Billion cubic feet 
175 
150 
125 
Economic opportunities 
on cropland and pasture 
100 
75 
50 
1990 2000 
2010 2020 2030 
Figure 4.14—Projections of softwood inventories on private timberland in the South, with and without utilizing the economic 
opportunities on cropland and pasture 
implemented, would raise net annual timber growth by 2.9 
billion cubic feet, a 50-percent increase over current soft- 
wood growth. Most of these opportunities—50 million 
acres, 2.3 billion cubic feet—are on the other private owner- 
ships. 
These are the opportunities that exist now, and some of them 
have been implicitly included in the base projections. As 
described in chapter 3, it was assumed in making the base 
projections that there would be large increases in the area 
of pine plantations, including the conversion to pine of 
mixed pine—-hardwood and upland hardwood stands, and in- 
creases in timber yields resulting from general management 
intensification. These management changes would, of 
course, be concentrated on the lands with the highest poten- 
tial for economic returns—the timberlands identified in chap- 
ter D: 
The analysis of economic opportunities in chapter 5 was 
made with the base projections of stumpage prices. As the 
Oy") 
economic opportunities are utilized and timber inventories 
increased in this simulation, stumpage prices are lowered. 
Consequently, the economic opportunities are reduced. In the 
final equilibrium solution in this simulation, the potential 
increase in net annual growth on private timberland is much 
below the 2.9 billion cubic feet shown in appendix table 
5.1. In addition, it was not practical to quantify the im- 
pacts of the intermediate stand treatments, and those not 
involving area change in management types, in the analyti- 
cal systems used in projecting resource changes. This fact 
is important because it results in excluding about half of the 
area with economic opportunities to increase net annual 
growth. Finally, because of the timing of implementing the 
opportunities, the full increase in timber growth could not 
be realized by the end of the projection period. 
Despite the limitations described above, the impacts of the 
simulation of the economic opportunities on private timber- 
lands are substantial. Softwood timber supplies (harvests), 
net annual growth, and inventories are all higher than the 
