A few years ago, I read anything I could about forestry and logging. Almost every word was bemoaning how tight the profit margins are (lots of land, low prices for timber).
For every paragraph about the best way to do something, there would be 3-6 paragraphs about how no small landowner can afford the best practices, and here are all the drawbacks of bad practices ....
Selective harvesting requires skilled labor and goes slowly, and you don't harvest much at any one time.
What I read made it sound like labor costs exceeded the price of harvested wood unless you had a big, flat tree farm most of which could be accessed by big machines from a few roads.
Even then, cutting fast-growing softwoods pretty young for pulp, or small trees for veneer and chips, seem to be the new business model.
Clear-cutting ares small enough to re-seed from surroundings was smart, but then you needed a property 5-20 times bigger than one harvest-able patch. And you still need to bring in the equipment to do it, and drag the logs out ...
The one that was scariest to me was the temptation to let someone come in and take your best trees, I think that's called "highgrading". What's left won't even reseed salable trees and you have no value left.
But I don't really know anything about it except for a few books that did a lot of complaining. There must be some way to make timber pay, or we wouldn't have any lumber mills.
My fantasy was to have a woodlot that I could improve by removing undesirable species and poorly-shaped trees (and burn those for heat, or maybe use them to improve the soil via hugelculture), Then (In my fantasy), I would re-plant with more valuable trees or white birch, just because I like white birch.
However, that's a project to be scheduled in decades, not years.
