164 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



or rough land which would not pay for clearing. Forestry 

 asks of Mr. Jones that he expend a little care and thought on 

 the improvement of that lot. Not for the purpose of better- 

 ing the conditions of stream flow, not for sesthetic reasons, 

 not for providing a health resort for city cousins (though in 

 some sections this aspect of forestry is considered profitable, 

 by the way). These reasons will not appeal to the average 

 farmer. No, but forestry asks Mr. Jones to do this for the 

 sake of his own pocketbook. In most cases he can make his 

 wood lot yield him a good return for intelligent care and at- 

 tention, a better return than he gets from many of his lines of 

 effort. Much of the work that is necessary to bring about 

 this result can be done at times when most farmers are idle, 

 when their time counts as almost nothing. Let him leave 

 his hundred dollars in the savings bank if he wishes. But let 

 him make out of his wood lot another savings bank which 

 in all reason should yield him a steady and reasonably secure 

 income. 



Forestry does not ask Mr. Jones to give up his regular 

 farming for the sake of his wood lot. It does ask him to 

 increase his revenue by the addition of a timber crop, bestow- 

 ing on it rational, systematic care, such as he would give his 

 tobacco or his dairy. 



In a meeting such as this I do not need to more than re- 

 mind you that up to within a comparatively few years most 

 farming has been little more than a mining of the soil. Year 

 after year crops have been taken off. Usually little has been 

 returned to the soil, and not much thought taken for the 

 future. Recently better methods have been gaining ground. 

 In the production of grains and fruits and animal products we 

 are striving to replace soil-mining by agriculture. 



In the realm of wood production this mining has gone on 

 almost unchecked up to the present moment. Now the nation 

 is rapidly awaking to the fact that unless we change our 

 methods this constant drain on nature's bounties, without due 

 precautions for what is to come after, is fully as disastrous on 

 the wooded acre as on its plowed neighbor. Agriculture has 

 been striving, more or less successfully, to make a man raise 

 his sack of wheat, his barrel of apples, his tub of butter, not 

 mine them, raise them in such a way that the soil does not 

 grow the poorer for having fulfilled its duty to mankind. 



