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Yearbook of Agriculture 1949 



and soon after signed the contract. 

 Matters were cleared so he and the 

 boys could start logging. The timber 

 would not run his mill all winter, but 

 he could keep it busy with the logs his 

 neighbors brought in from their own 

 lands or had purchased from forest 

 property, as he had. Also, the ranger 

 had told him of a larger tract of tim- 

 ber farther away; it would be adver- 

 tised shortly, and the farmer planned 

 to bid on that. 



The stand of pole-sized timber had 

 been marked when the ranger was 

 working in the neighborhood. The 

 marking was designed to thin out the 

 area and give the best trees a better 

 chance to grow. He estimated that 100 

 cords could be cut. The farmer's boys 

 wanted to do it, but the stumpage 

 would cost them about $200. Because 

 they did not have the money to pay for 

 it all at once, they paid $50 when they 

 signed the contract and arranged to pay 

 the rest in installments when 25 cords 

 were cut and stacked for measurement 

 by the ranger. A hundred cords meant 

 50 trips for the farm truck to the paper 

 mill, where they got about $15 a cord. 



SOMETIMES SUCH SALES to people 

 in the locality are as small as a single 

 tree, which can be split into shingles 

 to cover a cow shed or a few stringers 

 for a bridge. Sometimes the sales are 

 for a few fence posts, sills, and various 

 farm needs. Again, the sales might be 

 up to 5 million board feet. For the 

 seven Appalachian national forests 

 from Virginia and Kentucky north, the 

 average size of timber sales is fewer 

 than 50,000 board feet and less than 

 60 acres in area. 



For a given volume of timber to be 

 cut annually on a sustained-production 

 basis, the cost of administration per 

 thousand board feet is higher when 

 many small transactions comprise the 

 annual cutting budget. Nevertheless, 

 the small sale in the Appalachians helps 

 the local people and is useful in the im- 

 provement of the forest itself. Much 

 study has been given to techniques and 

 methods of preparing and administer- 



ing this type of timber sale to insure 

 good forestry practice at the least cost 

 and still meet the obligations to local 

 forest users. 



For example, the scaling of logs or 

 the measurement of cordwood in small 

 amounts as produced by many small 

 operators scattered over a wide terri- 

 tory, whenever the producer needs such 

 service, takes a great deal of time and 

 travel. Through training and practice, 

 forest rangers can accurately measure 

 the amounts of usable products in the 

 standing tree and at the same time 

 mark the trees to be cut. The necessity 

 for scaling after cutting at frequent in- 

 tervals is eliminated, and considerable 

 time is saved. In such sales, the op- 

 erator is purchasing the merchantable 

 contents of a specified number of stand- 

 ing trees estimated to contain a given 

 number of thousands of board feet or 

 cords of wood, as the case may be. 



Purchasers prefer the tree-measure- 

 ment method for several reasons, chief 

 among which is the elimination of op- 

 erating delays caused by the inability of 

 a busy forest officer to scale or measure 

 just when the purchaser is ready to saw 

 the logs or haul the wood. The ranger 

 frequently checks the accuracy of his 

 tree measurement by comparing his es- 

 timate with the outturn from selected 

 trees or with the purchaser's own meas- 

 urement of what he has cut from a 

 given sale. 



Timber may be paid for in install- 

 ments in advance of cutting, a practice 

 that is universal for larger sales in order 

 to reduce the part of the purchaser's 

 operating capital that is tied up in 

 uncut stumpage. For small sales it is 

 practical to require payment for stump- 

 age in lump sum, thereby reducing the 

 cost connected with securing large 

 numbers of small payments and the 

 accounting work connected with them. 

 Sales on a lump-sum payment basis are 

 increasing in number, but in making 

 small sales the forest officer takes into 

 account the prospective purchaser's 

 ability to pay. 



Throughout the chain of Appalach- 

 ian national forests, from Maine to 



