244 ANNUAL, REPORTS OF DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



The shortage of kimber, with its corollary of high prices, has fol- 

 lowed the westward sweep of lumbering, while the oulk of our popu- 

 lation and the greatest demands for lumber remain in the Central 

 and Eastern States. The Nation's lumber shipment in 1920, a recent 

 Forest Service study shows, was no less than 2,070,000 carloads; 

 and the average haul for each carload was 485 miles. According to 

 the best estimate the Forest Service is able to make, the freight 

 bill on lumber for that year was $275,000,000. This gigantic sum 

 merely gives one measure of the cost of treating our forests as mines 

 instead of timber farms. A fraction of this sum wisely invested 

 each year in forest protection and rehabilitation would grow timber 

 where it is needed, reduce the Nation's freight bill, cheapen lumber, 

 and release vast amounts of railroad equipment and labor for un- 

 avoidable transport. Coal and iron can not be grown, but timber 

 can be. 



These are some of the broad-scale effects of forest depletion. To 

 trace its effects more minutely in one typical region, the branch of 

 research is conducting a study of the economic effects of forest de- 

 vastation in one State. Wliat does forest destruction do to popu- 

 lation, to agriculture, to labor, to the lumbering industry, to the wood- 

 using industries, to the general economic and social life of the com- 

 munity? Here, in one cross section of American life, answers to 

 these questions will be sought in order to strike a balance sheet 

 between forest devastation and forest conservation. 



On a nation-wide scale also, though less intensively, the research 

 corps is tracing out the effects of timber mining as opposed to timber 



f rowing. This study will attempt not merely to set forth the 

 istorical, economic, and social consequences of timber mining, 

 but to make a census of our total progress in forestry up to the 

 present time. This, it is hoped, will be a useful contribution to the 

 general study of the use of land now being made by the Department 

 of Agriculture. In its larger aspects forestry is not merely a land 

 problem, but an agricultural problem. Not only should lands best 

 suited to forests be used for forests, but these forests should be 

 intensively managed as farms are intensively managed. For a stable 

 and prosperous agriculture in many older regions of the East, the 

 forested hills and the cultivated valleys must be handled with 

 equal skill; they are indispensable one to the other. Luckless at- 

 tempts to convert good forests into poor farms are fortunately on 

 the wane. 



Unfortunately financial limitations do not permit a stock-taking 

 of our forests on an adequate scale. Yet these studies point the 

 way and show the urgency of a nation-wide timber survey, a project 

 the Forest Service has strongly urged in recent years and again 

 repeats. 



GRAZING STUDIES. 



Efficient use of range land is dependent upon intensive investiga- 

 tions. The results so far secured in the administration of national 

 forest ranges arc partially attributable to the investigations conducted 

 at the Great Basin Experiment Station in Utah and at the Jornada 

 and Santa Rita range reserves in New Mexico and Arizona. As these 

 experiments are extended and perfected, the need for more knowledge 

 of the effect of grazing on the life of valuable forage plants becomes 



