544 BOAKD OF AGRICULTUEE. 



Prof. Latta: I think we will have to leave Prof. Weigle just now, and 

 if your question hasn't been answered you will have to hold it for a 

 while until we have general questions. Our sister State on the north has 

 given attention to forestry and the forestry question in recent years, and 

 it has made substantial progress. There are men there who are very 

 much interested In this question, and we are very fortunate to have one 

 here. Their southern boundary comes very near to us ,and what they 

 have done there will have close application to what we can do here. 

 We will now hear from Prof. Roth, Forest Warden, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 



Prof. Roth: Mr. Chairman. Ladies and Gentlemen— You all remem- 

 ber from boyhood and girlhood times when you had hard times account- 

 ing for yourselves in school, so you just talked around. Possibly you 

 would tell some interesting story so as to get off the main point. I am 

 booked to tell you about the reforesting in Michigan, but I can tell you 

 all I know about it in a very few minutes, so it falls to my share to 

 talk around. However, I shall try to make clear what we are driving 

 at. It is almost necessary to know something of the conditions with 

 which we were surrounded in order to appreciate the motives and efforts. 

 The State of Michigan, just north of you, is a bigger state than yours, 

 we think, in various ways. We have about thirty-six million acres of 

 land, and it can all be divided nicely into halves which differ very greatly 

 from each other. One-half of our state is really well settled farming 

 country like what you have here in Indiana. In fact when you cross the 

 line you would not know that you were going from Indiana to Michigan 

 on account of the radical change. Well, as I have said, one-half of our 

 land is very well settled. One-half is settled by farmers, and of that 

 half at least sixty per cent, of the improved land is cleared and fenced. 

 But the other half is very different. One-half of our state is in 

 a distinctly unsettled condition, sparsely settled, with very little farming. 

 Of that half there is not a county that has as much as thirty per cent, 

 of land settled. Taking the land on a whole, there is scarcely five per cent, 

 —five acres out of a hundred— that is improved land. You would not sup- 

 pose it when you are coming to visit us where we have nice things and 

 good things. You could hardly believe that we were so rich in real wild 

 land. In this particular we differ radically from you here. We have in 

 our state a large area of country on which we can raise not only all the 

 timber that wc need, but a great deal more. If we look at the forests and 

 the forest lands of Michigan they divide themselves very nicely into three 

 great groups. The first group is the farmers' woods. The farmers in this 

 settled half of ours have about twenty-five per cent, of their land still in 

 woods in some form or another. They have woodlots like yours which 

 occupy the immense area of over four million acres. We have another 

 body of land where forests are still growing; mostly forests of hard wood 



