16 CIRCULAR 661, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
woods but are sustained largely by timber imported at great cost 
from the Southern and Western States. Timber of the requisite 
kind and quality is still available in the nearby States, but the 
large manufacturers are interested neither in the small, ungraded 
lots offered by individual farmers nor in the poorly sawn and sea- 
soned output of the local portable mills. A medium of contact be- 
tween the farmer and these industries is in most cases utterly lacking. 
It appears that the farm woods in many parts of the Lake States 
could, under good management, contribute a fair share of the region’s 
industrial timber requirements; but that in the long run—important 
as the farm woods will always be—the greater volume must be sup- 
plied by well-managed large timber tracts, whether in public or 
private ownership. 
In addition to the saw timber and other timber which the farm 
woods contribute to wood-using industries, farmers market from 
their woods annually some 41 million board feet of sawlog-size 
timber (mostly in the form of fuel wood and fence posts) and 
923,000 cords of other wood which does not go to wood-using plants. 
The total annual sale amounts to 529 million board feet and 1, 015,000 
cords. In addition, they use on their own farms about 306 million 
board feet of sawlog-size timber and 6.8 million cords of smaller 
timber per year, all taken from their own woodlands. 
Fuel wood is the chief product harvested from farm forests. Next 
in importance are sawlogs and fence posts. Pulpwood, hewn ties, 
bolts, poles, and mine timbers are other leading products, especially 
in the northern belt. 
With their large yields of fuel wood and fence posts, farm forests 
contribute more than half the entire quantity of timber cut in the 
Lake States. 
PRESENT AND POSSIBLE RETURNS FROM FARM WOODS 
The farm timber products marketed by Lake States farmers bring 
them $10,000,000 in cash annually, and those they utilize annually 
on their farms are valued, in rough form, at $34,000,000, making a 
total annual return? of about $44,000, 000, which is ‘comewhed less 
than 5 percent of the annual returns from all products of farms in 
the Lake States. Of this total return, fuel wood represents 79 per- 
cent; sawlogs, 13 percent; and fence posts, 6 percent. Divided among 
the 456, 000 wooded farms of the region, 1t represents an average an- 
nual return of only $96 per farm, or $2. 92 per acre of farm woods— 
and even this is obtained at the expense of depletion of forest capi- 
tal. In view of the fact that farm woods occupy one-fifth of the 
total farm area of the Lake States, and supply more than half the 
total volume of timber (of all kinds) cut in the region, farm-forest 
returns appear very low. 
As might be expected, annual farm-woods returns per acre in the 
northern part of the Lake States are markedly lower than those in 
the southern and western parts. They average $106 per wooded 
farm, or $2.20 per acre of woods. In the southern woodland and 
western prairie belts the value of farm-forest products harvested an- 
**“Return,’’ as the term is used here, means the amount the farmer receives for forest 
products at the farm, representing not only stumpage value but the value of the labor 
expended in cutting and piling. 
