16 The Farm Woodlot 



the crop which will bring the highest yield ; the lack of a 

 market may prevent it in another. 



This proper choice of crops seems simple enough, but 

 the idea makes its way very slowly against the customary 

 practice. Because there was no market for a crop ten 

 years ago, it is still avoided to-day, although conditions 

 may have changed so completely that it would now be 

 the best-paying crop on the farm. 



It is this misplaced conservatism that has for so many 

 years kept the woodlot from its proper place in the scheme 

 of farm management. When there were large areas of 

 natural timber, the woodlot products were so plentiful 

 that they had no value, and no one could even imagine 

 the time when they would be scarce. The settlers who 

 occupied the treeless prairie all came from the regions of 

 plentiful timber. They still remembered the back- 

 breaking labor of clearing up the forest, and hesitated to 

 sacrifice any of that beautiful open land to the growth of 

 such a worthless crop — for so it was in their country — 

 as forest trees, even though they were paying excessively 

 high prices for lumber, posts and all the fuel they used. 

 To them every square foot planted to trees was a sacrifice 

 of good, productive land, — land which might be produc- 

 ing what they considered a valuable crop, — to produce 

 something which had no intrinsic value. 



These conditions have changed now in the timbered 

 area, and they never really existed in the prairies. The 

 woodlots in the hills of the forested East to-day yield as 

 high net revenue as some of the more fertile cultivated 

 lands of the valleys, in spite of the utter lack of care and 

 the violent abuses they have suffered. And even the fertile 



