348 REPORT, OF THE FORESTRY COMMITTEE 



of their importance make possible closer utilization in a given timber stand may 



be stated as follows, placing the most important first: 



1. Ready Markets. 



3. Cheap Transportation. 



3. Character of Timber. 



4. Efficient Management. 

 6. Proper Equipment. 



The examples to be given later will be sufficient to prove that ready markets 

 are by far the most important factors in timber utilization. Next, without ques- 

 tion, comes the cost of transportation. If the cost of transporting the logs is not 

 too great, a saw mill may be located in a thriving town or city where there is an 

 immediate market for its waste products. In some cases logs are now taken two 

 hundred miles by rail to the sawmill; the operation is profitable because of the 

 low freight rate on the logs and an excellent market for the by-products. The 

 raising of the log rate might at once compel the owner to transfer his manu- 

 facturing from the city to the woods so that he would lose practically all the 

 market for by-products. This would cause a great waste of timber, but it might 

 be an absolutely necessary outcome of a Railroad Commission decision. In- 

 stances of this kind have recently occurred. 



The character of the timber has very much to do with the closeness of its 

 utilization; a scattered stand of defective or inferior trees may cost more to log 

 than the resulting lumber will sell for, while a dense stand of good timber may be 

 utilized with profit down to the last stick. 



Of course, many lumber plants are not efficiently managed, neither are many 

 other business enterprises of similar magnitude. Possibly there has been less 

 efficiency of management in lumber plants, according to modern standards of 

 efficiency, because the lumberman is more a product of hard conditions in the 

 School of Experience than he is of engineering colleges and accounting depart- 

 ments. However, competition is producing, through sheer necessity, a more effi- 

 cient type of management, and many of the second generation of lumbermen, with 

 greater advantages than their fathers, are bringing a scientific training to the 

 solution of their problems. 



The manufacturer of lumber is in a class by himself ; he takes the trees sup- 

 plied by Nature and puts them into merchantable form; he has nothing to do 

 with the quality or the quantity ; if there is a market for the whole tree he puts 

 it into the forms demanded ; if there is no market, he has to leave the tree in the 

 woods ; he cannot make lumber to suit the inclination of every customer nor can 

 he make lumber to suit his own inclination. A lumberman of many years' ex- 

 perience has said in a public address : 



"The manufacturer in rnost lines takes the raw material and, by various 

 processes makes it into a finished commodity, that has very little! if any re- 

 semblance to the raw material, and if his methods of manufacture are right 

 he makes a perfect article. ' 



"You can go to the dry goods merchant, buy a yard of muslin, a bolt 

 of muslin or a thousand bolts of muslin, and should one prove defective it 

 can be returned to the manufacturer who can trace the defect to the careless 

 operator, or to a defective machine, and eliminate the cause of the defect 



