Company History

We are a family owned company that has been in business for the past 25 years. We own and operate one of the largest independent family owned Southern pine sawmills in the Southeastern United States. We make a lot more than lumber though – we are also the main outside supplier of chips to one of the largest paper mills in the world. On any given day we will purchase 150 loads of logs between all of our facilities. To put that in perspective…if you lined the log trucks up end-to-end it would stretch for almost three miles. Our size and our scope as a company allow us to manage the resource from forest to your door, and back again – in a way that truly makes a difference.

In 1987 the owners purchased the current sawmill from Tennessee River Pulp and Paper, and at that time had a manufacturing capacity of around 30 million board feet annually. The company employed about 25 people and it was manual labor intensive. Jasper Lumber Company, Inc. is now a highly automated modern sawmill capable of producing in excess of 100,000,000 board feet of lumber annually. In 1990 the company constructed a stand-alone chip mill. Southern Wood Chips, Inc. is capable of cleanly debarking and chipping in excess of 750,000 tons of paper mill quality chips annually. For the past 22 years it has remained one of the largest, and most efficient offsite producers of paper-grade chips in the pulp and paper industry.

Fast forward to 2012 – the company now employs over 150 people, and indirectly employs another 500. Included in the 150 employees, there are six timber buyers, four registered foresters, and a Sustainable Forestry Initiative® coordinator (SFI). There is also a wholly owned trucking company that is dedicated to hauling chips, and other products, to market in a timely and consistent manner.

In 2005 we built our first bagging facility to make use of our unique high quality by-product from our lumber production facility. In our first year we produced 650,000 bags of shavings for the equine bedding market. In 2007, despite the housing crash, demand for our bagged shavings outstripped our capacity to produce, so we began construction on a state of the art facility to produce another 2.2 million bags of horse bedding annually; for a combined production capacity of almost 3 million bags a year. We took what we had learned in automating our lumber and chip processes and built a shavings facility with two things in mind – quality and production volume. We use the most advanced in-line moisture detection technology available to sample our shavings 60 times every second. We screen our products three times to remove virtually all airborne dust from the end product. A quality control employee throughout the process closely monitors all of our products. Our philosophy is to use automation wherever possible so that we can allow employees to focus on quality control – so we can confidently say our quality is second to none.

So you may be wondering why you haven’t heard of the greentree brand before now. For the past 6 years, we have been manufacturing equine bedding for a leading bedding brand. But we always felt there was an opportunity to sell a “certified green” product to the horse bedding market. So in 2012, our management team decided to brand our own product, which would allow us to differentiate ourselves as the only manufacturer in the United States who can label a certified green product. All of our products are SFI® certified.