range lands is likely to be affected in 
the future by changes in area. 
These trends in forest and rangeland 
areas will be influenced somewhat by 
the Food Security Act of 1985, which 
established the Conservation Reserve 
Program and offered incentives for 
landowners to enroll acreages of highly 
erodible cropland for conversion to 
grass or forest land. The law intends 
that landowners enroll not less than 40 
million nor more than 45 million acres 
in the program. To the extent 
practicable, not less than one-eighth of 
the acreage placed in the conservation 
reserve shall be devoted to trees. In 
part because of this program, we 
project the area of rangeland to 
increase from today’s 770 million acres 
to 820 million acres. 
Although the Conservation Reserve 
Program should add several million 
acres to the forest land base, an even 
larger area of existing forest land is 
expected to be converted to other uses. 
The net loss is expected to be about 28 
million acres by 2040, mainly in the 
South and Pacific coast regions. Much 
of the loss in forest land is due to 
conversions associated with roads and 
urban space utilized by a growing 
population. 
Timber Demand— 
Supply—The Outlook 
Outlook Overview 
e Demands for all of the major timber 
products are expected to increase over 
the next 5 decades. 
e Total demands for hardwoods from 
the domestic timber resource are 
expected to increase 79 percent, and for 
softwoods, 35 percent. 
e Changes in technology that affect 
product recovery from roundwood and 
increased recycling of paper and 
paperboard are reflected in projections. 
e Harvest on forest industry lands is 
projected to increase 31 percent, to 7.2 
billion cubic feet in 2040, reflecting the 
assumption that these lands will be 
managed intensively in the future. 
e Harvest on other private lands is 
projected to increase 70 percent, to 
15.6 billion cubic feet in 2040. 
e For national forests, harvest levels 
are assumed to reach the sum of 
harvests for the final forest plans and 
the preferred alternatives where plans 
are not yet final by 2000 and to follow 
these plans after 2000, reaching 2.4 
billion cubic feet in 2040 compared 
with 2.0 billion cubic feet in recent 
years. 
e Supplies from other public lands are 
assumed relatively constant at recent 
harvest levels (1.35 billion cubic feet). 
e Supplies will meet demands in the 
U.S. market, but prices will be higher. 
e If global climate or other changes in 
the natural environment were to cause 
extensive reductions in timber growth, 
this would have major impacts on the 
domestic situation, with the effects 
building over time. 
Trends in Timber Use and 
Projected Demands 
Between 1950 and 1980, there was a 
slight upward trend in lumber 
consumption, punctuated by well- 
defined short-term fluctuations (fig. 9). 
Demand for lumber follows cycles in 
new housing starts and other general 
measures of the economy. For 
example, the severe recession of the 
early 1980’s caused a decline in 
housing that forced a drop in lumber 
demand. This was followed in the mid- 
1980°s by record consumption brought 
on by reduced interest rates that 
stimulated both new housing and repair 
and remodeling of existing structures. 
Demand for softwood plywood rose 
rapidly through the decades of the 
1950°s and 1960’s, reaching a peak in 
the early 1970’s (fig. 10). Much of this 
growth was due to the substitution of 
plywood for lumber in many end uses. 
By the 1970°s, opportunities for this 
substitution had largely been captured, 
and demand for plywood began to 
follow housing cycles, much as for 
lumber. 
The late 1970’s and 1980’s were years 
of major changes in the plywood and 
structural panel industries. Fiber-based 
structural panels began to make 
significant inroads into markets for 
solid softwood plywood. These fiber- 
based panels have now been accepted 
in the marketplace and should have 
major influences on the species and 
quality of roundwood needed in the 
structural panel industry. The new 
panels can be made from almost any 
species of wood, with the preference 
being soft hardwoods such as aspen. 
After the recession of the early 1980’s, 
consumption of structural panels 
reached record levels in response to the 
strong markets of the mid-1980’s. 
Future growth in demand for structural 
panels is expected to be strongest for 
the new fiber-based panels until 2010, 
