646 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



agriculture. In the long run, fully sixty per cent of the 

 forests of the country will be in relatively small holdings 

 and must be developed in correlation with the intermingled 

 farm lands. Many of these small holdings will be owned 

 by farmers and be managed as a part of their farm enter- 

 prise. The Government work that has to do with this 

 class of lands will have to be administered by the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture. This Department would require a 

 corps of men and an efficient organization of its own, 

 even if there were a separate bureau of forestry in an- 

 other department. We would immediately have the sort 

 of duplication that is today so seriously criticized, and 

 we would have a much less efficient handling of the work 

 than would be the case under a single organization re- 

 sponsible for all of the forest work of the Government. 



* * * 



2. While the National Forests render a national serv- 

 ice thix)ugh the protection of interstate rivers and through 

 the conservation of a supply of timber for the future, 

 the first benefits of this public enterprise are to the com- 

 munities, industries and individuals located in their vicin- 

 ity. In point of numbers the majority of the users of the 

 National Forests are small ranch men. The most con- 

 spicuous results that have been obtained from the Nation- 

 al Forests have been through their influence in stabilizing 

 and building up on a permanent basis hundreds of rural 

 communities within and near them. Their influence in 

 strengthening a prosperous rural civilization cannot be 

 overestimated. The fact that the Forest Service has had 

 this conception, which is also that of the Department of 

 Agriculture in its other work, explains the success of the 



undertaking. 



* * * 



3. The two greatest tasks in the administration of the 

 National Forests are first, the production and use of trees, 

 and second, the production and use of forage. Both of 

 these problems require technical administration, that is, 

 an administration based upon the knowledge of plant life 

 and growth. The primary service of the Forests is 

 through the trees upon these public properties. How- 

 ever, there is a large amount of excellent range which 

 is being utilized by live stock without injury to the forest 

 growth. A system of grazing administration has been 

 built up that is based on a technical knowledge of forage 

 production and conservation. This in itself is an agricul- 

 tural problem ; it could not have been solved except 

 through agricultural experts. The handling of the Na- 

 tional Forests is not a function similar to that of the ad- 

 ministration of the unreserved public lands. The Ad- 

 ministration of the public domain has been throughout our 

 history primarily one of disposing of lands to private in- 

 dividuals through the general land laws. It has not been 

 a problem of utilizing lands held under permanent own- 

 ership by the Government and applying to them the 

 principles of crop production, as is being done with the 

 timber and grass in the National Forests. 



Nor is the administration of the National Forests pri- 

 marily an engineering enterprise. There are many en- 

 gineering features in the handling of any land project. 



The major work of building roads is now handled by the 

 Bureau of Public Roads and the Forest Service has not 

 built up an independent corps of engineers. Under the 

 widest interpretation not over twenty-two per cent of the 

 appropriations for the Forest Service are spent for en- 

 gineering work. If we leave out of consideration the 

 money for road building which is expended on behalf of 

 the Forest Service by another bureau, the sort of en- 

 gineering work conducted on the public forests is analo- 

 gous to that of any organized agricultural enterprise. 



* * 



4. It has been suggested that the Forest Service should 

 be in the Department of the Interior, because of the large 

 number of questions of land titles and similar matters 

 in which the General Land Office has a part. In point of 

 fact, there is no more need that the Forest Service should 

 be in the same Department as the General Land Office 

 than that it should be in the Department of Justice where 

 constantly there are many cases of litigation which must 

 be handled by the Attorney General. On the other hand, 

 it is of vital importance for the Forest Service to be in 

 close relationship with the Bureau of Animal Industry 

 in connection with problems of live stock; with the Bu- 

 reau of Plant Industry, which has experts studying the 

 diseases of trees, questions of plants poisonous to live 

 stock, problems of forage production, etc. ; with the Bu- 

 reau of Entomology, whose experts are studying injurious 

 insects and methods of combating them ; with the Bu- 

 reau of Biological Survey, which cooperates with the 

 Forest Service in protecting the wild life in the forests, 

 in exterminating prairie dogs and other animals destruc- 

 tive of useful plant life, and in the reduction of wolves, 

 coyotes and other predatory animals that prey on live 

 stock and useful game; and with the Bureau of Public 

 Roads, whose engineers supervise the construction of the 

 many road projects in the National Forests. In a sense 

 the whole organization of the Department of Agriculture 

 is participating in the work of the administration of 

 the National Forests. A great loss would be suffered by 

 interrupting such a successful organization of effort. 



* * * 



5. In its work of extending the application of forestry 

 to private lands the Forest Service works in part through 

 direct educational means and in part through cooperation 

 with agencies of the different States and with private 

 owners. Where the work touches agricultural communi- 

 ties the Forest Service utilizes to a large extent the exist- 

 ing cooperative organization of the Department of Ag- 

 riculture. The transfer of the Forest Service to another 

 Department would enormously complicate such coopera- 

 tion, if it did not practically put a stop to it. 



* * * 



6. Finally the research work in forestry is very closely 

 related to other research in the Department of Agricul- 

 ture. The studies in tree growth, forest production, natu- 

 ral reproduction, tree planting, and the like are studies of 

 plant life. This is a distinctive field of the Department 

 of Agriculture. The same is true also of the technologi- 

 cal studies now conducted at the Madison Laboratory. 



