2 BULLETIN 1491, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
ing landowners more and more widely to study the possibility of 
profitable reforestation. These developments have created a general 
demand for information on the timber-growing methods which are 
adapted to the various types of forest growth in the United States, 
and on what these methods will cost. 
Timber culture, like the growing of farm crops, is necessarily 
governed in any country by the soil and climate, by the requirements 
of the native forest trees, and by the national economic circum- 
stances. Lessons may be drawn from the experience of other coun- 
tries, as the United States has drawn upon the forestry practice of 
Europe, but profitable methods of growing timber, particularly 
under the wide range of forest types and economic conditions in the 
United States, can be evolved only from our own experience and 
investigation, region by region. Hence to meet the demand for 
information on practical ways and means of growing timber profit- 
ably in the various parts of the United States, it is important that 
the results of our own experience and investigation to date be brought 
together and set forth in the clearest possible way. 
This the Forest Service has attempted to do in a series of publica- 
tions dealing with the 12 principal forest regions of the United 
States. The information presented has been gathered from many 
different sources, including the experience, so far as it was obtainable, 
of landowners who have engaged in reforestation. An effort has 
been made to bring together all that any agency has yet learned or 
demonstrated about the growing of timber in the United States ; and 
the results have been verified as far as possible by consultation with 
the forest industries, State foresters, and forest schools. These pub- 
lications thus undertake to set forth, in a simple form, what are 
believed to be the soundest methods of reforestation as yet developed 
in our common experience and study in the United States. 
Necessarily, the Forest Service claims no finality for the measures 
proposed. Timber growing in every country has come about through 
a gradual evolution in industrial methods and the use of land. All 
too little is yet known of the best methods of growing timber under 
American conditions. As time goes on, research and practical ex- 
perience will add greatly to the success and certainty of the meas- 
ures carried out in our woods, just as American agriculture has 
steadily become more highly developed or just as our manufactur- 
ing processes have been perfected through experience and study. 
But we know enough about growing timber now in the forest re- 
gions of the United States to go right ahead. Believing that the 
forest landowners of the United States are now ready to engage 
in timber growing on a large scale, the Forest Service has endeavored 
to place before them in concise terms the best suggestions and guides 
which the experience of this country to date affords. 
In these publications the measures proposed for a particular forest 
region have been arranged in two general groups. The first includes 
the first steps, or the minimum measures based on local physical con- 
ditions, that are needed to prevent timber-bearing land from becom- 
ing barren. These measures, in which the prevention of fire is of 
outstanding importance, represent, broadly speaking, the least that 
must be done and the lowest cost that must be incurred to keep forest 
lands reasonably productive. While influenced in some cases by the 
