How do industries that provide goods like lumber or livestock maintain output when their goods take a long time to develop but get used/processed in a short period of time?

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Eczpurt@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

Trees for example take decades to be usable for lumber but it only takes a few minutes to saw one down.

How does the industry maintain a balance when daily demand is constant?

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FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They stager their crops.

Basically, it takes 20-30 years for a yellow pine to reach harvest. So they have lots of (huge) tracks that are growing, each lot is planted in sequential years- one lot is planted while another is harvested

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- Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Logging is done to order too. Crews are directed to lots that have the type and grade of logs, and are cut to lengths that match what the clients are ordering and the ships are ready to take (here in NZ where most logs are exported)
  
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  - FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    there’s that, too. a lot of it depends on what’s being farmed, and how much regular deamand there is for it.
    
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BCsven@lemmy.ca ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It’s the difference between lead time and production period.

Let’s say GM rolls off 1 car out of the assembly line every hour, it doesn’t mean the work they do to build a car only takes an hour.

Maybe it takes a week? (I’m guessing) to get from frame to finished vehicle. It means the first six days are just filling the plant line, and 7th day they plop out a car an hour as they add one frame to the input at one an hour, but lead time is a full week to get car X from start to finish.

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11111one11111@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Same way i can have 2 week harvest cycle on my 6 marijuana plants that take about 3 months from seed to harvest to grow. Staggering the cycle.

Trees are different approach all together because they arent farming trees for lumber they are logging forests that are past their age for generating new growth.

Live stock is more like weed but instead of 3 months i think its like 3 uear for cattle and thry only harvest once a year so they prolly breed a third of the herd each year.

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- jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Correction that they are also farming lumber, but the cycle is just much much longer.
  
  I know a family that does it as one of a few things they do. Their timber land is relatively small so they have it harvested all at once. Every couple of decades a company pays them a healthy sum to get the timber and then nothing is done with the land for the next couple of decades while trees grow. In addition to the cash payment, they get to own the land tax free as it counts for agricultural exemptions.
  
  Others in the thread are deeper into it and speak of staggered logging so there is annual logging off like 1/25th of the trees at a time.
  
  Not to say there isn’t cutting of totally natural forest, but there is farming too.
  
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Azzu@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
If you need 1000 trees per day, and you plant 1000 new trees per day, guess when you run out?

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- a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Tomorrow. Because it takes a fucking long time for trees to grow.
  
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  - Azzu@leminal.space ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    There are roughly 3 trillion trees on earth. Even if they don’t replenish, at 1000/day you need roughly 8 million years to run out.
    
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WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
The law of supply and demand. If the demand starts to outstrip the supply the price will go up to compensate and reduce the demand. At the local level, imports can fill supply gaps. Demand isn’t really constant. The word used to describe it is elastic. For trees, they cut down however many they are going to. Replant, move to the next patch the next season and so on.

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- dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  There’s a whole futures market for this and many other prime matter. Companies, including retailers, buy stocks ahead of time. That’s the original meaning of a stock. The company then fulfills orders as the stocks become due or they get renegotiated for a later date. This is a crucial source of financing for these industries. As they get the cash influx by selling promises of future productivity.
  
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orbitz@lemmy.ca ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
For lumber they have sections to log out for a period and shift them l, least how it was done when I was there in Canada. Essentially long term planning so by the time they need that lumber again it’ll be regrown to healthy levels, so they have a good idea area required for a season. We got lots of trees and non developed area but I assume similar in most places that do lots of logging…besides when it’s just done to clear areas that is, but not the usual rotation areas.

Been a few years (decades) since I’ve been involved in any way so perhaps things have changed but I think they’d try and keep that rotation going for longer term benefits. Due to needing road access and all for those spots they tend to be more remote, though I was in a small town in the middle of nowhere for most of my involved time I did end up in a more populated area and they still did similar. I was more IT and once had to go out to check out how their GPS was used, was a noticable drive to get out there, like 2ish hours I think. Can’t even recall why they asked I had no idea how their GPS was used properly or to make any changes.

Was the same when my father worked at the mill as well. Cause pretty sure i asked similar at one time. Their yard held like 1million cubic meters of wood often. So they stock up… Though lots of swamp in that area so most logging was in winter to stock up and run over summer with minimal input. Always fun to drive highways and get behind a logging truck heh, couldn’t help but think of final destination.

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riskable@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Well, they used to donate to politicians that wanted to fund schools 🤷

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