VTDigger22%
A New York paper mill is closing part of its operation. Vermont loggers are sounding the alarm. 59%
By Charlotte Oliver60%
7/20/2026, 10:25:13 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 19 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Negativity Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Pessimism Bias as the most egregious example at 23.4% saturation with 165 hits. Analysis detected 1,006 faulty-reasoning hits from 705 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 55% and a BS Rank of 59% (9,158 of 21,886 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 58.20% of the article peer group.
Loggers and foresters around Vermont say they’re anticipating the industry will suffer after a New York paper company announced Friday that it will close part of its operation.
Finch Paper’s decision to close its pulp mill in Glens Falls, New York, will continue to stress Vermont’s already burdened logging industry, warned Vermont logger Sam Lincoln.
“It’s going to have an enormous impact,” said Lincoln, who owns Lincoln Farm Timber Harvesting in Randolph Center.
He also formerly served as deputy commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation.
Industry experts say that Finch Paper plays an important role in Vermont’s logging industry because it purchases low-grade pulp wood.
The company is one of only a few of its scale in the region that has a pulp mill, which processes wood that’s undesirable for logging because of its knots, shape or other defects.
It’s only the most recent regional mill to shut down, after a spate of big paper mill closures over the last 40 to 50 years in Maine, New Hampshire and along the Hudson River in New York.
That’s on top of more recent closures among Vermont’s timber mills, including the A.
Johnson Company in Bristol and Mill River Lumber in Clarendon.
Finch Paper said it would close its pulp mill and would instead begin exclusively buying the pulp that’s used to make its paper products rather than making it.
“In the last 20 years, the market has shifted dramatically, and Finch can now reliably purchase pulp less expensively than it can produce on site,” the company said in a statement.
The company previously made 60% of its own pulp and bought the other 40%, according to John Brodt, a spokesperson for the company.
Finch Paper declined to say how much wood it processed or where the wood is sourced, but local industry experts said the paper company’s purchases from Vermont played an important role in maintaining the health of the state’s industry.
Oliver Pierson, the director of forestry for the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, estimates the pulp mill processed about 50 to 80 truckloads of wood per day from around the region.
Although low-grade woods aren’t as valuable as whole logs, loggers are facing high overhead costs, including those required to meet environmental sustainability and water quality standards, Pierson said.
That means that a logger might not be able to turn a profit if they’re harvesting just timber and leaving everything else behind, he said.
“But if you can also get the low-grade wood materials out, then you have a sort of economically viable job,” Pierson said.
Responsible forest management is expensive, he added, and requires maintaining culverts, putting down hardened roads and building bridges.
Lincoln, who’s been a logging contractor since 1998, said that he’s trying to get out of the business this winter because the last two years have been unprofitable.
He thinks the mill’s closure will have a significant ripple effect on those in the industry, creating obstacles for landowners and loggers alike.
Whenever he contracts with a landowner to harvest timber, a high percentage of the wood harvested is low-grade, Lincoln said.
Vermont has a lot of Hemlock trees, which usually have a lot of low-grade wood.
Without a nearby mill that can take a high volume of low-grade wood, loggers aren’t going to take on projects involving many hemlocks, according to Lincoln.
As a result, land that’s covered in hemlocks becomes less valuable to landowners, he said.
Bill Sargent, a retired forester who lives in Shaftsbury, said that he believes the only other local pulp mill comparable in size is in Ticonderoga, New York.
And it’s likely the Finch closure will leave too many loggers scrambling to send their wood to Ticonderoga, he said.
That leaves loggers with limited options, according to Sargent, who suggested they might instead turn their low-grade material into firewood — though that could flood the market.
Without cutting for pulp, responsible forest management is next to impossible, he said.
“You need to remove that low-grade material from the woods in order to grow the better material that you leave standing,” Sargent said.
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