A NATIONAL PLAN FOE AMERICAN FORESTRY 1471 



Some require weedings, or insect and disease control; others do not. 

 Planting costs vary greatly from region to region and from site to site. 

 The cost of starting a new crop after logging mature timber varies all 

 the way from practically nothing to perhaps $20 an acre. Some lands 

 stocked with immature timber require practically no care, except fire 

 prevention, to get full production, while others need treatments that 

 cost several cents an acre a year. 



In framing detailed programs and policies for the inauguration of 

 intensive forestry practices, as Wisconsin is doing, the above factors 

 of returns and costs should be carefully weighed, so that effort will 

 be directed most effectively. 



The principle of concentrating intensive forestry on areas of highest 

 potential production cannot be applied from a national point of view 

 solely ; to do so would be to neglect the needs of communities in various 

 sections whose welfare is intimately associated with successful manage- 

 ment of local forests. State forestry programs are going to be carried 

 out with thought of State needs. Private forestry programs are going 

 to vary in intensity according to the individual attitude and financial 

 set-up of the owner. 



From many angles it would be ideal for each geographic division of 

 the United States to produce the timber products that it needs to 

 support its own domestic and industrial uses, but this is wholly im- 

 practicable. Some regions have not the acreage of forest land to do 

 so ; some regions grow one class of products (like hardwoods or extra- 

 large timber) that other regions cannot grow; few if any regions can 

 grow all the variety of products they require. There is now much 

 shipment of products from one region to another, and apparently 

 this must continue. The regions of highest potential production, or 

 rather those with the greatest capacity for increased production, are 

 not those closest to the country's major markets. The South and the 

 Pacific coast, for example, are perhaps better suited to timber produc- 

 tion than any other regions, and it will be economical for them to 

 continue to export wood to other regions. However, other things 

 being equal, it is desirable to grow forest products as close to where 

 they are going to be used as possible. 



The first consideration in instituting forest management on a forest 

 property is to assure effective protection and the stopping of devasta- 

 tion on the whole property, and then provide the means for intensive 

 forestry wherever on that particular property intensive forestry gives 

 promise of being most profitable. Land classification, economic 

 studies, and silvicultural studies will show what areas are best suited 

 for intensive forestry, and the management plan for the property 

 should be drawn accordingly preferably prescribing a program for a 

 tree generation. 



OPPORTUNITIES FOR INTENSIVE FORESTRY IN CERTAIN 

 FOREST REGIONS 



As a supplement to the generalized discussion in the preceding pages 

 of the principles, the necessity, and the objectives of intensive forestry, 

 consideration will be given in summarized form to the opportunities 

 for intensive practice in certain of the principal forest regions of the 

 country. Here as before it must be remembered that attention is 

 given only to those measures needed to step up volume and quality 



