62 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



February 



nterest their growth will represent 

 upon the capital invested in the land. 

 It is not the intention of the Bureau to 

 foist upon you any European system of 

 forestry not adapted to your needs, but 

 only to recommend, upon the basis of a 

 thorough investigation, modifications of 

 your present methods when such modi- 

 fications will yield good returns. For 

 example, let us suppose that you are 

 cutting pine of merchantable size for 

 lumber, and putting smaller pine into 

 cross-ties. It would be the province of 

 the Bureau to determine whether or 

 not it would pay you best to allow all 

 pine to reach lumber size and simply 

 cut ties out of the tops, thus taking 

 advantage of the more rapid growth of 

 the smaller trees. In the same way 

 you will often have to determine whether 

 it is more profitable for you to tap small 

 trees for turpentine or to let them grow 

 until you can cut them for lumber. The 

 forester can answer this question on a 

 basis, not of surmise, but of a com- 

 parison of the value of these trees for 

 turpentine and for lumber based upon 

 actual measurement of how long it \vill 

 take them to make lumber. Man}* of 

 you are now using countless numbers 

 of thrifty young pine for spur ties, for 

 corduroy, for bridges, and for skids. 

 The forester can tell you what these 

 young trees are worth, because he can 

 find out from actual measurements how 

 long it will take them to make lumber 

 and how much lumber they will make. 

 And he will in many cases show you 

 that you are throwing money away in 

 using young pine trees for such pur- 

 poses, and that you can save this waste 

 by utilizing instead the tops of logged 

 trees, culls, or trees of a kind less valua- 

 ble than pine. In principle, practical 

 forestry is an exceedingly simple matter; 

 in application it requires trained men, 

 both to solve its problems and to put 

 their solution into effect. 



Whether you will practice forestry or 

 whether you will lumber in the ordinary 

 way is simply a question of whether 

 you will treat your forest as a gold mine, 

 ignoring its productive capacity, or 

 whether you will lumber conservatively 

 at a cost very little higher than under 

 your present methods, and which will 



be repaid you many times over. For- 

 estry can never offer you the spectacu- 

 lar opportunities for the investment of 

 capital which the ordinary lumbering 

 of a practically inexhaustible supply of 

 timber has offered you and your prede- 

 cessors. The trees do not grow fast 

 enough for that. But they grow fast 

 enough to make their preservation a 

 gdod investment, and, with protection 

 from fire, an eminently safe one. You 

 are inclining more and more strongly 

 toward greater capitalization of your 

 mills and logging equipment and toward 

 greater concentration in your logging 

 operations. The era of the portable 

 sawmill is practically over. There are 

 few areas left in which a man can skim 

 the cream of the timber and let the rest 

 remain. You are cutting closer and 

 closer year by year and you are attempt- 

 ing by improved machinery to offset the 

 disadvantages of poorer timber and less 

 accessible sources of supply. 



Improved machinery is an excellent 

 thing ; economy in the mill is admira- 

 ble also ; but these alone will never 

 solve the urgent problem before you. 

 It is only by economy in the w r oods that 

 you can, where there is reasonable safety 

 from fire and where other conditions are 

 favorable, make your plant, so to speak, 

 self-supporting. If you omit economy 

 in the woods, all economy elsewhere will 

 only serve to postpone somewhat the 

 time when your mill must shut down. 

 It is perfectly natural that you should 

 not turn with eagerness toward forestry, 

 because you are just at the end of an 

 era in which a plentiful supply of tim- 

 ber rendered it unnecessary for you to 

 practice it. But now there is the ques- 

 tion immediately before many of you 

 whether you will lumber in such a way 

 that you may keep your mill running 

 continuously and draw a fair profit from 

 your operations, or whether you will 

 skin the land, shut down the mill, and 

 look elsewhere for an opportunity to 

 carry out the same policy. The former 

 method means in the vast majority of 

 cases a safe and conservative business 

 enterprise yielding fair and assured re- 

 turns ; under the latter method you may 

 make more money for a little w'hile, but 

 you will inevitably in the end be forced 



