240 Forestry Quarterly. 



economic reasons for discontinuing the permits for free use of 

 green saw material to individual permittees. In the first place the 

 cost of logging his own timber is much greater for the average 

 permittee than it is for a regular timber sale operator who under- 

 stands the business and is equipped for it. This additional cost is 

 hard to determine but from a few specific cases it has been found 

 to exceed $2.00 per M over that of an adjacent timber purchaser 

 operating under the same conditions. The most apparent lack of 

 economy in the free use business, however, is in the high cost of 

 milling by so-called custom work. The mill operators who do 

 custom work in District 4 are almost without exception small 

 timber purchasers. The amount purchased depends chiefly on the 

 local market, consequently if this market is largely supplied by 

 free use permits, as is often the case in newly settled communities 

 where no large towns are located, there is very little revenue from 

 timber sales. The free use permittees always get their saw timber 

 as close as possible to mill sites and since most of them are not 

 equipped for logging they are continually annoying the mill oper- 

 ators by borrowing tools, etc. The operators naturally do not 

 overlook this point when charging for the mill work, and, since 

 the expense of milling out each special order and piling it sepa- 

 rately for the permittee is expensive, this too is an item not over 

 looked. The result of this additional milling expense and bother 

 to the operator adds not less than $2.00 and in many cases as high 

 as $6.00 per M in excess of regular milling costs. These figures 

 are based on the practice in the Forests in District 4 where mill 

 operators charge from $5.00 to $9.00 per M for custom work with 

 an average of $7.00 per M, while the actual cost of milling in 

 regular timber sales by portable circular sawmills seldom exceeds 

 $3.00 per M. It can, therefore, be readily seen that the free use 

 permittees pay an average excessive cost of about $6.00 per M 

 in logging and milling fees while the only economic consideration 

 granted by the Government is in free stumpage, which in District 

 4 would average about $2.00 per M, still leaving a loss of $4.00 

 per M to the permittee. It has been argued that many of the per- 

 mittees can do their logging in the winter when there is no other 

 occupation for them and their teams, and that the difference be- 

 tween the milling fee and the actual cost of the operator's lumber 

 at the mill represents the economy of the free use timber. If risks 

 and breakage were eliminated and other employment impossible 



