18 



A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 



existence of 81 million acres of second-growth saw timber, 105 bearing 

 young stands of cord wood size, and of 90 with fair to satisfactory 

 restocking. 



The public employs about five times more trained professional 

 foresters than do private owners. 



The relative efforts of public and private agencies are perhaps 

 roughly expressed in the expenditures for 1932 already stated and 

 shown graphically in figure 1 . 



About two thirds of the public expenditures, which are nearly 90 

 percent of the total for the year, are devoted to public lands and 

 mainly to the commercial forests which constitute only one fifth of 

 the total area of commercial forests. 



Less than half of the private expenditures of 10 percent of the 

 total are used on four fifths of the commercial lands. 



PUBLIC FOREST RANGE 



PRIVATE FOREST RANGE 



50 



100 150 



MILLION ACRES 



200 



250 



Area on Which Some 

 Sort of Management 

 Plans are Applied 



Area on Which Fairly 

 Intensive Management 

 Plans are in Effect 



Area on Which no Range 

 Management of Any Sort 

 is Being Practised 



FIGURE 10. Management of forest ranges. About two-thirds of the area is in private ownership, but 

 public agencies have put a far larger area under management. 



The extent to which private has fallen behind public ownership is 

 summarized graphically on a percentage basis in figure 11. The 

 distribution of expenditures is further shown in figure 12. 



THE PROBLEM OF THE AGRICULTURAL LAND AVAILABLE FOR 



FORESTRY 



A total of over 50 million acres east of the plains originally forested 

 but not now included in the forest land classification is estimated by 

 the Bureau of Agricultural Economics to have already been aban- 

 doned by agriculture and to be available for forestry. 



It is made up of abandoned farms that have gone out of production, 

 of idle or fallow land in farms still operated and of former pasture 

 lands. 



Abandonment is still in process. The Bureau of Agricultural 

 Economics estimates that if present trends continue, approximately 

 15 million acres more may be abandoned by 1940, and from 25 to 30 



