PRIVATE FOREST-LAND PROBLEMS 
UNSTABLE ownership of large areas of 
forest land, which precludes adequate 
protection and management. 
Multiplicity of intermingled owner- 
ships, which compound the inherent 
difficulties of forest-land management. 
Overlapping, often ill-defined, and 
sometimes conflicting Federal, State, 
and local interests, responsibility, and 
authority. 
Wide variation in objectives between 
classes of ownership and within the 
same ownership classes. 
Inadequate technical knowledge of 
how to handle forest lands. 
Difficulty, with present extension 
facilities, of making existing knowledge 
available to the extremely large number 
of scattered forest owners. 
Special handicaps of small unorgan- 
ized owners, who in the aggregate 
control 139 million acres of com- 
mercial forest land: Manufacturing and 
marketing facilities; management 
problems, etc. 
The problem of completing the 
change which has already begun, of the 
philosophy of forest owners from that 
of liquidation to that of forest manage- 
ment. 
Inequitable tax practices. 
Hazards of fire, insects, and disease. 
Underdevelopment of new uses and 
markets for wood. 
The lack of suitable forest credit 
facilities for industrial and nonfarm 
forest owners. 
Twenty-five million acres of idle for- 
est land in need of planting. Millions 
more in semiproductive condition in 
need of rehabilitation. 
THESE are some of the private forest-land 
problems. Their solution is a matter not 
for the private owner alone, nor for the 
public alone just because it has an interest 
in private forest lands. Action by both is 
required and is equitable. 
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