Family logging business forced to close after nearly 40 years due to inflation, gas prices

JACKSONVILLE, Onslow County — A logging company that served Eastern North Carolina for nearly four decades is now shutting its doors, unable to keep up with inflation and gas prices.

Bobby Goodson said with diesel prices nearly tripling in the past two years, inflation of other products, and truck shortages, he didn't see any way to hold on to the business, the only career he had ever considered.

"I started in the logging business when I was 11 years old in the summer with my dad," explained Bobby. "I knew I wanted to cut trees. I knew I wanted to log."

After 37 years of running Goodson's All Terrain Logging, Bobby hung up his chainsaw. With rising inflation and fuel prices more than doubling last month, Bobby said he had no choice but to shut down.

"When you got a fleet of trucks, and you're running probably 7-800 miles a day, a truck is going to get five miles to the gallon. That fuel increase kills you. And so I didn't see any way out," Bobby stated.

He said he fought to hold on to the business for the past two years, but with truck shortages and nearly every piece of operating equipment costing more, the future for loggers doesn't seem feasible.

"In the United States, logging is a 300-billion-dollar industry, and we loggers are the ones where it starts. That's the grassroots; we are at the bottom of the totem pole," Bobby said. "And when we start failing, there's a whole lot of people that are going to start feeling the pain."

Since he announced the shutdown of the business, Bobby said dozens of loggers throughout the country reached out to him over email and phone and said prices forced them out of their businesses too. A community of workers is left with nothing but the question of what comes next.

"If something drastic doesn't happen, there's gonna be a severe logger shortage," Bobby explained.

He said loggers have been trying to band together and call for change. He hopes now will be the tipping point to make a change happen.