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American Agriculturist, June 21, 1924 
Our Friends the Trees 
An A. A. Wednesday Evening Radio Talk 
I T WAS my good fortune to be born at the edge of the 
big woods, up in Northern Wisconsin. I saw as a 
boy the cutting of the virgin forest, the driving 
and the floating of the logs down the river, and 
then something of the way in which the logs were put 
through the saw mill to come out as lumber and timber. 
My early contact with the forests gave me a very deep 
interest in the future of our forests, and made me 
eventually become a forester, that I might do my share 
in helping to protect 
our forests, making 
them a permanent re¬ 
source. 
Why should it be 
necessary to-day for 
the friends of the trees 
and the forests, and 
foresters, to be plead¬ 
ing for a continuation 
of our forests? Why 
shouldn’t everyone be 
convinced of the great 
value of our forests, 
and determined to see 
that our present forests 
are maintained for the 
future, and that new 
forests are built where 
the old ones have been 
burned down? 
There is a very sound 
reason for the indiffer¬ 
ence of most of you to 
the necessity for con¬ 
sidering our forests as 
our friends, and for 
your failure to demand 
of those who represent 
you in our legislative 
halls that our forests 
be property protected 
and renewed. Let’s go 
back just a little to see 
what has made us so 
very indifferent. 
When our people 
*came to our Eastern 
shores, some three to 
four hundred years ago, 
they came from coun¬ 
tries in which the for¬ 
ests were already dis¬ 
appearing, and. they 
came with the idea of 
the forest as a friend, to be taken care of. Some of the 
first rules and regulations made by our fathers were 
for the forests.'' In 1640, Exeter, which is now the 
State of New Hampshire, passed rules and regulations 
for the protection of the forests. In 1682, William Penn 
ordained that the grantee must keep one-sixth part of 
his land in forest, and as early as 1783 every one of the 
Thirteen Colonies had forest fire rules and regulations. 
Why did we forget these early regulations, and why 
is it necessary for us now to plead for proper care of the 
woods? Our people found, as they came to settle this 
new land, the finest woods that white man had ever 
seen before, coming right down to the shores of the 
Atlantic. Our hardy pioneer fathers started exploring 
the great western country, and they came back with 
stories of the wonderful hardwood forests of the Ohio 
Valley and the Jesuit Fathers, exploring the Lake 
States, wrote of the wonderful evergreen forests. 
We Have Over-estimated Our Reserves 
There has been implanted in our people for several 
generations the idea that there are plenty of forests to 
the westward to take care of all of our needs, and 
therefore there was little necessity for protecting and 
preserving the woods. Down through the years we 
have been getting rid of the trees so rapidly that to-day 
we see very clearly the end of the remaining virgin 
forest of the South and West. And with the disappear¬ 
ance of the trees and the increasing cost of all forest 
products, we are feeling an economic need that is mak¬ 
ing us think seriously of what we are to do in the future 
for wood. In other words, our present indifference is 
quite justifiable, and now that we know what the 
future holds in store for us, we should wake up and 
work aggressively for more and better forests. 
We are tremendous consumers of wood in this 
country. With all of the uses of brick and concrete and 
steel, in building, more wooden buildings are being 
erected to-day than any ot,her kind. We have become 
so accustomed to using large sizes of timbers and boards, 
that we continue to be wasteful, even though we are 
paying a very high price for our wastefulness, ffhe 
By HUGH P. BAKER 
Forester, American Paper and Pulp Association 
Forest Service at Washington tells us that we have an 
annual waste of 140,000,000 feet of lumber in this coun¬ 
try each year because you people are insisting on buying 
lumber cut to even lengths. This waste represents 
the average annual growth of over 2,000,000 acres, 
which is equal to about one-half the area of New Jersey. 
Some of you are saying 
that the substitutes for 
lumber, — brick and 
steel, and concrete,— 
will solve our wood 
problem. In a way 
these substitutes will 
help, but engineers tell 
us that we will always 
be great users of wood 
for construction and 
for other purposes. We 
have tried steel and 
concrete railroad ties, 
but without success, 
and to-day we are us¬ 
ing more wooden ties 
than ever before. 
The pulp and paper 
industry last year used 
over 6,000,000 cords 
of wood, and with this 
wood and the pulp 
which we imported from 
foreign countries we 
produced last year over 
7,000,000 tons of paper. 
Even though we are a 
wood using industry, 
our consumption of 
wood last year was only 
a little over 4% of the 
total wood cut in the 
United States. Out of 
the thirty billion odd 
feet of lumber which 
we produce annually 
in this country, the 
railroads use about six 
billion feet. Most of 
the wood used by rail¬ 
roads is for construc¬ 
tion, but when you 
know that they are 
using annually over 
87,000,000 hewn railroad ties, you can appreciate 
the demand which the railroads are making on our 
forests. Last year the automobile industry used over a 
billion feet of lumber for body construction and crating. 
But you are not interested in figures as to the consump¬ 
tion of wood in this country. 
Chemicals were mentioned as one of the direct re¬ 
turns from the forest. We are just at the beginning of 
the development of the chemistry of wood products. 
Through distillation and in other ways we are producing 
a large amount of chemicals, and we are going to pro¬ 
duce more as the years pass. 
But I think most of you will be rather more interested 
in the indirect values of the forest. You know some¬ 
thing of the result of cutting the trees away from our 
hills and mountains, and then through carelessness 
allowing jire to keep these hills and mountains denuded. 
With the forest gone you appreciate readily that melting 
snows and spring rains will rush down from our hills, 
carrying soil which should be kept in place on the hills, 
and causing floods in our streams and rivers. We can¬ 
not have a satisfactory and permanent supply of water, 
for either domestic or industrial use, unless we keep the 
head waters of the streams covered with a forest. 
During the last 70 to 100 years we have cut over more 
than 70% of the forests of this country. We still have 
a good deal of fine forest in the South and the far W est, 
but it is costing us more each year to bring the products 
of the forests to our cities and to our industries, and 
really those of us who know about our forests know 
that we are rather close to the time when our virgin 
forests will be gone. 
New York was covered with a solid belt of forest, 
when Manhattan Island was first settled, and it was 
considered to be a great forest state. It is still a great 
forest state, even though the virgin woods are gone, 
because we have the forest soil upon which we may again 
grow even a better forest than the original timber. 
Out of the 30,000,000 acres of land in New York only 
about 15,000,000 acres of land are under the plow. 
What are we doing with the rest of it? Yes, we have 
a million or two acres of forest land belonging to the 
state in the Adirondacks and Catskills, but that 
doesn’t account for the rest of this land. You can 
hardly go into a lumber yard in any village or city of 
New York to-day without finding most of the lumber 
and timber in that yard coming from Louisiana or 
Texas, or the West Coast. You would be surprised at 
the proportion of the cost, per thousand feet of lumber, 
which is freight. The freight bill on lumber brought into 
New York from these distant places for construction 
and for industrial use runs into millions of dollars. 
How long do we want to put up with such an extrava¬ 
gant practice? 
I could go on and tell of the disappearance of the 
forests in the Lake States, and in New England. The 
Northern Lake States were covered with a very wonder¬ 
ful evergreen forest, and yet to-day but 2% of the 
original pine forest of the Lake States is left. 
But man hasn’t been the only destructive force in 
the woods. We have stood idly by and let our trees 
burn up from year to year in a disgraceful way. Each 
year around 7,000,000 acres of land in this country 
are being burned over. It would be safe to say, I think, 
that more forests have been burned up since white men 
came to this country than has been used. As long as we 
are careless with camp fires, or cigarette stubs, there 
will be forest fires. 
Insects, such as the web-worm, which has been 
destroying the foliage of so many of our trees this 
spring, and fungi, which are little plants that feed upon 
the wood causing it gradually to decay, are very destruc¬ 
tive to our forests. 
What It Means To Grow Trees 
But now let’s see what it means to grow a 
forest. We will go out this fall and gather the cones 
from the pine or the spruce trees. We can open these 
cones by applying heat, and the little brown seeds will 
fall out of the cones. Next spring we will prepare the 
soil for this tree seed just as we would for a garden, and 
plant the seeds much as we plant radish, except we 
probably would broadcast the seed over the bed rather 
than plant it in rows. As nature requires shade for the 
growing of the little evergreen trees, we will put some 
artificial shade over them. When they are a year or 
two old we will thin them out by lifting them from' the 
• seed bed and putting them out in rows, far enough apart 
so that each little tree can form a good root system. 
After these transplanted trees are three or four years 
old, and from 4 to 12 inches high, we lift them out of the 
soil and plant them where we want them to grow on 
forest land. We usually plant them from 6 to 7 feet 
each way. This means twelve hundred trees to the 
acre. Three men or three good husky boy scouts can 
easily plant a thousand trees a day, and by the way, 
the boy scouts of the country have been doing some 
splendid work in starting forest plantations about city 
water reservoirs and in other places. 
After the little trees are planted, grass and brush 
will grow up about them and you may think that the 
(i Continued on page 578) 
ISN’T IT ABOUT TIME FOR US TO PLANT THE 
TREES FOR OUR GREAT, GREAT, ETC., 
GRANDSON’S BUNGALOW? 
Copyrighted 1924 by the New York Tribune, Inc. 
Since we are cutting down our timber each year six times as fast 
as it can grow, and it takes 300 years to grow a good sawlog. 
—Darling in the New York Tribune. 
