A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 



1307 



data available as to the probable life of improvements or the time 

 at which a given cultural job will no longer be repeated on a given 

 area. For example, the construction costs of roads and trails were 

 depreciated in 40 years, giving a 2.5 percent annual carrying charge. 

 In this instance, the rate of depreciation is rather high, because with 

 another charge already included for maintenance, roads may be 

 expected to give service longer than 40 years. Buildings, depending 

 on kind, were depreciated in 15 to 20 years, which gave an annual 

 carrying charge of 6.7 and 5 percent. 



Stand betterment, planting, and other cultural operations were 

 written off in a 100-year period, representing the average long rotation 

 likely to be used on the national forests, or at the rate of 1 percent 

 per year. Since hi Federal finances an amortization or sinking fund 

 is not usually employed, the write-off and depreciation method was 

 substituted, to ascertain the actual costs of a given activity. 



The present and proposed average cost per acre for the existing 

 national-forest system merely represents the average for 161 million 

 acres. Costs for a single national forest unit may vary considerably 

 from this figure, depending on the number of activities administered 

 and the intensity of present management and development. For 

 example, nearly 83 million acres of the 161 million acres in the na- 

 tional forests are grazed by livestock, and if the grazing costs are 

 charged directly to this acreage and not to the entire property, the 

 present per-acre grazing cost is 1.76 cents instead of 0.90 cents. 

 Similarly the total acreage on which timber sales are now made or 

 likely to be carried on during the next 40 years is about 50 million 

 acres or only 31 per cent of the gross area. Present timber-sales 

 cost on the total area is 0.823 cent per acre, but, if based on the 50 

 million acres, would be 2.650 cents. 



The wide spread that may appear between costs for different na- 

 tional forests is illustrated in table 2, where costs for actual acreage 

 covered are given for four typical units representing different combi- 

 nations of resources. Present costs vary from 6.6 cents per acre in a 

 unit with a predominant grazing resource to 19.3 cents per acre, where 

 heavy utilization is being made of many resources. 



TABLE 2. Average costs per acre of resource management and fire protection on 

 representative national forests 



