884 A NATIONAL PLAN FOE AMERICAN FORESTRY 



it, even though the young growth has practically no market value 

 at the present time. 



7. The requirements of mortgage notes that may preclude aban- 

 doning parcels of an entire tract. 



8. Use of the land for grazing. 



The first two considerations are transitory. It may be expected 

 in some of the major forest regions that when a logging operation is 

 concluded in a county the entire tract of logged land will be aban- 

 doned. This seems to be borne out by the history of some of the 

 logging centers. As a higher percentage of the country becomes 

 logged, delinquency is greatly accelerated. 



The third reason hope of sale for agriculture or recreation will 

 vary with the region and with the pendulum of human tastes and 

 business trends. Colonization has already been carried so far and 

 so unsuccessfully on stump lands decidedly submarginal for agricul- 

 ture that the trend in the Northern States seems to be away from 

 further hope of profit from such use of forest land. In the Lake 

 States extraordinary recreational uses, and in the Southeast hunting 

 facilities, furnish a prospective additional return from certain classes 

 of forest land that might otherwise go delinquent, but whether these 

 uses, supplemental to forest uses, will be sufficient to hold in private 

 ownership any great amount of land, otherwise tax-forfeited is 

 problematical. 



The speculative possibility that minerals or oil may be found, or 

 that the public will acquire the land by exchange or purchase, is 

 undoubtedly holding some land, temporarily at least, in private hands. 

 These reasons prevail more or less in all parts of the country, but 

 certainly the oil prospects are a material reason why there is not more 

 delinquency in such States as Louisiana and Texas. 



Faith in the future of reasonably productive land may often cause 

 one owner to hold his land even though his neighbor with identically 

 the same kind of land under the same economic conditions, adopts the 

 policy of abandoning his. So long as his land is in productive condi- 

 tion, the former owner has hope of the ultimate profitableness of 

 holding his property. 



Grazing rental of cut-over land, particularly as found in the Rocky 

 Mountain States, helps to carry the land and forestall delinquency. 

 Such land is often sold by the timberman for grazing use, and so 

 remains in private ownership primarily for range purposes, not 

 timber growing, though the two purposes may both be served in the 

 long run. 



FACTORS THAT DETER THE CONVERSION FROM PRI- 

 VATE TO PUBLIC OWNERSHIP 



Much of the low-grade and cut-over forest land of the country, as 

 well as much submarginal agricultural land, is in a very unstable 

 status, lying suspended, so to speak, between the private owner and 

 the public. The private owner does not want it. The public has 

 not the policy or the legislative program to hold and manage it. For 

 this reason the statistics of the acreage of tax-reverted land give but 

 a partial picture of the seriousness of the breakdown of private owner- 

 ship. They dp not include the great acreage which is in reality 

 abandoned by its owners but to which the public is not asserting title. 



