192 A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 



Forest fires, insects, and chestnut blight have also taken their toll. 

 Until recent years, however, enough was left to make possible the 

 relogging of areas already cut over, especially as the market for pulp- 

 wood and tanning-extract wood enabled the utilization of small tim- 

 ber and previously worthless species. Of late, large numbers of port- 

 able mills, as in the softwood forests, have operated on cut-over or 

 culled lands, cleaning up the remaining saw-log and tie timber. While 

 there still remain in the mountains a number of large old-growth 

 tracts, as well as many promising second-growth stands, much of the 

 hardwood timber supply is either relatively inaccessible or of poor 

 quality. The farm woodlands which dot the valleys and plateau con- 

 sist for the most part of small tracts which have been cut over several 

 times. They, however, are more accessible than the mountain timber. 



About 45 billion board feet, including the better and more accessi- 

 ble hardwood stands, occurs in the bottomlands and swamps of the 

 coastal plain and lower Mississippi Valley. Approximately 30 billion 

 of this, of which more than one third is old growth, is in the wide 

 river bottoms of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Exploitation 

 in the lower Mississippi Valley has progressed steadily since 1900; the 

 factories of the Carolinas, the Ohio Valley, and the Lake States, once 

 regionally independent, have been drawing on the lower Mississippi 

 Valley hardwoods. In 1929, about one fourth of the total hardwood 

 lumber cut of the United States came from Arkansas, Louisiana, and 

 Mississippi. At the present rate of cutting the virgin stands of the 

 lower Mississippi Valley will be cut out in a few years. However, 

 second-growth and old-field stands are supplying an increasingly large 

 percentage of the hardwood cut. 



Conditions in Louisiana, the leading hardwood lumber producer, 

 are in many respects typical of the lower Mississippi Valley. That 

 State in 1928 had about 80 hardwood mills each with a daily output 

 of 30,000 board feet or more. A survey of 60 mills (made coopera- 

 tively by the State of Louisiana and the Forest Service) revealed 5 

 mills with 10 to 15 years' supply of timber, 6 with 5 to 10 years' supply, 

 32 with 1 to 5 years' supply, and 17 with no timber but operating on 

 logs bought in the vicinity of the mills. Although the available sup- 

 plies may have been underestimated, indications point to a marked 

 downward trend in merchantable hardwood timber supplies in the 

 State. 



WESTERN REGIONS 



It has already been shown that 1,314 billion of the country's total 

 saw-timber stand of 1,688 billion board feet is in the West. Much of 

 it is high up in the mountains where logging is very costly. On the 

 other hand, highly developed mass production methods in woods and 

 mill, combined with rail and water transportation, have rendered the 

 better and more accessible of these stands readily available to the 

 far distant central and eastern markets. Just what proportion of 

 the western timber should be considered available to the country gen- 

 erally is problematical. It depends to a large extent, of course, upon 

 how much the large and distant markets will pay. 



It is estimated that about 600 billion board feet, or somewhat less 

 than half of the western supply, would have a positive realization value 

 on the basis of the logging and milling methods and costs and of lum- 

 ber prices that obtained during the 1925-29 period; or in other words, 

 would be classed as economically available on that basis. Further 



