Forester says wait on the thinning. At what point is waiting just a story you tell yourself?

Small tract, pine, first commercial thinning is technically due. A thinning is where you cut maybe a third of the stems to give the rest room to grow, and the wood that comes out is mostly pulpwood, which is the cheap stuff. Local pulp stumpage is soft, meaning the price a mill will pay for the standing tree is low right now.

My forester's position: don't cut into a weak market. Trees keep growing, the market comes back, you thin in two or three years and you sell more tons at a better price. This is supposedly the great advantage of timber over almost everything else, you can just decline to sell.

The other side, which I keep chewing on. Deferral isn't free. The stand gets crowded, growth per acre slows, and a dense stand is more exposed to beetles and to wind. You also don't know that the market recovers on your schedule. Meanwhile I'm paying taxes and a management fee and getting nothing back, and I've watched people in other asset classes hold for a better price right up until the reason they were holding stopped existing.

And there's a middle road nobody loves: thin anyway but lighter, take less volume, keep the stand healthy, accept the bad price on a smaller number of tons.

I genuinely don't know which of these I believe on a small tract where I can't spread the risk over ten stands. Curious how the room splits.