140 FOREST VALUATION 



7. The crop is not ripened in a few days or even months, but 

 can be cut at any time from the age of fifty to one hundred and 

 fifty years. 



8. It requires less labor than the farm crop. 



Agricultural use on the other hand : 



1. Is possible or practicable on probably less than fifty per 

 cent of the land area of the United States. 



2. It is the most important use of land. 



3. It uses more unskilled labor than forestry. 



4. It furnishes greater values only from better lands. 



5. It furnishes less material per acre for transportation and 

 further manufacture. 



6. It encourages erosion, rapid run off of water and so injures 

 land and disturbs water distribution. 



3. Use of land for range. 



Real range lands occur chiefly in dry districts, prairie and des- 

 ert, and mountain countries where the forest can not hold its own 

 on account of conditions of temperature, or moisture, or both. On 

 better prairies of the West the range has given way to the farm. On 

 poor soils in forest districts like the southern pinery and the sands 

 of the Great Lake region the forage plants are readily crowded out 

 by more frugal but useless plants, so that grazing on these lands is 

 of very little value, and can not be compared with the use of these 

 same lands for forest. The poor jack pine lands will grow fifty 

 cents worth of jack pine and scrub oak per acre and year, but they 

 will never be worth ten cents per acre and year continuously as 

 range. 



The following general averages describe the range conditions 

 in western United States : 



Number of head of range live stock and their equivalent in 

 sheep. 



United States. West. Equivalent in sheep 



West of plains. in the West. 



Cattle 61 million 9 million, or 15% 50 million 



Horses 24 million 2.5 million, or 10% 20 million 



Sheep 52 million 28 million, or 54% 28 million 



Assuming that the feed of a sheep is worth sixty cents per year 

 and that the four million acres of tilled agricultural land in the west 

 furnish one-third of all the feed, the range lands, approximately 



