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this kind has produced enough to pay the taxes on the land it occupies. 

 Without exception, every plantation visited could be characterized as an 

 absolute failure. The best of them were planted on land that was good 

 enough to be rated as good corn ground. In such situations young trees 

 thrive fairly well but when planted in poor, "washed", abandoned soil the 

 trees struggle along for years before they are large enough to cut first class 

 bean poles. Certainly it is not proposed to buy high priced Indiana farm 

 land, take it out of production and plant trees on it. And yet if we delib- 

 erately plant trees on the opposite type of land no one will ever be benefitted 

 by the work — and the tax payers will have to foot the bill. 



In southern Indiana we have still many thousands of acres of timber land. 

 Some of this, most of it in fact, has been cut over more or less. It is difficult 

 to find a tract from which no timber has ever been removed. There are 

 other thousands of acres that have been cut over and practically all of the 

 merchantable timber sold. This cut-over land has not been cleared for 

 agricultural purposes, however, and still contains the stumps and roots of 

 the former trees. 



It is a well known fact that when a tree is cut down that the root will as 

 quickly as possible send up one or more vigorous sprouts in an effort to 

 replace the top. It is also well known that when the mature trees are 



The forest fire is the worst enemy of our future timber supply, 

 removed in a forest the younger trees make a tremendous growth in a very 

 short time. What then is to prevent these cut-over lands from replacing the 

 trees removed much more quickly than similar trees could be grown on 

 abandoned farm lands? There is but one answer to that question and that 

 is "fire". Every year in Indiana we permit forest fires to rage over our tim- 

 ber lands and no one ever takes the trouble to do anything about it. In my 

 own neighborhood we had a fire a few years ago that killed more young 

 trees than have been planted in the state since the Board of Forestry was 

 first organized. This particular fire was prevented from doing still greater 

 damage only by the prompt action of a private individual. It was known 



