Budget Earmark Could Make Northern Michigan The State's Hub For Forestry Training

Thanks to a $100,000 earmark in Michigan’s 2026 budget, a northern Michigan community college will soon be the state's only institution of higher learning with a forestry harvest simulator. Industry leaders say the technology will be a boon for the forestry trades in Michigan, a $26.5 billion component of the state’s economy. Kirtland Community College in Gaylord hopes to acquire the simulator next year, and to share it with other colleges in the state to spread the impact.

At the state level, earmarks are generally seen as a way for legislators to fund pet projects in their districts. The practice has come under fire in recent years. As a result, this year’s contentious budget session – which only narrowly avoided a shutdown of the state government – concluded with a far smaller set of earmarks than previous years, when legislators sometimes allocated north of $1 billion for these non-competitive grants. Kirtland was one of just a few northern Michigan entities to land an earmark, with State Representative Ken Borton (R-Gaylord) serving as sponsor.

According to Barb Walden, Kirtland’s dean of occupational programs, the simulator “replicates the seat and the control panel that's found in harvester equipment.” By pairing those mock controls with a projector screen, the simulator creates a virtual-reality-like environment where students can learn the ropes of forestry field work in a low-stress fashion.

“A student will be operating the controls of the simulator and seeing on the screen, ‘Oh, I missed that tree. Oh, I got that tree. Oh, that tree just tipped over onto the harvester; that wasn’t good,’” Walden explains. “If we were out in a real harvester doing training, students would be cutting tree after tree, which can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. The simulator is a way to give students the hands-on training they need, but to do it in a safe environment without damaging any actual consumable trees.”

Harvesters are the foundation of Michigan’s forestry industry, which Walden says is estimated to support some 88,000 jobs statewide, including in logging, paper production, solid wood products, and furniture manufacturing. 

“I’ve been in this industry for 30 years and I’m still one of the younger people,” laughs Mike Elenz, president of the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association (GLTPA). “People are aging out, and it's harder to bring younger people in than it used to be. Maybe with this program, it'll give younger people time to try something that they wouldn't jump into otherwise.”

By Elenz’s estimation, it can take months of “repetitive motions” behind the controls of a real harvester to get the hang of it. It's a stressful (and not particularly fun) process Elenz thinks is improved substantially with a good simulator.

“When you train people in the field, you really can't have more than one person [in the harvester] at one time,” Elenz explains. “You show them what to do as best you can, but then you just let them go at it. You watch them, obviously, but it's hard to have that one-on-one communication as they’re running the equipment and making mistakes. Training on a simulator is a lot less intimidating.”

Walden says Kirtland started considering a simulator after surveying GLTPA and two other trade groups – the Michigan Association of Timbermen and the Michigan Forest Products Council – about “the skillsets needed for entry-level harvester operators.” The key takeaway was that those associations feel the need get students through the training pipeline and into the field faster.

Thanks to the backing of Borton and influential partners like the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Michigan State University’s Institute of Agricultural Technology, Kirtland was successful in navigating the simulator request through the state budgeting process. The $100,000 earmark will cover all or most of the expense, and will allow the community college to launch a 15-week, one-semester forestry training program, likely starting next spring.

While the simulator will be based at Kirtland, Walden tells The Ticker the college is open to partnering with other higher learning institutions.

“For example, 15-20 years ago, Bay College up in Escanaba had a harvester program that included a simulator,” Walden says. “Then, as the needs were filled [in the workforce] and the equipment aged out, that program went away. But we’ve been in talks with Bay College, because the need for forestry professionals is back, and it exists not just in northern Lower Michigan but also in the Upper Peninsula. So, we potentially could be sharing our simulator or sharing curriculum. Rather than duplicate this program in two or more places, we want to make it available where the students are, and really just focus on filling the need of the employers.”