276 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 

 FOREST DEPLETION AND FREIGHT BILLS 



THE extent to which the country as a whole is be- 

 coming dependent upon the West Coast for its tim- 

 ber supply, and what this means to the consumer in the 

 form of freight bills is rather strikingly illustrated by 

 some statistics issued by the Interstate Commerce Com- 

 mission. These statistics cover freight shipments from 

 the States of Oregon and Washington for a normal 

 month prior to the recent increase in freight rates. They 

 show that prior to that time these two States were ship- 

 ping forest products to every State in the Union 

 Florida with two carloads per month receiving the small- 

 est amount, and Minnesota with 3,615 carloads, the 

 largest. Even New York State, situated as it is clear 

 across the continent, was receiving 412 carloads per 

 month. 



Still more striking is the relation between shipments 

 of forest products and other commodities. Normal 

 monthly shipments from the two States of Washington 

 and Oregon furnished the railroads 32,340 carloads of 

 commodity freight, of which 21,270 carloads were forest 

 products. The total freight revenues amounted to $8,276,- 

 591.80, of which forest products paid $6,508,007.77. In 

 other words, forest products furnished 64.3 per cent of 

 all freight shipments from these two States and 78.6 

 per cent of freight revenues, and as yet the eastern 

 United Sates is hardly more than beginning to draw 

 upon the West Coast for its timber supplies. What will 

 the situation be in another 10 or 15 years, when the 

 present stands of southern yellow pine are largely a 

 thing of the past? 



These figures are illustrative of a situation which is 

 bound to become more acute if prompt action is not 

 taken to put our present non-productive and partially 



productive forest lands to work. The little State of 

 Connecticut, for example, now pays $3,000,000 a year 

 freight bills for the transportation of lumber from other 

 forested regions. This amount is sufficient to replant each 

 year one-eighth of the entire area of forest land in the 

 State. Moreover, if Connecticut had been practicing 

 forestry any such expenditure would be wholly unneces- 

 sary, since under proper management the State could 

 produce its present consumption of saw timber on 86 

 per cent of its present forest area. Practically every 

 State in the Northeast is in much the same position. 



We have now reduced our forest resources in the East 

 and South to the point where 61 per cent of our total 

 stand of saw timber lies west of the Great Plains, and 

 over 50 per cent in the three Pacific Coast States. Our 

 demand upon the latter is becoming heavier each year 

 and with it our freight bills are becoming larger and 

 larger. Recent investigations of a number of large re- 

 tail lumber companies in southern Minnesota showed that 

 the average transportation cost of material handled by 

 them, due primarily to the increasing volume of western 

 lumber which these companies have had to import in 

 order to supply the needs of their territory, had increased 

 262 per cent in the last 15 years. Yet these companies 

 are in a region which only a few years ago was im- 

 mediately contiguous to the greatest lumber producing 

 region of the country, and which might still be a great 

 producer were its idle lands productive. Is it not high 

 time that we took steps to cut our freight bills for forest 

 products and at the same time to remove one of the 

 serious causes of freight car congestion, by adopting a 

 program which will put our 81,000,000 acres of wholly 

 idle and 235,000,000 acres of partially idle lands to work? 



A SPECIOUS FALLACY 



/"i.ME of the greatest obstacles to the practice of 

 ^- , forestry in this country is our failure to really 

 grasp the possibility of continuous forest production. 

 Witness, for example, the following statement, attributed 

 to a prominent statistician in the Department of Agricul- 

 ture : 



"If a lumber mill buys timbeHand sufficient to enable 

 it to operate for ten years, it constructs a railway for 

 logging supplies, and a sawmill, installing all equipment 

 connected with these operations. It may build a town 

 and establish a commissary. It, therefore, becomes 

 proper and necessary for the lumberman to write off the 

 cost of the plant over a period of ten years. And this is 

 what is meant by extinguishment charges." 



For comparative purposes, he is quoted as adding that 

 "depletion is similar but it concerns the exhaustion of the 

 raw material itself." 



This is a strictly logical application of the view that 



when once the forest is cut it is gone for good, or at 

 least for some fifty or a hundred years until a new forest 

 can be grown to take its place. Even those who recog- 

 nize that the forest is a crop and not a mine too often 

 fail to appreciate that it is a crop which can be so handled 

 as to yield annual returns. The natural result of this 

 habit of thought is to regard extinguishment charges 

 and depletion charges and carrying charges as necessary 

 burdens which must be borne by the lumber industry, 

 and, in the end, passed on to the consumer. 



As a matter of fact it is entirely possible to regulate 

 the cutting of a forest not only so that each part will be 

 reproduced, ordinarily by natural means, as rapidly as 

 it is cut, but also so that the part first cut will be ready 

 for logging again by the time the entire area has been 

 covered. The ideal, or "normal," forest is one made up 

 of a series of fully stocked and vigorously growing 

 stands, each of which is one year older than the next 



