THE FARM LAND 61 



have been so badly depleted by over-cutting and fire that 

 thousands of rural wood-using industries have gone out of 

 existence. These industries and the big logging operations that 

 fed them gave many farmers opportunities for winter wage 

 work, for the hire of their teams, and a market for hay, grain, 

 and food. 



Forests managed for permanent production give rural wage 

 work not only to harvest mature timber, but to maintain roads, 

 protect the woods from fire, and to improve the growing tim 

 ber by weeding and thinning. One small federal forest in north 

 ern Michigan, for example, is able to guarantee $500 a year 

 wage work to each of twenty-eight sub-marginal farm families 

 in the neighborhood. 



The farms of the United States contain 185,474,965 58 acres 

 of timberland, and interspersed with them are many millions 

 of acres of commercial timberlands all, with few exceptions, 

 producing only a fraction of the timber they could produce 

 with good management. The misuse of this vast resource has 

 unquestionably greatly reduced total farm income and has had 

 particularly bad effects on hill farms where timber production 

 is an essential part of farm income. 



When the same crop is planted in the same soil for a long 

 enough period of time, the soil is exhausted. Crops must be 

 rotated to rest the soil and restore plant nourishment. There 

 must be cover crops to hold the soil, and green manure crops 

 to enrich it. There must be terracing or strip cropping, or 

 other erosion control devices. In other words, the farm must 

 be treated as a biological unit instead of a plant factory. All 

 of this takes effort, skill, knowledge, and sometimes a reduction 

 or postponement of income. But the commercial farmer who 

 depends solely on his cash crop not only to pay the costs of 

 raising his crop, but even to buy food and the necessities of 

 life, can hardly afford to rotate crops when prices are low. 



68 Letter from United States Forest Service, 1939. 



