Forests in Poor Condition to Grow Timber 
DD 
More Than Half the Forest Land is Poorly 
Stocked 
HE poor condition of the forest growing 
stock, rather than a lack of productive 
capacity of the forest land, keeps Florida 
from growing more timber. The main reason why 
timber growth is so low in Florida is that so much 
of the forest land is lying idle when it could be grow- 
ing trees. In 1949, 12.4 million acres, 58 percent, of 
the forest land was either unstocked or poorly stocked 
with sound trees of commercially valuable species. 
Some of this land, of course, is recently cut-over 
land and other land which can be expected to restock 
naturally in a reasonable time if protected from re- 
peated wildfires. However, 7.1 million acres do not 
have enough seed trees to insure reasonably prompt 
natural restocking. Four-fifths of this large area 
without adequate seed trees is poor-site land (fig. 
24); 3.7 million acres is pine types and 1.9 million 
is upland hardwood and scrub oak types. Virtually 
all of the land without enough seed trees on the fair 
and good sites, 1.5 million acres, is slash and long- 
leaf pine land. 
FOREST LAND 
MILLION ACRES 
Y UPLAND HARDWOOD AND 
jen tres YY) caus oak TYPES 
Figure 24.—Distribution of poorly stocked land without 
adequate seed trees, by site quality and forest type, Flor- 
ida, 1949. 
KEK 
The poorly stocked forest land without seed trees 
is distributed throughout the State but is especially 
prevalent in Central and South Florida and in sev- 
eral counties of Northwest Florida. Over half, 3.8 
million acres, of the total lies in the central and 
scuthern part where much of the forest land is poor 
in site quality. Another three-fourths of a million 
acres are on the dry sand ridges of Okaloosa, Walton, 
Washington, and Calhoun Counties west of Talla- 
hassee. 
The distribution of the nonrestocking forest land 
on the fair and good sites differs from that on the 
poor sites. This 1.5 million acres, which would rate 
first priority in a planting program, lies almost en- 
tirely north of Lake Okeechobee and occurs only 
sparingly in the western part of the State. About 
700,000 acres are in Northeast Florida. 
More Than a Third of the Live Trees Are 
Culls 
A serious obstacle to natural restocking and plant- 
ing alike is the large number of low-grade trees on 
many areas (fig. 25). In 1949, 37 percent of all the 
live trees in the State were culls. These are trees 
which are so rotten or so rough and deformed that, 
at the present time at least, it would not pay to cut 
them for sawlogs. They also include the trees under 
saw-tiumber size that are so defective and deformed 
that they show no promise of ever becoming mer- 
chantable for sawlogs. Various species of oak, mainly 
scrub oak, make up the largest share of the cull 
trees (fig. 26). As pointed out previously, some of 
these poor-quality trees are suitable for pulpwood or 
' fuel wood. However, they greatly reduce stand pro- 
ductivity by taking up space that could be occupied 
by trees of more desirable form and species. 
Mainly because of the dense stocking of scrub 
oaks, large areas of the dry, sandy ridge land which 
formerly grew commercial stands of longleaf pine 
have completely failed to restock following cutting. 
For the same reason, even where an adequate seed 
30 Forest Resource Report No. 6, U. S. Department of Agriculture 
