These days, though, the panorama is more vexing than bucolic for Yeomans.

Over here on one side of the driveway is a clear-cut field once littered with pines downed by Hurricane Helene. Over there, between the driveway and the lake, is a thinned forest where trees will be left to grow bigger and thicker to one day be turned into saw lumber used in construction. Beyond that thicket is a wood used as a hunting ground.

He points across the lake and with his finger traces along the tree line, pointing out pine groves at various points of maturity.

The end-of-September closures of International Paper mills in Savannah and Riceboro, a small town just off I-95 in Liberty County 30 minutes south of Savannah, will chop away at southeast Georgia’s bustling forestry industry.

For Yeomans, the shutterings are like two “ax chops” to his livelihood: He’s a timber agent, managing the harvesting and selling of wood to the mills, as well as a tree farm owner.

His 16 logging crews — he’s already laid off two since the mill closures were announced in late August — move tens of thousands of tons of cut trees from the fields to the local mills each year. Until now, four times as many loads had headed to the International Paper facilities as to other area sawmills that make lumber, wood pellets of fluff paper used in diapers and feminine hygiene products.

Forestry activities contribute more than $42 billion to the state’s economy annually, or about 6% of its gross domestic product.

The International Paper mill closures put 1,100 machinists, maintenance pros, managers and office staff out of work. But on an economic impact tree, those employees are just the lower branches. The timber industry ecosystem is a thick wood that includes landowners, foresters, loggers, truck drivers, diesel mechanics, tire repairers and any number of ancillary service providers.

“It’s a gut punch,” said the state’s chief forester, Devon Dartnell.

Contraction is not just happening in southeast Georgia but all across the rural South.

Eleven mills in the South have closed since 2022, according to Forisk Consulting, an Athens-based advisory firm to timber investors. Tim Lowrimore with the Georgia Forestry Association, a trade and advocacy group, uses terms like “critical crisis” and “pivotal moment” to describe the current environment.

Dartnell estimates that with the International Paper closures and the recent shuttering of a Georgia-Pacific paper mill in Cedar Springs, near the Georgia-Alabama state line, Georgia tree farms are growing 60% more timber than they are harvesting.

“Oversupply is a growing issue — no pun intended,” said Dartnell, who heads the Georgia Forestry Commission, a state agency.

The economics are uprooting because mills are making more products from recycled paper and making significant advances in innovation that increase efficiency. Cardboard box shipments also have fallen to their lowest levels since 2016 amid an uncertain economy, The Wall Street Journal recently reported, even as e-commerce companies like Amazon use less cardboard to deliver their goods.

That’s in addition to the yearslong decline in traditional paper demand with the spread of the internet. The combination lowers the need of fresh-cut trees, or what is known in the industry as “virgin fibers.”

Meanwhile, the industry is experiencing a period of mergers and acquisitions, and as companies consolidate, they shutter facilities that duplicate operations. That explains, in part, why the Riceboro mill closed. International Paper recently purchased it in an acquisition of UK-based DS Smith, and it makes the same cardboard material produced at the bigger mill in Savannah.

Georgia-Pacific likewise cited an aging facility among the reasons for closing the Cedar Spring mill in August.

Herty, a chemist whose life spanned the turn of the 20th century, is largely responsible for Georgia’s standing as one of America’s leading timber baskets. He developed techniques that led to the state becoming an epicenter for pulp and paper product manufacturing just as the turpentine industry died out.

The state is at a similar innovation crossroads today, says the Georgia Forestry Association’s Lowrimore. Many of the alternative uses for timber show promise but “aren’t quite there yet,” either technologically or economically, industry insiders agree.

Among these prospects is mass timber, a category of engineered wood products made by laminating, nailing or doweling multiple layers of solid or composite wood into beams and panels. Once considered susceptible to fire, mass timber is gaining broader acceptance and is being used as an alternative to steel and concrete.

But those uses face headwinds. The construction boom that followed the COVID-19 pandemic is waning, at least beyond the outskirts of booming Savannah, driving down demand.

Another option is biomass, or the burning of wood to produce energy in the same way as coal and natural gas. While popular in Europe — Georgia exports much of the 1.8 million tons of wood pellets produced each year — biomass remains environmentally controversial domestically. Biomass produces more greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels but that pollution is largely offset by the renewable nature of trees: Fields cut to be burned are replanted, and those new trees capture carbon.

Yeomans expects some of his logging clients to re-evaluate their land use plans. The region is also productive for row crops, such as cotton, soybeans, corn and peanuts. But the market for those products is as tight as those for timber, as agricultural exports have been undercut by U.S. trade wars and tariffs with China, India and Europe.

Those hardships come just as industrial growth along I-16 has expanded the prospects for another land use: development. Swainsboro is about 15 miles north of the interstate and along a popular north-south alternative to I-75.