FOREST ALIENATION. 175 
increasing cost of labour. Actual planting-costs in the past plus in- 
creased cost of labour in the future would make the figure about 
£2,000,000. 
It will be said forest plantations may yield two or three times as 
much timber as the native forest. That may be true for the first forty 
years; and then the economic position may be reversed, because by that 
time the forest may be fully stocked, have a timber-growth figure ap- 
proaching the forest plantations, and a better natural regeneration. 
The crux of the matter lies in the fact that in forty years the present 
forest plantations will have cost the country some £65 per acre, while 
the forest all this time has been giving good returns, perhaps yielding 
as much money and employment as would have grassing and dairying, 
on the poor soils to which forest demarcation generally relegates the 
forest. | Gf 
(2.) As native forest the loss to the Dominion may represent an even 
vreater value. Puhipulhi, as has been seen (p. 68), represented a value 
at present-day prices of £720 per acre. No such forest exists nowadays ; 
but we may fairly take somewhere near £300 per acre as representing 
the value of good existing forest, reckoning the vaiues of both present 
and future timber crops. This maximum value of £300 per acre would 
mean «a forest well stocked now, and (what is more important to the 
calculation) with a good standing stock of young immature timber. (See 
photo of Kauri forest at Matakohe: frontispiece). One must remember 
that under existing methods only the present-day merchantable timber 
is ever considered, while the best value may be in the immature timber 
which ‘will ripen as the countryside develops with roads and markets. 
From this maximum value of about £300 per acre there are naturally all 
grades of yalue in the forest being alienated. Both (1) the present 
timber-value, and (2) the discounted value of future timber crops, will 
vary with each forest; since (1) depends not only on the present “‘ stand ”’ 
of timber but on the means of working it, while the value of (2) depends 
on the grades of the younger forest, the distribution of the age-classes. 
Thus, as an illustration, if one assumes that the average forest being 
alienated may have a.mean value of only one-tenth of the maximum, 
or a value in present and future timber crops of only £30 per acre. 
there comes out the awkward little caleulation—30,000 acres x £30 = 
£900,000; or, as a round figure for a low estimate, £1,000,000, so that 
the absence of forest demarcation may be costing New Zealand some 
£1,000,000 yearly in present, and the discounted present-day value of 
future, timber crops, 
These figures do not mean that there is one million’s worth of timber 
being lost yearly, but that the forest alienated, if worked scientifically, 
would represent that sum as a present-day value. From this has to be 
deducted the value of a few good crops of grass raised on the ashes of the 
burnt forest, and (on the poor soil of demarcatable forest) uncertain grass 
thereafter. 
The £1,000,000 Value discussed.—The forest values of which £30 
per acre is merely a rough general estimate are not future values subject 
to a heavy discount for time. They are present values, realizable with 
interest after a certain number of years, depending on the quality and 
age of the forest concerned. But from these values would have to be 
deducted the cost of putting the forest in order, which at the worst would 
be the cost of interplanting; at the best, the thinning-out of the mature 
timber. In most cases the cost of putting the forest in order would be 
. 
