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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 
