Successful farming : a ready reference on all phases of agriculture for farmers of the United States and Canada by Gardner Frank D. (Frank Duane) 1864-1963

Author:Gardner, Frank D. (Frank Duane), 1864-1963
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Agriculture
Publisher: Oakland, Calif. : Smithsonian
Published: 1916-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 40

The farm Woodlot

By F. F. Moon

Professor of Forest Engineering, College of Forestry, Syracuse University, N. Y.

Need of Forestry. —To properly solve the land problem of any nation each acre should be put to its best permanent use. Field crops should be grown upon the tillable areas and the land which is too steep or stony for cultivation or too sterile for ordinary field crops should be made to produce repeated crops of timber. That is why the practice of forestry, which is "the raising of repeated crops of timber on soils unsuited to agriculture," is necessary to secure the proper use of all the land.

Forestry is not a part of agriculture. It is separate, but co-ordinate and interdependent. Agriculture has first call upon the land and selects the fertile and level areas for tillage. Forestry takes the remaining portion and raises the timber indispensable to our civilization. Both are concerned with crops, since the forester regards his timber-covered areas as fields to be sown (either by nature or artificially), tended and finally reaped, for forestry means using the products of the forest and does not mean locking up the woodlands for park purposes, as some people think.

The practice of forestry upon the non-agricultural soils is absolutely essential for three reasons:

(1) Timber is absolutely indispensable to our civilization.

(2) There are large areas of land which can never be used for agri-

culture.

(3) The indirect influence of the forest in moderating climatic

extremes, in controlling run-off, etc., is necessary to the successful practice of agriculture and to the health and comfort of the people.

1. Next to food, shelter is most important. According to Fernow, over half our population live in wooden houses, and two-thirds use wood for fuel. The same authority estimates that 95 per cent of all the timber consumed in the United States is for necessities.

Our per capita consumption of wood is unusually high, and on the increase. (It is twice what it was fifty years ago.) We consume six times as much timber per capita as in Germany, and twenty times as much as in Great Britain.

2. Agriculture ?an never be practiced on a large part of this continent, and this land must not be allowed to lie idle. Of the 1,900,000,000 acres

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