14 



BULLETIN 523, TJ. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



Table 9. — Proportion of the ash himbcr cut in the United States contributed 

 by different regions in different years. 



Region. 



1S99 



1909 



1910 



1912 



1915 



(1) New England 



(2) Middle Atlantic 



(3) Lake States (Michigan, Wisconsin, 



and Minnesota) 



(4) Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, 



Kentucky, and Tennessee 



(5) South Atlantic and Alabama 



(6) Lower Mississippi Valley, including 



Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, 

 Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. . . 



(7) Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and South 



Dakota 



(8) Washington, Oregon, and California. . . 



Total 



Per cent. 

 1.5 

 5.1 



38.3 



30.8 

 4.9 



17.9 



.1 

 1.4 



Per cent. 

 5.0 

 8.6 



19.2 



32.6 

 6.5 



27.6 



100.0 



Per cent. 

 5.5 

 7.4 



19.3 



32.8 

 5.7 



Per cent. 

 5.2 

 9.3 



13.7 



36.9 

 6.9 



27.3 



Per cent. 

 5.5 

 10.0 



13.8 



31.0 

 8.6 



30.5 



100.0 



100.0 



100.0 



Per cent. 



4.5 

 8.3 



14.9 



31.4 



8.2 



100.0 



THE SUPPLY OF ASH TIMBER. 



About two-thirds of the present supply of ash is second growth, 

 chiefl3' in small timber tracts and wood lots attached to farms, and 

 about one-third is virgin timber, chiefly in large tracts. Usually it 

 forms less than 5 per cent of the stand in which it grows. Black ash 

 in the Lake States and green ash in the lower Mississippi Valley 

 often form from 20 to 25 per cent of the original stand, but these 

 original supplies are rapidly becoming exhausted and will seldom 

 be reproduced. The green ash, however, is for the most part on 

 agricultural land which ultimately will be drained and .used for 

 farming. At the present rate of cutting the supply of virgin ash 

 will be practically exhausted in the next 10 years; but this does not 

 mean that the annual cut will be very greatly diminished in the next 

 decade, as it is already largely dependent on second growth. Fur- 

 thermore, ash is a tree which, with a little encouragement, will main- 

 tain or increase the proportions it forms of second-growth stands on 

 sites where it originally occurred naturally''. 



Within the geographical range of the three important commer- 

 cial species — wh4te, green, and black ash — there are approximately 

 400,000,000 acres of w^oodland; but not over 4 per cent of this area 

 has even a thin natural stand of ash such as would have an average 

 increase by growth of, sa}'-, 10 board feet of ash per acre annually. 

 This indicates that the maximum annual growth of ash to be ex- 

 pected in the United States is 100,000,000 feet, and the probability 

 is that it will be considerably less. With the exhaustion of the virgin 

 ash timber, therefore, it would be well, in order that the supply of 

 ash may be maintained, to reduce the annual cut to something less 

 than 150,000,000 feet, unless intensive forest management of the 

 genus is undertaken on a considerable scale. This does not take 

 into consideration, on the one hand, decrease in area of woodland 



