A newly opened commercial-scale sawmill in Antigo is the only training sawmill of its kind in the U.S. 

The sawmill at Northcentral Technical College’s Antigo campus will be a teaching tool for northern Wisconsin students and members of the lumber industry. It’s part of the school’s wood sciences program and was funded by about $4.5 million out of an $8 million state Workforce Innovation Grant to the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s Wisconsin Forestry Center. That grant is meant to provide career training that will help address worker shortages in the lumber industry.

In late May, wood sciences program director Logan Wells, who has been an instructor there for five years, stood by a stack of recently sawn lumber from cherry wood — the first batch of cuts from the sawmill to have gone through the kiln-drying and finishing process. The boards are all eight feet long, but of different widths.

“We take whatever width the log will give us,” Wells said. 

Scanners in the sawmill find knots and other imperfections inside the logs like woodpecker holes or bark pockets. Boards that are at least 83% “clean” are top-grade. The lowest-grade cuts will be used for pallet wood. Part of the art and science of milling is figuring out how to cut each log to yield the most high-quality lumber possible.

In addition to the eight students enrolled full time in the program for the fall, Wells leads certificate programs and continuing education courses for industry professionals looking to sharpen their skills or gain experience with new technology. About 100 students per year come through those programs.

Wisconsin’s forest industry employs about 58,000 people, according to the state Department of Natural Resources, and its forest products are worth more than $24 billion per year. In addition to building materials and pulpwood used for papermaking, notable Wisconsin-made wood products include white oak staves used for whiskey or wine barrels and high-grade maple for the hardwood basketball courts used by NBA teams and in the NCAA’s Final Four.

But the industry faces challenges, made worse by aging and declining populations in much of northern Wisconsin, where many of the state’s hardwood forests are located.

Wells, a Green County native who has worked in sawmills and as a forest products specialist for the Department of Natural Resources, said the industry is also in a time of technological advancement. Like other manufacturing industries, lumber companies are incorporating robotics and artificial intelligence. Advances in engineered wood have led to new uses for wood, such as the mass timber skyscrapers now going up in Milwaukee and elsewhere.

“It’s a very dynamic industry,” Wells said. “It’s been around a long time, and it’s gonna continue to be around.” 

Inside the 10,000-square-foot mill, most equipment is elevated. Logs move on conveyor belts through the process of being debarked, sawn into slabs and refined. 

From a cockpit with computer controls, Wells demonstrates how operators calculate cuts to the outside of the log until it resembles a massive railroad tie, then slice it into boards that are shaped and given square edges by other machines. 

Sawdust from the mill is collected and used for packaging material by a local potato farmer. Other byproducts are turned into wood chips used for landscaping at NTC.

Wells said giving students and industry professionals a chance to work on professional-grade tools will help the industry continue to adapt to fast-moving technological changes.

“We’re just scratching the surface with the new sawmill,” he said.

This story was originally published by WPR.

Antigo school’s first-in-the-nation training sawmill readies students for lumber industry is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.