seed. Then you put the seed where it will be happy and in a couple 

 of years you have a pine or spruce tree as long as your little finger. - 

 Then you pick out the ground to set it in, and that is easier than with 

 some other plants. You can't look at a field and tell just how good a 

 place it is for buckwheat or timothy, but if you have a piece of land 

 covered with big old pine and spruce stumps, you dont' have to be a 

 soil chemist to find out whether pine or spruce will grow again where 

 they have once done well. 



But one does not like to use rose ground for sunflowers or corn 

 ground for buckwheat. Each crop belongs in its place. We could 

 raise a lot of very fine cottonwood in the corn belt country, but we 

 never will. Each crop should go into its appointed place. If we want 

 to raise timber we ought to find out where it can be grown to the best 

 advantage, everything considered. That is a very simple matter. 



MANY ACRES OF "WASTE." 



Michigan, for instance, has something over 10,000,000 acres of idle 

 land which once grew fine pine, but which is now idle land. Wisconsin 

 and Minnesota have twice as much of that land as has Michigan. 

 Georgia has 20,000,000 acres, and a dozen other states have from 

 5,000,000 to 15,000,000 acres each of idle, cut-over, logged-off, non- 

 productive, "waste" land. 



As a matter of fact, we have so much idle former forest land that it 

 has become embarrassing. Germany is bigger than France, and Texas 

 is bigger than Germany. If you blocked up the cut-over forest lands 

 of the United States and put them down over Texas, they would cover 

 that sizable state and thousands of square miles would stick out over 

 the edges. If you wanted to survey those cut-over lands and cross 

 each square mile once, and had an airplane, and made 100 miles an 

 hour, and traveled 10 hours a day, your trip would take you the greater 

 part of a year. 



TIME IS A FACTOR. 



So there isn't any difficulty about finding a suitable place to grow 

 timber if ever we decide we want to do such a thing. Whenever we 

 get ready we can get the seed and the ground is waiting, and that is 

 all there is to it except the matter of time which is required between 

 planting and harvest. A tree takes its own time about growing, and 

 no amount of urgency or money can hurry it up very much. But we 

 know how fast the different species grow under different conditions, 

 and we know how long we will have to wait in order to harvest pulp 

 wood or ax handles or bridge timbers. The average tree from which 

 our common lumber is coming is around 250 years old. Most of our 

 paper is made from spruce, and the average spruce cut for pulp is over 

 100 years old. But, by matching the right species to the right soil, and 

 helping out here and there, we know how to get a right decent sawlog 

 in 100 years or even less, and we know how to grow a very satisfactory 

 kind of pulp wood in less than 50 years. 



TIME TO START FORESTS. 



Considering all these things, it would seem that the only important 

 thing left was to determine whether we wanted to begin raising timber 

 as a crop, and if so, just when. And if the Bureau of Corporations is 

 right in saying that our old virgin sawlog timber will be gone at the 

 present rate of consumption in 60 years, and if it is true that the pulp 



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