12 CIRCULAR 661, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
The north woods district of Wisconsin (district 4) resembles the 
northeastern forest district of Minnesota in the meager development 
of agriculture and in the close connection existing between farming 
and forestry. Here, too, more than half the farms are part-time 
farms. The use of county-owned, tax-reverted lands to provide win- 
ter employment for local settlers is a possibility coming into general 
recognition. In Frog Creek Township, Washburn County, for ex- 
ample, county officials have, for the past several years, arranged for 
winter employment of needy settlers in cutting pulpwood, excelsior 
bolts, and snow-fence bolts. In 1939, the settlers organized their 
own cooperative association for buying stumpage from the county 
and selling the rough products. 
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan (district 8) is, in general, char- 
acterized by the same farm-forest conditions and problems which 
exist in the northern parts of the two other Lake States; it has, how- 
ever, a greater remaining area of old-growth timber, supporting 
large sawmills and other forest industries which provide farmers 
with many opportunities for off-farm employment. As elsewhere in 
the northern forest belt, the undeveloped state of agriculture is re- 
flected in a small farm-land area and in a high ratio of farm wood- 
land to cropland. In the better farming sections, land clearing is 
progressing steadily; in the inferior farming sections, where agricul- 
tural development was early arrested but many farm families still 
cling to their homesteads, httle clearing is under way and on most 
farms the woods are gradually encroaching upon the improved land. 
In the Upper Peninsula as a whole, 52 percent of the farms are operated 
on a part-time basis. 
The northern part of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan (district 
9) is transitional from northern forest to southern woodland. The 
farm woods consist mainly of aspen, scrub oak, jack pine, and young 
second-growth maple. All the old growth and virtually all the 
merchantable hardwood timber has been logged. In the northwest, 
in the vicinity of Antrim County, the problem is how to manage 
farm woods so as to produce part of the timber needed by the 
remaining forest industries. Here a number of important wood- 
using mills, their own timber supplies exhausted in the recent past or 
nearing exhaustion, are now greatly dependent upon farm woods. 
The central part of the district contains large stretches of cut-over 
and burned-over sand plains. On these, both crop farming and 
forest farming are precarious. Rehabilitating these plains through 
timber growth should be a national and State undertaking. Much 
of the land is already in Federal and State ownership, and large-scale 
planting is in progress. Through much of this section there is little 
place for farm woods, though in some parts the farm-forest situation 
resembles that in the central pine district of Wisconsin. Along 
the southern border of the district good farms and farm woodlands 
are numerous. Here, the chief problem is to maintain a supply of 
timber for domestic needs. 
LocaL PropLEMs SUMMARIZED 
The foregoing makes clear that each of the three main geographic 
belts has problems in farm-woods management peculiar to itself, 
differing to some extent among the economic districts described. 
