THE NEXT STEP IN FORESTRY IN MICHIGAN. 49 



the vast pinery plains along the Atlantic still remain unsettled after 

 centuries of effort, is it likely that our pinery lands, will make an ex- 

 ception and all be converted into flower gardens as by magic? Hardly. 

 There is little doubt that in 100 years the greater part of these poorer 

 lands will be still unfilled just as in the older states and in the states 

 of the Old World, and that only the real agricultural land will be worth 

 farming then as now. 



There is still another point to l>e considered. The friends of forestry 

 and of the present reserve law are not asking to have the entire district, 

 an entire county or town, reserved ; nor do they suggest for a moment 

 that good agricultural, lands should be held indefinitely as forest, espec- 

 ially in districts where good lands are rather the exception and are there- 

 fore all the more needed for farm purposes. The law enables now, and 

 will always enable, the Forest Commission to sell and exchange these 

 lands, so that whenever a real farmer wants to buy agricultural land, 

 there will be little trouble of his getting the land. 



'•The land is all fit for settlement." I have suggested part of the 

 answer. There is not a state of Europe where all land is tilled. A few 

 years ago the foremost authority in England declared that the British 

 Isles had enough waste land to raise the bulk of its own timber, instead 

 of giving over 100 million dollars every year to other countries for its 

 supplies. "Sand is sand," the farmer says, "and it never gets to be 

 anything but sand." The farmers of the United States, thousands of 

 them, have known about the pinery lands of New Jersey, Virginia, North 

 Carolina, and our own as well, and vet thev evidentlv felt afraid of 

 them. Is not this wholesale testimony of the farmer worth all the theo- 

 rizing in the world? I would rather take his testimony than all the soil 

 analyses ever made. But the farmer says and says emphatically : "No, 

 it is not all farmland, not by a good deal." But the chemist says the 

 same, and what is worth more still, nature says the same. We find on 

 these lands the plants characteristic of poor land. 



Now as to the sheep range. First, let me warn every state against 

 converting large bodies of land into range and especially sheep range, 

 unless a dry climate prevents doing anything else. But even in arid 

 states, like Wyoming, Montana and Washington (East Side) the farmer 

 has decided against unlimited conversion of lands into range. It was the 

 clear-sighted and farsighted farmer of Montana, Wyoming and Washing- 

 ton who found it necessary to stop the spread of the uncontrolled range 

 business. He found the range changed to desert and he found land 

 monopoly the strongest enemy of the settler, and so he passed a law 

 which forbids the state from selling an acre of land, arid lands, mind 

 you, for less than |10, while here in Michigan we dispose of lands for 

 from 10 cents per acre upward, and as lately as last fall sold the choice 

 10 per cent of 80,000 acres at |1.2.5 per acre. 



But that is not all. Are these sandy lands grazing lands? No and 

 yes. If a man has many acres to a sheep, it can find something almost 

 anywhere. The sandy pineries of the south have been used as a range, 

 but it is a poor business. To be of any value, grass wants good land. 

 On many of our pinery lands, the sweet fern, the huckleberry and other 

 persistent, long-lived ericaceous and other plants are rapidly crowding 

 out what little there is of sedge and grasses. Let a few dry years come 

 and help on the wrong side, and where will the grasses be? 



But even granted it is possible to use these lands as sheep-range, as 

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