We are stewards of the forests. We take pride in protecting what we have and always use sustainable methods. “[If we didn’t] the paper and pulp mills will not take our timber; therefore, we strive to be ethical in our forestry practices and we take pride in that.”

Matt Ellis, a third generation forester and owner of Delta Timber Company, has “more wood than he can [currently] cut.” He has people asking him to take away their trees, but he just doesn’t have the resources.  A successful businessman and dedicated forester, Matt gives us inside knowledge on the forestry business in South Carolina. Matt has lived in the southeast his entire life and grew up around trees. It is literally his family’s business and legacy.

Matt is a soft-spoken but serious man who has been doing sustainable forestry practices since before such practices became law. He embraces sustainable practices because they make sense to him and it seems right. He is a meticulous planner, and it shows in how he goes about his work. He keeps an ear to the ground for what could influence anything from seeding rates, to trucking efficiency, to wildlife corridors. As an ethical man, he thinks about consequences first.

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“So many timber harvesters have gone under in the past year.” Matt -- who is the Nature Conservancy's go-to guy -- is genuinely concerned about losing his livelihood, just like the rest of us are today. Day in and day out, he does a job invisible to most. He looks back with anxiety at the many pulp and paper sawmills that dried up in 2009 and went out of business.  
“We are so lucky in Georgetown because we have a sawmill; people are driving 150 miles to use our mill for pulpwood. People are begging us to come to their land and thin their forest because trees are dying. There’s insect damage and we can’t get there, we do not have enough loggers.”

A father of two, Matt has been married to his best friend, Leigh, for 21 years. He has lived in Pawleys Island his whole life and has been a constant in the surf community. He loves his family, music, college football, and the beach. Matt played percussion in a local band that specialized in folk-island music, The Highliners, for 15 years. He is known by many as an honorable human being and a good friend. Since he is a native, he provides a vital oral history of Pawleys Island and the tremendous changes he has seen culturally, environmentally, and socially. His father, Cleve Ellis, got his undergraduate degree in biology at Georgia Southwestern and then graduated from University of Georgia with a forestry degree. Cleve worked at International Paper his whole life. Matt followed in the footsteps of his family, his great grandfathers and father, and began his career in forestry at Canal Wood, where he worked for 17 years before starting his own company in 2011. His experience with mills all over South Carolina provided him with direct knowledge of the timber industry.

There is a big shift in the logging and timber industry going on right now," Matt informs us. “It’s not what people think when they see the logging trucks driving by, they think there are so many; however that is just not the case. So many people are going out of business in logging because of the high truck insurance rates. They are going out of business and there is no one replacing them. It’s all about the money. The logging insurance is too high.”

Matt discusses the great qualities of the SC Forestry Agricultural Commission. They go to old agricultural sites where the farmers are no longer farming because they have been outsourced or went out of business and offer timber farming instead. This program is called a “Cost-Share” program allowing farmers to do a timber crop on their farmland. It has been reported that certain woody biomass companies have clearcut hardwood cypress forests in NC. ² Matt insisted that this will not be allowed in South Carolina. All of the sawmills, pulp and paper companies will not touch wood that has not been logged with the Best Management Practices given by the SC Forestry Commission. “There is no way right now South Carolina can crop-support a mill for woody biomass. We just do not have the loggers to support the amount of pellets that they are proposing. You can quote me on that.” ³

“We police ourselves, we are sustainable, we replant and we use Best Management Practices, so if there are woody biomass companies coming into South Carolina, they will not be able to practice bad forestry; we will not have it in South Carolina.” ⁴