18 CIRCULAR 661, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
typical offer), instead cut the timber himself, hauled it to market, 
and received $1,197 for it, at a cash expense of only $160. Not only 
did he receive five times the price originally offered, but he also was 
able to leave his woods in good condition for regrowth, whereas 
woodlands entrusted to contractors, whose sole aim is maximum 
immediate profit, are generally devastated. 
Another, and in fact the basic cause of low farm-timber returns is 
woods depletion. To obtain greater returns, greater timber yields are 
fundamentally necessary. There is no lack of demand for forest 
products in this region, which now imports large quantities of forest 
products of types which may be grown on farms, and apparently will 
continue to do so. Greater returns, then, can come in the long run 
only from a well stocked and continuously productive forest made so 
through protection from grazing and good management in harvesting. 
Cld-growth forest subjected year after year to grazing is trans- 
formed by degrees into open wooded pasture having no young tree 
growth to replace the timber stand. First, all seedlings and very 
small trees are browsed off, and at this point the forest ceases to re- 
produce. As time passes, the largest trees in the stand die or are cut, 
leaving bare openings. Finally, where not long before stood a virgin 
forest, no trees remain except a few veterans scattered over an area 
covered with sod. Many farm woods in the Lake States, especially in 
the southern part, have now reached this final stage of depletion. 
Again, poor cutting practices and inadequate protection are respon- 
sible for much farm-woods depletion. Farmers who cut their own 
timber seldom resort to clear cutting, but the form of partial cutting 
which they practice often amounts more nearly to a creaming process 
than to stand improvement. In many stands, cutting of the more 
desirable kinds of trees and of the better-formed trees has resulted in 
increasing the proportion of inferior timber. Fire has had an im- 
portant part in the depletion of farm woods in the past, and in the 
northern forest belt still causes considerable losses. Some settlers 
burn their woods as a preliminary to clearing, and the fires often 
spread over wide territories before being extinguished. About 1.5 to 
2 percent of the northern woodland area is burned over in an average 
year. 
About five-sixths of the farm woodland of the Lake States is in 
various stages of conversion from dense forest to open pasture or 
brush land. Only one-sixth is being cared for in a way which favors 
perpetuation of the timber stand. In the northern forest belt, for 
instance, of 50 farm woodlands studied in the vicinity of Littlefork, 
Minn., not 10 percent were being handled in a manner to avert deple- 
tion; and a similar study in Antrim County, Mich., though it showed 
more favorable conditions, revealed only 400 out of a total of 1,400 
woodlands, or less than one-third, that were fairly well managed. In 
Carver County, Minn., in the southern woodland belt, only 14 percent 
of the farm woodland is free of serious damage. 
In some parts of the region, such as the more intensively farmed 
areas of the southern counties, farm tenancy has an important bearing 
upon the farm-woodland situation. Few tenants take even the slight 
interest in the farm woods which is taken by owners; and while farm 
