6 4 6 



Yearbook of Agriculture 1949 



and heat, in public buildings and power 

 plants, as well as in domestic sawdust 

 burners. Briquets of sawdust and shav- 

 ings compressed at high temperatures 

 are a fuel product of growing interest. 



A great variety of things are or can 

 be made of slabs, edgings, and trims, 

 depending on the species and dryness. 

 Seasoned material has a wider market 

 range than green wood. At the sawmill 

 it may be cut to rough size or to fin- 

 ished dimensions. If softwood, such 

 material is called "cut stock" ; if hard- 

 wood, "dimension stock." Typical uses 

 are various building materials floor- 

 ing, molding strips, sash and frame 

 stock and furniture flat stock, squares 

 for bed slats, upholstery frames, chair 

 backs and posts, core stock, core blocks, 

 glue blocks, box and crate stock, handle 

 squares, toys, stepladder stock, tent 

 pegs, washboard parts, and a long list 

 of other articles. This material is also 

 used for fiber products, including 

 building boards, container board, roof- 

 ing felt, and even various grades of 

 paper. Its biggest single use, however, 

 remains as fuel, usually in mixture with 

 sawdust but sometimes bundled or 

 bagged for retail sale; as a processing 

 fuel, it is used by bakers of some types 

 of pastries and breadstuff's, in the dry- 

 ing of tobacco, and to heat brooders. 



In the pulp and paper mills, much 

 the same development is going on. 



The enigma of lignin is being at- 

 tacked by Government and privately 

 financed research in the hope of find- 

 ing uses for it. As knowledge of this 

 complex substance grows, it is recog- 

 nized as a potential source of valuable 

 industrial chemicals. It is now used as 

 a dispersing agent for portland cement, 

 in the negative plates of storage batter- 

 ies, and for the production of vanillin 

 and tannins. The evaporated sulfite 

 liquor in which it occurs is used as a 

 binder for foundry cores, in linoleum 

 cement, and as a road-surface binder. 



As a source of valuable chemicals, 

 wood is winning greater interest year 

 by year. Chemists are gradually devis- 

 ing new methods of extracting those 

 chemicals at economic cost levels, with 



their eyes trained primarily on the 

 scrap piles now completely unused. 



Sawdust can be transformed into 

 grain alcohol, vitamin-rich yeast, and 

 molasses for stock feed, and, along with 

 small percentages of pulp binders, into 

 serviceable building boards. Alcohol is 

 being manufactured from the spent 

 liquors of sulfite pulp mills. Molasses 

 produced from wood residues at the 

 Forest Products Laboratory is being fed 

 experimentally to cattle, hogs, and 

 chickens to establish its feed value. 



But the task of utilizing wood resi- 

 due does not end in the laboratory with 

 the discovery of new ways of using it. 

 Commercially feasible processes must 

 be developed, financing obtained, then 

 plants built where steady supplies are 

 assured at practical costs, technical 

 skills developed, and markets found. 

 All those steps are necessary to trans- 

 late research findings into commodities 

 available for purchase and use at a 

 profit to the manufacturers and dis- 

 tributors. Unless the many problems of 

 production and distribution can also 

 be solved, research findings are likely 

 to remain curiosities of the laboratory. 



The attack on the problem of un- 

 used wood residues has to be from 

 many sides. It has to meet local as well 

 as regional and national needs. A 

 single large, centralized plant in the 

 Pacific Northwest can perhaps make 

 yeast, molasses, alcohol, and other in- 

 dustrial chemicals profitably, because 

 of the vast supplies of raw material 

 nearby. In the Lake States and New 

 England, however, where supplies of 

 wood residue are more scattered, the 

 need is for smaller plants set up per- 

 haps as auxiliaries to sawmills and 

 similar primary converters. 



Such small plants have a special sig- 

 nificance for farmers, who own about 

 36 percent of the timber-growing land 

 of the United States more than is held 

 by any other single group of owners. 

 Much of this acreage is not producing 

 at anything like its capacity, largely 

 because profitable utilization and man- 

 agement are not practiced. If, how- 

 ever, new markets for low-grade tim- 



