CONTINUOUS FOREST PRODUCTION 41 



easily established than in democracies. Stability of policy is the all- 

 important thing in forestry. There is moreover much reason to believe 

 the American corporation is more capable of such stability than our 

 political units. The Federal government is the only one of our political 

 units that have attained any degree of stable forest policy. 



I beHeve that it can be substantiated that purely as a business 

 proposition forestry for the purpose of supplying permanent plants with 

 raw material is justified just as the U. S. Steel Corporation is justified 

 in providing raw material for 50 to 100 years in advance. To be 

 practicable, however, there must be available, above all, cheap money. 

 This can be had by pooling the borrowing capacity of the bulk of the 

 industry in the money markets of the world as discussed hereafter. 



Forest management, dealing as it does at all times with large 

 bodies of standing timber, will continue to yield at least those increases 

 in value of the whole investment that are secured under the timber- 

 mine policy. It will in addition do away with depletion as a cost and 

 yield a current annual return. This question has been examined from 

 the standpoint of a typical case in the Pacific Northwest. In Table 2 

 is shown the approximate cost and return from handling a typical 

 Washington or Oregon forest on the basis of a sustained annual 

 yield. 



This table is from an unpublished manuscript by the writer and is 

 designed to show for a typical western Washington or Oregon forest 

 to be organized at once for sustained annual yield, the approximate 

 cost of forestry operations per thousand feet cut annually. It is also 

 designed to show the cost of caring for the old timber remaining year 

 by year as it is cut off during the first rotation under management. 

 The forest is assimied to be a privately owned one, worked under a 

 60-year rotation. As the average acre of timber is considered to 

 be 40,000 feet in this region, it will take \}/2 acres of mature timber to 

 cut 1,000 feet each year for 60 years. This table may be considered to 

 represent such an area of one and one-half acres under regulation by 

 simple area division method, or it may be considered to represent 60 

 sample plots of 1/40 acre each, located on the 60 annual cutting areas 

 of a large forest under simple area division method or regulation. The 

 former assimiption is perhaps the simplest to grasp. Since 1,000 feet 

 of timber is cut annually and all costs for the whole tract charged to it 

 the result of this method is to show aU costs of taxes, protection and 

 administration, regeneration, etc., per 1,000 feet annual cut. Since 

 we are determining the current annual results year by year, com- 



