164 



The Dawn of a New Constructive Era 



least in a few instances every success has attended the burning 

 of these stumps by that simple process of digging a post hole, 

 boring an augur hole down through the stump and letting it 

 dry out, and then building a fire in that post hole so that this 

 augur hole will act as a flue and will contain so much rosin that 

 it will readily burn out in most cases. 



Now, the men who demonstrated that the average of these 

 lands could be cleared at a price not to exceed $10 per acre, by 

 contract, has attracted a wonderful lot of notice which is of value 

 from a business standpoint in the handling of this problem. If I 

 were a farm operator, that information would be very valuable 

 to me ; but we have not yet gotten to the point where we can 

 get hold of this information at a given time. We are given some 

 of it merely in fragments. 



Now I come to another point, which I hesitate to broach and 

 which I do on my personal responsibility rather than as an of- 

 ficial of the United States Department of Agriculture. It has 

 been suggested that some form of organization be perfected here 

 Land Owners by which all the information thus developed can be consolidated, 

 and that definite arrangements be made by which additional in- 

 formation will be gotten and made available for all parties in- 

 terested in this great problem. Now, if we look to see what has 

 been done, we find the Federal Government and the several 

 States are only touching this problem very lightly. Some of 

 them have several experiment stations and demonstration farms 

 and have developed certain information which can be had for 

 those particular localities. There are probably several hundred 

 lumber companies which maintain demonstration farms and ex- 

 periment stations, or whatever you choose to call them. I be- 

 lieve most of them are small demonstration farms where they 

 are getting a lot of valuable information ; but they put that in- 

 formation in their files in their offices and use it for their own 

 purposes, and no one else profits by it ; and more especially do 

 we not get that information which is of an adverse nature, and 

 which sometimes is worth more to us than the positive facts de- 

 veloped. When you get a warning what not to do, you are just 

 as well off as when you get information as to what you should 

 do; because in the one case you positively have a loss, and in 

 the other you merely have an opportunity to make a gain. If 

 the interests of these cut-over pine land owners could be con- 

 solidated in such manner that all the information, both pro and 



Should Ex- 

 change Infor- 

 mation 



