310 acres of age-16 pine, stocking says thin now, pulp stumpage says wait

You already answered it. At 155 square feet with crowns closed you're thinning for the stand, and the check is a byproduct. I've never regretted thinning on time and I have regretted the two stands where I waited on price. What you lose isn't three years of diameter, it's the crown you can't grow back once it recedes. The residual trees carry that limitation to final harvest.

Run the other direction of the math too. If deferring costs you half an inch of DBH at rotation on 288 acres, that half inch is the difference between a chip-n-saw log and a sawlog on a chunk of your stems. That's a much bigger number than the 14k of pulp price you're chasing.

The 145 to 160 spread bothers me more than the price. That's a wide band for a stand you're about to make a permanent decision on. Did he run fixed-radius plots or a prism sweep, and how many plots on 288 acres? If it's eight prism points from the truck window you don't actually know your stocking.

Also what's the target residual? A third-row removal plus selection down to 70 or 80 square feet is a different job from a straight fifth-row. Your ton estimate reads like a light thin to me.

Check your property tax classification before a crew touches it. Forest or ag use valuation programs exist in most states and the terms differ state by state, and in some of them a harvest triggers a yield tax or a reporting requirement, and in a few, changing use after a cut can claw back deferred taxes. Your 6.40 an acre tells me you're already enrolled in something. Read the enrollment terms and confirm with your county assessor in writing what a commercial thin does to your status. Cheap phone call, expensive surprise.

10 percent to the forester on a 50k sale is 5k for marking, bid solicitation and contract admin. That's normal and it's the best money in the whole job.

The number you're asking for doesn't exist as a single figure, and the reason matters. Diameter response to thinning depends on site index, current stocking, and how much of the stand is already crown-suppressed. Growth-and-yield models can project it, and a forester with local mensuration data can run your stand through one and give you a range for thin-now versus thin-in-three-years. Ask for that projection explicitly rather than a verbal opinion. That output is what your decision hinges on.

On the framing: the harvest-timing flexibility that makes timberland attractive is real, and it applies most cleanly to a final harvest of merchantable sawtimber, where deferral means the trees keep growing into a higher-value product class while you wait out weak prices. A first commercial thin is different in kind. Its main purpose is to redistribute growth onto crop trees. Deferring it doesn't bank value the way deferring a final cut does, and past a certain stocking level it starts subtracting from what the stand will be worth in fifteen years.

Your post reads as though pulp prices are the swing factor, and I'd push back on that. On the numbers you've given, the thinning revenue is roughly 36k net against a tract whose final harvest value will be an order of magnitude larger. A price move in pulp changes the small number. Stand structure changes the big one.

One practical check: confirm whether pulp markets within your haul radius are stable, because if a mill in the basket closes, the option to thin at any price can disappear for years.

@orchard I mostly agree but you're waving off the market question too fast. Whether he can thin at all in three years depends on there being somewhere for low-grade wood to go. I've watched a basket go from three pulp outlets to one and stumpage went to effectively zero because nobody would haul it. That's a real risk on a deferral, and it argues for cutting now for a reason that has nothing to do with silviculture.

Crew availability will decide the timing for you anyway. Good thinning crews with a proper feller-buncher setup are booked out and they'd rather do a 600 acre job than your 288. If you get a slot, take it. And do the road work before they mobilize, because a crew sitting waiting on your culvert is a crew that leaves.

Wet-weather ground? If your tract is flat and holds water you're a winter-only job and that shrinks your window a lot.

Second the crew point. I've seen a scheduled thin slip 14 months because nobody wanted the acreage, and the price argument became irrelevant.