io6 



Or, in a favorable situation, it may 

 be moving so fast that we can ap- 

 prehend its progress in a few years. 

 Take an abandoned farm in southern 

 Connecticut. The summer after cul- 

 tivation stops, tall weeds grow in the 

 fields. Next year, there may be a little 

 grass beneath the weeds, and black- 

 berry seedlings will have started. At 

 the end of 5 years, the field will be a 

 tangle of briars. Here and there clumps 

 of gray birch will have started from 

 seed blown in by the wind, and juni- 

 pers will be dotted about where birds 

 have lighted and have gotten rid of the 

 seeds of the juniper berries they have 

 been eating. In 10 years, the old field 

 is a young forest of birch and juniper 

 higher than your head; in 20 years, 

 oaks and maples will be coming in in 

 the shade; in 40, the birches will be 

 dying out, some of the oaks that got 

 an early start will be crowding the 

 junipers, and the place will begin to 

 look like the wood lot that never was 

 plowed. 



Meanwhile, around the edges of the 

 millpond down the slope, the pickerel- 

 w T eed and waterlilies will have grown 

 farther and farther out into the water. 

 The shore line will have been pushed 

 out with a tangle of buttonbushes, and 

 at the upper end of the pond, where 

 40 years ago one could push a row- 

 boat, there may be a forest of red 

 maples with oaks coming in along the 

 drier edges. 



Both in the old field and the mill- 

 pond, as in all vegetational succession, 

 progress is toward median moisture. 

 Dry areas become less dry, and the wet 

 areas less wet. 



The important lesson to be gained 

 from a study of natural plant succes- 

 sion is that, wherever the climate is 

 suitable for forests, the trend is to- 

 ward them. Fire may destroy them, in- 

 sects or diseases decimate them, or 

 winds blow them down; but, given 

 time, they will build back again. Fur- 

 thermore, once the process of succes- 

 sion is understood for a region, the 

 steps can be predicted. The trend is 

 not only toward a forest but toward a 



Yearbook^ of Agriculture 1949 



particular type of forests, the forest that 

 can use most efficiently the rainfall and 

 the temperatures that prevail. It will 

 be made up of trees whose seedlings 

 can grow in the shade of their parents. 

 Such a forest perpetuates itself. It is 

 the climax, and does not change unless 

 the climate changes or it is disturbed. 

 Of all the disturbers of forests, man 

 is first. Because trees grow in climates 

 comfortable for him and favorable to 

 agriculture, he has destroyed them to 

 make room for his cities and his farms. 

 He has needed wood, and to satisfy 

 that need has used up or cut into for- 

 ests on vast acreages of land that he 

 did not intend to use for anything else. 

 When the first settlers came to this 

 country there were 1,072 million acres 

 of forests within the 1,905-odd million 

 acres that now make up the United 

 States. Only 624 million acres remain ; 

 of them, only 45 million are at all com- 

 parable to the original forests. The 

 forest land most suitable for farming 

 has already been cleared. The trend 

 is now the other way ; large areas once 

 farmed have been abandoned. 



FORESTRY is THE handling of forest 

 lands to satisfy the needs of man, just 

 as farming is the management of farm 

 lands to serve his purposes. As agricul- 

 ture is the science underlying farming, 

 so silviculture underlies forestry. Both 

 deal with plants. The basis of both is 

 botany. Their difference is of degree 

 rather than kind. 



Forestry generally sticks closer to 

 nature than farming does, following 

 the natural progress of plant succes- 

 sion almost exactly if the kinds of trees 

 in the climax forest furnish the most 

 useful wood products. The farmer had 

 to get rid of the original forest and 

 often felled the trees and burned them. 

 The crops he raises are different from 

 the climax forest. Trees cut in the vir- 

 gin forest are themselves the first crop 

 in forestry, and the successive crops are 

 much like the one that grew naturally. 



In farming, new crops are started by 

 plowing and planting seed. That is not 

 often done in forestry. Instead, natural 



