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V 0 1 T VVV Published Weekly by The Rural Publishing Co.. 
333 W. SOth St.. Xew York. Price One Dollar a Yea- 
NEW YORK. DECEMBER 17. 1921 
Entered as Second-Class Matter. .Tune 26. 1S79. at the Post j\t 4(2(20 
Office at New York, K. Y., under the Act of March 3. 1S79. • L> ’• 
The Forestry Prohlem in New York 
U nproductive lands.— some uttie time ago 
f read with considerable interest tli« v article of 
Mr. De Craft' of Jefferson County, on pa so 1099 of 
The R. X.-Y.. relating to the hill lands of Southern 
New York. Mr. De Graff is to he congratulated as 
one of the few who face certain aspects of these 
hill lands of Southern New York as they are. and 
recognizes that for the present.there fire large areas, 
the cultivation of which is not economical under 
a w do range in productive quality and accessibility. 
Along the edges of many of the larger valleys, and 
adjacent to the city, there is much good land on 
these hills, and it supports some very good farms. 
The soils, of course, need careful handling; some of 
them need drainage; most of them need lime, and 
they need attention to vegetable matter and plant 
food, hut they fire not particularly inaccessible to 
roads and markets, and they respond well to good 
market. There is an acute climatic handicap on the 
most elevated of these lands, and that feature is to 
he watched quite as close as the character of the 
soil. Tt produces a short season and an unreliable 
season, which makes successful maturity of crops 
common to that latitude very uncertain. On the 
other hand, the farmer who is already located under 
some of these difficult conditions should recognize 
that his conditions can be improved. There are 
Copyright by Ewing Galloway, Now York. 
Holstein Cattle in Pasture on a New York Farm. Fig. 622. 
present conditions and, therefore, that it is unwise 
to encourage men to attempt to live upon those lands 
and cultivate them, it is as economically unsound 
and as morally oblique to encourage men to locate 
under these conditions as it is to sell a man a gold 
brick. Mr. DeGraff very well states the handicaps 
under which a farmer labors on the poorest and most 
remote soil conditions of that region. 
VARIATION IN CHARACTER—The particular 
point I wish to bring out in this connection is that 
all of the hill lands of Southern New York should 
not be characterized in one group. They have quite 
handling. They are particularly the soils embraced 
in what the soil man knows as the Wooster series, 
with some other series of soils of less extent, but 
which are clearly delineated on the soil survey re¬ 
ports that now cover a large section of the State. 
CROP POSSIBILITIES—It seems to me it is. 
important to emphasize to the prospective purchaser 
of land in this region the fact of this range of qual¬ 
ity. and the importance of looking out for those dis¬ 
tinctions in the soil, ‘which is quite a different thing 
from stigmatizing the entire region. These handi¬ 
caps are not limited to soil conditions and access to 
means of soil improvement open to him by which his 
crop yields can be increased. 
REFORESTATION.—This brings up a third sug¬ 
gestion concerning this and much other land in the 
State which cannot be farmed to advantage. The 
State has been very active in its forest policy aimed 
at the encouragement of reforestation, but not much 
actual progress in the field has been made thus far. 
The timber crop is too long between harvests to rec¬ 
ommend itself strongly to the average individual. 
Reforestation must be practiced under a plan of 
organization that is longer lived, and because of the 
