44 FOBESTS OF WISCONSIN. 



FOEESTKY OR AGRICULTURE. . 



The point is raised tkat this land is needed for agricultural 

 purposes; that all of it will soon be settled since even on the 

 poor sand lands improved methods and potato crops have proved 

 a success. While the statement is certainly true of all good 

 clay or loam lands, it applies but doubtfully to over half and 

 certainly not at all to nearly 40 per cent, of this area. How 

 long it takes to improve a territory, how much unproductive 

 waste remains even in the older so-called "well settled" counties 

 appears from the following concrete cases. 



Of old Sauk county not one-half is improved land; the five 

 counties of Adams, Waushara, Juneau, Marquette, and Mon- 

 roe, with an aggregate area of over 2 million acres of uncom- 

 monly level land, have 30 per cent, improved land, or over one 

 -and one-half million acres of waste and brush land, most of which 

 is not even serving the purpose of pasture. Adams, Marquette, 

 and Waushara counties with their 800,000 acres of waste land, 

 instead of having 80 million feet of pine to sell which might be 

 growing every year on its non-productive area, supported in 

 1895 a wood industry whose product amounted to the pitiful 

 sum of $13,000 and probably the material for this was imported. 



But even where the land is good and might all be farmed it 

 remains doubtful whether the forest can entirely be dispensed 

 with. Experience in older countries and the Eastern States 

 speaks against this; the farmers of the fertile prairies are plant- 

 ing trees for the sake of wood, on land of unexcelled fertility. 

 Some of the farmers of Trempealeau and other counties who go 

 20 and more miles, invading jack pine groves for their fuel, find 

 that wood is both too necessary to do without and too bulky to 

 haul far; and valuable as pasture land is to the thrifty farmer 

 of southern Wisconsin, the great importance of a convenient 

 wood supply has led to an actual increase in wooded area in 

 most of the southern counties of the state. 



How soon the 17 million acres of wild land of North Wis- 

 consin will be settled no one can tell; the likelihood is that over 



