Marc Brinkmeyer is the chairman, president and co-owner of the Idaho Forest Group, the largest lumber producer in the Intermountain West. The company was created in 2008 in a merger that brought Brinkmeyer’s Riley Creek Lumber Company with Bennett Forest Industries, owned by Dick Bennett, a long-time Evergreen Foundation supporter.

Earlier this month, Mr. Brinkmeyer was a guest speaker at the Pacific Logging Congress 100th annual celebration at LaQuinta Resort in LaQuinta, California. His very thoughtful presentation, “Recovery: U.S. Forest Products Supply and Demand,” describes the collapse and long-awaited recovery of the U.S. homebuilding industry is exquisite detail.

Mr. Brinkmeyer has farming roots dating from Germany in the 1400’s and in Iowa since 1870. The fact that both farms are still in the Brinkmeyer family is testament to the family’s core belief that the land is to be respected and nurtured as a resource that supports us all. 
Mr. Brinkmeyer founded Riley Creek in 1981, after acquiring a saw mill at Laclede, Idaho from Brand S, a privately held, Oregon-based lumber company. He began his career in public accounting with Arthur Andersen in Portland, Oregon working with medium and large-size companies including several in the forest products sector. One of them was Brand S. He became the company’s Chief Financial Officer in 1973, a position he held until he bought the Laclede mill in 1981. 

Before merging with Bennett Forest Industries, Riley Creek was already Idaho’s largest lumber producer, with state-of-the-art mills at Laclede, Chilco and Moyie Springs.  The company also owned 65,000 acres of timberland in Washington, Idaho and Montana, plus exclusive cutting rights to 300,000 acres in central Idaho and strategic relationships with other industrial forest land owners.  

Mr. Brinkmeyer is a member of the Western Wood Products Association and the Intermountain Forestry Association, and he was recently been appointed to the BI-National North American Lumber Council.  He also serves as a Board of Trustees of Buena Vista University at Storm Lake, Iowa.

To review Mr. Brinkmeyer’s Power Point presentation, Recovery: U.S. Forest Products Supply and Demand, click here.