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All Week Long ■ It’s hard to find a logger who loves the woods as much as Mike Smith.
Logging is truly a full-time lifestyle for Mike and Andrea Smith, who live on the job site. Their company, M.C. Smith Enterprise, was named Texas Logger of the Year for 2021.
By Jessica Johnson BURKEVILLE, Tex. or Mike and Andrea ★ Smith, both 46, their fate was decided when Mike was just five years old. See, Mr. Smith was a pulpwood mechanic and young Mike would often follow him around to the logging woods to work. There, Mike was exposed to logging and quickly found his path in life. Fast-forward to high school, and Mike was still obsessed with logging. He started his own company in 1994. He worked small private tracts on the weekends with a chain saw, a tractor and his dad’s winch truck. Andrea was also exposed to logging at a young age, as her father worked on a crew in the woods. But the logging bug didn’t bite her until she fell in love with the senior class valedictorian, Mike Smith. “When I met Mike I was so head over heels in love with him I found out real
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quick, if I didn’t jump in and like it and love it as much as he did I would never see him,” she explains. “The hours he works, I’d have never seen him. Over a period of time, I fell in love with it, too.” She went into the woods each weekend alongside Mike when they first got M.C. Smith Enterprise started. “We started out with just junk,” she says. “We took baby steps. It took years to build us up to what we are now.” The business has survived crashes, vandalism and mill closures and still hung on. Logging became even more important in the Smiths’ lives when they lost Mike’s father to pancreatic cancer over five years ago. As he passed, Andrea says he told them, “Whatever you do, don’t stop what we started.” After that Mike really threw himself even more into making the logging venture a success. That humble beginning and the tenacity required to make it through by the Smiths has not gone unnoticed by others in the industry. In 2021, Texas Forestry Assn. named
M.C. Smith as Texas Logger of the Year. The operation advanced to the national FRA Logger of the Year award rounds. “This is our hobby. This is his life, and his dream. He could have been anything he chose to be and he chose logging,” she says with pride.
Making A Home From 1994 to 2003, the Smiths lived a fairly “typical” logging lifestyle. They worked for various companies, cutting tracts, working on equipment and traveling home each night from wherever they were working. As with many, the Smiths bounced around a little as mills sold their landholdings in east Texas. At one point, they were working up to 200 miles from their house, traveling back and forth from Louisiana to their Texas home. Then the equipment started getting vandalized. And the Smiths noticed some thefts. So, in 2003, while working in Louisiana, the Smiths made a choice.
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They would pick up their roots in east Texas and move with each job, settling in to living in a big wheel. By staying on the job, the Smiths don’t have to worry about the threat of further vandalism. Moreover, it allows Andrea to see more of her husband, who often puts in 14-plus hour days. “Mike works 24/7,” she laughs, noting with pride that their crew (just Mike with two employees) is able to move the same production as many larger operations do. That’s only possible, she adds, because of the hours he puts in. Thanks to a combination of Mike’s never-quit work ethic, his “no stick left behind” mentality and their ability to be nimble, M.C. Smith has the edge on certain specialty tracts. Currently, the crew works exclusively for WestRock, and therefore spends 99% of their time in pine plantations on first thinnings. “We are often appointed to designated tracts because of the way we work,” Mike says. “We make sure everything is gone before