Ficure 22.—About 7 million acres of slash and longleaf pine in Florida are on poor-quality forest land, which has limited 
timber-growing possibilities. (Photo courtesy Florida Forest Service.) 
about 100 years to grow 10 thousand board feet per 
acre on the best of these areas. This amounts to a 
mean annual growth of only 100 board feet. Many 
areas are not so productive as this; areas such as the 
dry oak ridges and some of the poorly drained flats 
with an underlying hardpan are so poor that even 
old-growth trees seldom exceed 12 to 14 inches in 
diameter. 
The prospect of growing pulpwood timber on a 
short rotation on these poor sites is better. Pine on 
many of these sites makes fairly rapid growth for the 
first 30 or 40 years. When fully stocked they could 
be expected to grow from 15 to 20 cords of pulpwood 
per acre in 40 years or, on the average, nearly a half 
cord per acre per year. The big problem is to keep 
these poorer sites stocked with timber. 
More than half of the area of slash pine type 
growing on poor-quality forest land is in South 
Florida; another 19 percent is in the central part of 
the State. Four-fifths of the longleaf pine on poor 
sites is on dry, sandy ridge land in Northwest and 
Central Florida. 
In addition to the longleaf and slash pine on poor 
land, there are 770,000 acres of pond and sand pine 
which, in general, have rather low timber-growing 
potentialities. Also, nearly two million acres of dry, 
sandy ridge land are covered with scrub oak (fig. 23). — 
A large part of this area once had fair stands of 
longleaf pine. If some way could be found to elim-— 
inate the scrub oak cheaply, the land could be plant- 
ed and much of it could be expected to grow from 
a fourth to a half cord of pulpwood per acre per 
year and a limited amount of small sawlogs. 
Less than a fifth of the cypress and lowland hard-_ 
wood types is on poor-quality forest land. This is 
land on which mature hardwood trees on the aver- 
age do not have more than one merchantable 16-foot 
log in them. 
In addition to the commercial forest land, in 1949 
Florida had more than a million acres of idle agri- 
cultural land. Some of this, of course, soon may go 
back into agricultural production, but a substantial — 
part will never be cultivated again and is available 
for timber production. Much of this abandoned 
cropland has good timber-growing possibilities. Many 
13- to 15-year-old slash pine plantations in Florida 
show an average growth of more than 2 cords per 
acre per year. 
28 Forest Resource Report No. 6, U. S. Department of Agriculture 
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