Tommy Peagler is the Forestry and Timber Harvesting instructor at Coastal Pines Technical College in Waycross and he frequently runs into people connected to the state’s forest industry. He asks them a simple question — “How is it going?” — and gets back a distressing answer.

“It’s going good, but it would be going better if we could find some drivers.”

It is a familiar refrain across the state, no matter who you talk to along the wood supply chain: the landowners, the foresters, the loggers, the trucking companies, the insurance agents, or the mills. The whole wood economy is predicated on getting the logs out of the woods to the mills and that is becoming increasingly more difficult because of a shortage of drivers.

The shortage of drivers, many agree, is due to the fact that insurance companies require three years of Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) experience to get behind the wheel of a log truck. On top of that, the prospective drivers also need specific training to drive the log truck.

“I get it, I understand, the insurance agencies feel log truck driving is more difficult than over-the-road driving, and pulling something like produce,” said Peagler. “It is more difficult. Loads shift. Roads are uneven. You’re driving on dirt roads with a ditch on either side. It can be wet, muddy.”

Peagler is in the position to do something about the shortage. A graduate of the University of Georgia School of Forestry and Natural Resources, he already has an “in woods” course at Coastal Pines, which teaches students how to get the standing tree down on the ground, prepared, and put on the truck for travel to the mill.

When his current crop of 2018-19 students is done with that “in woods” course in the spring, Peagler is hoping to have in place a program for students to get their CDL and then start an eight-to-10 week program in driving a log truck. That program will be rigorous enough, Peagler said, to satisfy insurance requirements, which have been one of the biggest impediments to finding drivers.

Meanwhile, Scott Copeland, an insurance broker with Rome-based Guffin & Eleam, Inc., took a phone call in 2017
from Jeff Alexander, the president of Georgia Forest Products in Americus, who was also suggesting a faster track
for drivers to get behind the wheel of a log truck.

Copeland then talked with Longleaf, an insurance provider, which had started Team Safe Trucking. Longleaf had the
same idea: fast track these drivers. The idea was to have an intensive course using training modules for truck drivers,
along with actual driving with a qualified instructor.

“We realized if we didn’t start doing something, I was going to be out of a job, Jeff Alexander was going to be out of a job, and nobody is going to have any wood,” Copeland said. “We have to fix it.”

Momentum to find a remedy has also attracted the forest products company Interfor.

“We are hearing from suppliers the ability to attract new drivers into the sector is very challenging, largely due to the log trucking experience requirements being mandated by insurance providers,” Interfor said in an email response to
questions about the driver shortage.

Tommy Peagler’s students from Coastal Pines Technical College and the Timber Harvesting program gather for class in the woods.

Meeting the Need, Avoiding a Crisis

Dr. Joseph Conrad, who teaches and does research in timber harvesting and timber transportation at the University of Georgia (UGA), said the CDL initiative is a significant development because the majority of wood in the state is moved
around by smaller trucking companies. It is these smaller firms that need drivers, as well as reasonable insurance premiums for their drivers.

“Here in the south we’re moving 60 percent of the nation’s timber,” Conrad said. “There are loggers having to change
their business model, shrink their footprint because of the shortage (of drivers), so it’s a terrible problem.”

Copeland said the crisis really showed itself between July and September 2018, when two insurance underwriters called
him and said they were getting out of the business of insuring log trucks. The industry not only had a driver shortage,
it had an insurance shortage.

“Every logging crew needs another driver,” Peagler said. “I have had people say if I had a driver I would buy a truck.
One thing bleeds over to the other. The counties down here rank 1, 2, 3, 4 in the state in producing wood. Interfor has told me it sees a trucking problem coming and we need to do something about it.”

Interfor, which has seven wood facilities in Georgia, as well as its U.S. South regional headquarters in Peachtree City,
wants to get keep the spigot open for logs to get to the mill. It recognizes the problem.

“Loggers are being driven out of business due to trucking shortages, many loggers are experiencing loss of production due to trucking limitations, mills are experiencing lower than normal inventories/some downtime,” the company said in an email response to questions. “This situation will worsen with the wet season approaching, and will also be of greater concern if/when new mills/mill expansions come online.”

UGA’s Conrad said smaller carriers are hauling a majority of the wood in a segmented industry. The typical Georgia
logger just has one logging crew, so they are going to need four or five trucks to haul their wood in a given week, he said.

Bernie Henderson, who owns H&H Trucking in Washington, said the shortage of qualified drivers has already
impacted his business.

“I kind of lost my momentum of getting wood out of the woods,” Henderson said. “We have to gain that back now. Logging is a lot about rhythm and being there on time and keeping the wood flowing at a steady pace, rather than have a whole bunch of it sitting there waiting on a truck. When the wood is sitting there, everybody in the woods gets complacent, and they don’t perform like they are supposed to. I’m out of my groove terrible.”

Students from Coastal Pines Technical College and the Timber Harvesting program: Dakota Long, Kacee Johnson, Jonathan Herrin, Allen Sapp, Payton Strickland, Eli Chancey, Brad Guest, Jack Golub, Jules Bowers, Trey Long, Gavin Manning, and teacher Tommy Peagler.

The Next Generation

There is nothing like need to stoke ambition. So when Peagler kept talking about the shortage of log truckers in the state, one of his Coastal Pines students, Jonathan Herrin, looked at it as a career path. The 17-year old from Waycross already had some experience in the woods driving bobcats and using small equipment and he liked the work. He signed
up for Peagler’s “in woods” class and he is planning on signing up for the CDL log truck driving course after that.

Herrin will be 18 next April and he is ambitious enough to think he will one day be behind the wheel of the log truck.

“I know I can handle it,” he said. “It is going to be a great way to make a living. I’m confident I’m going to get the proper
training. I think the shortage of drivers means there is some wood going to waste.”

Peagler said log truck drivers starting out can make $40,000 a year, which is comparable to other “local” haulers, like cement truck drivers. But there is going to be a weeding-out process. A seasoned instructor will know pretty quickly in the cab if a young driver can handle to chore of driving a log truck. Peagler said insurance companies will have a chance to tweak the program and make it more rigorous, if that is what it takes to get underwriters engaged.

“They are not going to approve everybody that comes through the door,” Copeland said. “But ideally, we all want to survive. I’m talking to loggers now, if you think you have somebody who would fit the program, let me know. My position is that just because somebody hasn’t hauled wood doesn’t mean they can’t. They just never have.”

The success of the first class in 2019 is going to be crucial for the program.

“If you get an initial cohort going through the log truck driver training and you are seeing good results from those drivers, that they’re not getting in accidents at a different rate than others with years of experience, and showing this training worked, that will lead to more insurance companies buying in and break the log jam,” Conrad said.

But insuring drivers is only part of the problem facing the industry. Henderson said the newer trucks for hauling are not as reliable and the technology behind the in-cab systems requires tools not owned by local shade-tree mechanics. Henderson said Augusta, 52 miles away, has the closest operation to handle maintenance. There is also the matter
of cost for the rigs, approximately $175,000 to $185,000, he said.

An even bigger problem for drivers is finding benefits.

“I have asked the bigger companies about buying into benefits and they just laugh at me,” Henderson said.

If the wood economy is going to have sustaining momentum, there have to be qualified people looking out through the windshield of the log truck dodging the potholes and staying out of the ditches. The drivers have to be well insured and have reasonable benefits.

It’s a challenge, but the good news is that many hands are on the wheel driving toward a solution.

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Ray Glier is a journalist with 42 years of experience telling stories in sports and business. He has spent most of his career in the Atlanta area working for USA TODAY, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Youth TODAY and many others