ABSTRACTTree bucking is the initial production process in converting felled trees into useable wood products. This process has been previously modelled as a dynamic programming problem. Unlike other production problems that have been modelled as dynamic programming problems, there have been no serious attempts to formulate this problem as a branch‐and‐bound model and then examine the model's performance. This research develops the tree bucking problem as a branch‐and‐bound model to be tested by varying several parameters. The testing is performed in two phases: (1) a sensitivity analysis is performed to test two key parameters used by the model, and (2) branching strategies are tested on various problem scenarios. The size of the solution sets searched by the technique vary from as low as 40 to as many as 41,000 possible combi