A Seat at the Table: Zip-O-Log Mills Joins Eugene's Healthy Forests Roundtable
This wildfire season, Oregon lost more than 2.5 million acres to fire — one of the most destructive years on record. So when local forestry, timber, and agriculture experts gathered in Eugene on September 10th for the Healthy Forests Roundtable, Zip-O-Log Mills made sure we had a voice in the room. Representing our team was Dylan Fritz, our Timber Manager, who brought a mill's-eye view to a conversation about the future of Oregon's forests.
Why This Conversation Matters
The roundtable, held at the Veterans Memorial Association building, brought together foresters, farmers, and industry professionals to talk through a question our region can no longer avoid: how do we make Oregon's forests more resilient to wildfire?
A few themes came up again and again:
Thinning works. Removing excess trees and vegetation reduces the fuel available to burn, making forests more resilient when fires do start.
Oregon has lost milling capacity. One longtime Central Oregon resident pointed out that his hometown once had five mills — now it has none. Without local mills to process material removed from forests, thinning work becomes far harder to sustain at scale.
Federal and state approaches don't always align. Harvests on federal land have dropped roughly 90% since 1990, and several participants noted a gap between how the Oregon Department of Forestry and the U.S. Forest Service approach fire prevention and land management.
Certainty drives investment. Longer-term federal timber contracts were raised as a way to give mills the confidence to invest in equipment and expand capacity — rather than operating one contract cycle at a time.
The event was framed as a nonpartisan discussion of forest health, and that's the lens we're bringing to it here: this is about the health of Oregon's forests and the industry that depends on them, not about any candidate or campaign.
A Mill's Perspective
As a fourth-generation, family-owned timber and glulam manufacturer, Zip-O-Log Mills sits right at the intersection of these issues. Forest health, milling capacity, and wildfire resilience aren't abstract policy topics for us — they're the conditions our business, and our region, depend on. It's part of why we've spent this year writing about forest health and wildfire prevention on this blog, and why we think it's important to show up when these conversations happen in our own backyard.
It was a good discussion about the deficiencies of federal land management and many solutions to those issues. Proper management needs to increase pace and scale in order to move our national forests toward healthy ecosystems. —Dylan Fritz
Looking Ahead
Conversations like this one don't solve Oregon's wildfire challenge in a single afternoon, but they do something important: they put mills, foresters, and land managers in the same room, talking about the same problem. Zip-O-Log Mills is glad to have had a seat at that table, and we'll keep showing up for these discussions as they continue.
Watch KVAL's coverage of the roundtable here: kval.com/news/local/eugene-roundtable-focuses-on-forest-thinning-and-wildfire-prevention
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