Yearbook of Agriculture 1949 



The decline has meant scarcity of 

 good timber in many parts of the 

 country. This has resulted in cutting 

 much young timber before it is mature. 

 Many small mills are cutting 6-inch 

 trees. For much of the South, the 

 average pine saw- timber tree in 1945 

 was 20 percent smaller than a decade 

 earlier. In the Mississippi Delta, many 

 hardwood mills are operating on logs 

 one-half or one-third as large as for- 

 merly. Even in the Douglas-fir region 

 of the Pacific Northwest, the cut of 

 second-growth timber reached 25 per- 

 cent of the total output in 1947. 



In North and South, the demand 

 for pulpwood, mine timbers, box-grade 

 lumber, and other items that can be 

 cut from small trees also contributes 

 to premature cutting. In a vicious cir- 

 cle, all this tends to perpetuate and 

 worsen the shortage of larger timber. 



Quality also is lowered. The fine 

 logs needed by many forest industries 

 are no longer abundant. High grad- 

 ing cutting the best trees and leaving 

 the poor trees destructive cutting, 

 and fire have replaced valuable timber 

 with inferior stands. 



In southern New England and parts 

 of the Middle Atlantic States, the de- 

 terioration of sprout hardwood for- 

 ests by repeated cutting, fire, and the 

 chestnut blight has left little timber 

 that is attractive to lumbermen. In 

 fact, forest management there is handi- 

 capped by the difficulty of disposing of 

 the inferior growth that preempts so 

 much of the land. 



In the Lake States, between 1936 

 and 1945, the volume of white and 

 red pine saw timber dropped 29 per- 

 cent, and beech, birch, and maple 

 together declined 16 percent; the vol- 

 ume of the less desirable aspen, how- 

 ever, increased 55 percent. 



In the South, longleaf pine has been 

 succeeded by scrub oak on more than 

 2 million acres, mostly in Florida. 

 Heavy cutting in the pine-hardwood 

 stands, taking pine to a smaller di- 

 ameter than hardwood, has allowed 

 hardwoods of increasingly inferior 

 quality to take over. The total cubic- 



foot volume of softwood timber in 9 

 Southern States from Georgia to Texas 

 decreased 4 percent from the early 

 1930's to 1945, but the hardwood vol- 

 ume increased 5 percent. Hardwood 

 saw timber declined almost as fast as 

 the pine. In the Appalachian Moun- 

 tains, removal of yellow-poplar and 

 the better oaks often reduced the re- 

 maining forest to an unmerchantable 

 condition from which it has been slow 

 to recover. 



In the West, the utilization of white 

 pine, ponderosa pine, and sugar pine 

 often has left a forest in which less 

 desirable species predominate. 



Only one-fourth of the remaining 

 acreage of virgin timber meets the high 

 standards generally associated with 

 that class of timber: Heavy stands of 

 large, high-quality trees of good species 

 with little defect. The timber on one- 

 third of the virgin acreage is of doubt- 

 ful value long past its prime, defec- 

 tive, and often of inferior species. 



As a result of rapid exploitation of 

 private timber and of a conservative 

 policy since the turn of the century 

 in opening up the public forests both 

 related to economic circumstances 

 43 percent of the saw timber now 

 stands on the 25 percent of the com- 

 mercial forest land that is publicly 

 owned. In the West, almost one-half 

 the timber is in the national forests, 

 and 15 percent is in other public own- 

 ership ; less than 40 percent is privately 

 owned. But the 397 billion board feet 

 of private timber in the West, mostly 

 in Washington, Oregon, and Califor- 

 nia, is generally more accessible and of 

 better quality than the public timber. 

 In the East, 93 percent of the timber 

 is privately owned. 



More than one-fourth of the private 

 timber is on the farms. The farm-tim- 

 ber resources are indispensable to the 

 national supply. Properly managed, 

 they can be a more stable and better 

 source of farm income. 



Private timber in other than farm 

 holdings is the major source of raw ma- 

 terial for the timber industries. How 

 much of the 670 billion board feet in 



