behind poor-quality trees and soil. But Cliff says many animals benefit from the new growth of young forests. He also says good forest management practices help fight wildfire and insect infestation and promotes timber growth. He also follows regulations like the Neuse River buffer rules that monitors timber harvesting in certain zones to keep the local water habitats healthy.

For Cliff’s businesses, private landowners sell their trees to him for timber. These can be farmed forests or forests that need to be thinned. Then, he goes through the complicated process of cutting, organizing, weighing, trucking and selling the long, delimbed trunks of tree. He mostly sells the timber to mills for lumber, plywood and pulp and contracts with Caraway Logging and H&S Logging to do the same.

He says business is going well. 2021 was a relatively dry year without hurricanes, making roads clear and transport easier. Also, because of the COVID-19 lumber shortage, timber has been in high demand.

In the field, Cliff and I are now following the skidder, a machine that grabs five to six trees at a time and slowly drags them to the log deck like a toddler dragging a blanket. It’s a distance of about a quarter-mile, or 20 chains in logging terms; today the skidder is manned by Melvin Buck Martin Jr.

When Melvin gets there, his father, Melvin Martin Sr., is in the loader. He sorts, grades and delimbs the tree trunks, managing them with the machine’s long arm as if they were as light as toothpicks. He then stacks them in the bed of a semi-truck, watching the weight, using the long arm.

When the timber is loaded, truck driver Carlton Simmons, nicknamed Head Doctor, pulls off the scales, climbs out of his cab and straps down the logs. His is the first truck to load this morning.

“There aren’t many of us left. We are disappearing,” Head Doctor says of truck drivers. “People are retiring or dying out.”

Cliff agrees. Today, the biggest problem facing the logging industry, and his business, is a lack of truck drivers.

“The wood looks great but it doesn’t matter until it crosses the scales,” Pig Jr. says, commenting on the moment when timber is loaded onto trucks and weighed.

“The biggest challenge of my day is getting the trucks lined up,” he says, meaning trucks are hard to find.

“It will get better. It’s a cycle. Things will change and then change again,” explains Cliff.

Both he and his family have been in the industry long enough to know.

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