TREE FARMING: THE NEW CONSERVATION

IN the old days lumbermen had a harsh motto--"Cut and get out"--as they marched across U.S. forests leaving them stumped and stripped. The result was that by the late 1930s the U.S. was in danger of becoming timber-poor, and the lumber industry was under heavy fire from conservationists. Today, lumbermen have a new approach and a new program that promises to produce more trees than ever before. The project: tree farming, under which U.S. forests are as carefully planted, managed and harvested as lettuce and tomatoes. When loggers fell a tree, they make sure a new one grows in its place.

Tree farms, ranging in size from small, back-country wood lots to the vast forests of big logging firms, now cover 33,692,964 acres, an area bigger than New York State. Some 3,500,000 of these acres were set aside for farms last year for the first time. In the South tree farms cover 21 million acres from North Carolina to Texas. Florida has one gigantic farm of 800,000 acres owned by St. Joe Paper Co., and Texas has 3,400,000 acres producing fast-growing Southern pines for U.S. construction and pulp mills. But the biggest operations are in the Pacific Northwest, where the idea first took root. There the Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., Potlatch Forests, J. Neils Lumber, Crown Zellerbach, Long-Bell Rayonier, and other large companies have nearly 8,000,000 acres of tall Douglas fir, cedar, hemlock, spruce and pine spreading across four states.

Credit for the idea goes largely to the Weyerhaeusers. As far back as the turn of the century enlightened lumbermen talked of timber as a steady crop instead of something to be mined like gold. But no one did much in an organized way until 1941, when dwindling U.S. lumber reserves, new wood-using industries, and the increased needs of World War II gave the idea a boost. For a starter, Weyerhaeuser planted the first 120,000 acres of logged-over ground near Montesano, Wash, with Douglas fir seedlings, and sat back to watch them grow to logging size in 80 to 100 years.

To help nature work for man, loggers now act as regulators of the natural reseeding process. For example, in cutting over an area of Douglas fir, they fell trees in blocks about half a mile square, leaving thick stands of mature trees as natural nurseries to sow their airborne seeds over the cut areas. At five years the seedlings are Christmas-tree size and at 20 about the height of a two-story house, and growing about 300 to the acre. When the crop is 30 years old, the lumberman's harvest begins. With power saws the lumbermen thin out the weakest trees, use the wood for pulp and poles, leave the best trees to mature in another 50 to 70 years into huge, 150-ft. giants for the building industry.

The harvest is only half the job. Year round company foresters roam the woods to protect the crops against disease and fire, spray insecticides to kill off such enemies as the pine beetle and the spruce budworm, which can destroy masses of trees. If fire has cleaned out all mature, seed-bearing trees, the timbermen do their own planting. In six years Crown Zellerbach seeded nearly 30,000 acres of barren land, gave away more than 1,000,000 seedlings to 4-H clubs and others for planting.

Spurred by many new uses for wood, U.S. lumber production last year hit a near record of 36 billion board feet. Yet the loggers promise that there will be more timber in the U.S. in the future than there is now. "Our big problem," says Arthur W. Priaulx of the West Coast Lumbermen's Association, "is to get the idea across to the little guys. They can realize $25 an acre every year by tree farming, more than they can make by putting the same land into pasture." Those who have tried it agree. Says one timber-wise farmer, who tree-farms 180 acres in Washington's Lewis County: "For years we struggled to clear this land for pasture and crops . . . Finally, the timber company told us to get wise and harvest timber as a crop. In the last ten years I've harvested 1,000,000 board feet of railway crossties, 800 cords of fuel wood, 1,000,000 board feet of saw logs and 500 cords of pulpwood off that land. Now my motto is 'Let your tree work for you.' It pays."

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