1578 A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN" FORESTRY 



AN APPRAISAL OF THE FORESTRY EXTENSION 

 PROGRAM OF TODAY 



The organized effort that is being put into forestry extension, when 

 the various agencies are enumerated and their fields of endeavor are 

 surveyed, appears on analysis to be pitifully inadequate to the job at 

 hand. When the wide-spread need in the field is compared with the 

 part of it that has been met or even partly met, when the accomplish- 

 ments to date are checked against what must be done, and when it 

 is realized that only an organized, synchronized, well-directed attack 

 can meet with success within a reasonable time and at a reasonable 

 cost then the inadequacy of the present program is felt in its full 

 force. 



The strongest, best financed, and most effective of the several 

 forestry extension efforts is that being carried on as a part of the 

 agricultural extension work of the State colleges with the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture cooperating. It is, as stated before, confined 

 almost entirely to farmers and is therefore concentrated upon not 

 more than 25 percent of the forest lands of the Nation. Yet even 

 in this field, notwithstanding the earnestness of the agencies at work, 

 it cannot be said that the ground is being covered. Farmers own and 

 manage in conjunction with their fields and pastures nearly 127 

 million acres of commercial forest land. There are over 4 million 

 farms with woodlands. The number of farms reported to have been 

 directly reached by the extension effort in 1931 to the extent of 

 actually effecting some improvement in forestry practice is 32,000, 

 or less than one farm out of a hundred. 



While there is no doubt considerable spread of good practice from 

 farm to farm, the average farmer with woodlands today is not getting 

 anything like the returns his little forest is capable of producing not 

 because of a lack of energy or even of capital, but simply because he 

 does not realize the possibilities nor know the measures that are 

 necessary to bring them about. Our program to reach the farmer 

 with the information and advice needed to get the full returns from 

 his forest is good as far as it goes, but it is far too lightly manned to 

 cover the field. 



If the farm woodland owner, served by the best organized and 

 financed activity, is getting insufficient attention, what of the indus- 

 trial timber owner who has no farm? In so far as public agencies 

 are concerned this class of ownership is almost entirely neglected. 

 The finest timber stands and the most productive and most favorably 

 located forest lands of the country have been and are still held by 

 this class of owner, and 80 percent of the lumber produced comes 

 from their forests. If any forest resources have truly national 

 significance, these forests and forest lands have. They have suffered 

 most from devastation and deterioration, and the final results of their 

 long-continued exploitation for immediate returns without heed of 

 the future are to be found on a large scale in every section of the 

 country. The progress of deterioration of forest stands and forest 

 lands is still going on, not because it is impossible to handle them 

 properly, but because the owners and the public generally are not 

 yet alive to the means and methods of managing forests more profit- 

 ably. 



The East generally, and the Lake States and the Gulf States 

 especially, have millions of acres of profitless, useless, tax-delinquent 



