—Before leaving the farm it might be well to say that easy marketing makes for diversified farming. All eggs are not put in one basket, and in case of a failure or partial failure in one crop the effect is not felt so much because there are others from which returns will be received. Often drought will injure a wheat crop but later rains will “make” the corn crop; or, earth soaked by winter snows will mature a wheat crop while the corn may, due to a few days of hot dry weather, be a partial failure. While chinch bugs may get the wheat, it is possible to kill potato bugs by spraying. And the year the potatoes die by blight may be excellent for alfalfa and timothy. Diversified farming also allows of the rotation of crops, thus conserving the fertility of the soil. And it all can be done over a wide range from the market place because of good roads and easy marketing facilities.
Forestry.
—Realizing that the lumbering methods in vogue in this country since its earliest settlement are most wasteful and are destructive of the future usefulness of the timbered regions the United States Government has set aside as forest reserves several hundred thousand square miles. A forest crop is like any other crop. It must grow from the seed and at maturity be harvested. Those trees that have reached the point in life where years do not add materially to the lumber content are marked for cutting. So that each year brings a harvest. New trees are planted or allowed to spring up where the old were cut so that there is a continuity. It is estimated that there yet remains some 550,000,000 acres of forest land unsuited for agriculture.
The older lumbering methods meant that a company gained control of a tract of timber land, sometimes they had not purchased it, it was really government owned, and cut and slashed all the trees that were upon it. No attempt was made to utilize any of the tree except the bole; the limbs, containing thousands of cords of good wood, were left with the slash to become the prey later of fierce fires, which often got beyond the bounds of the cutting and destroyed millions of acres of growing timber.[194] At a still earlier day the trees were cut so that they would fall with their tops together, then they were burned in order to clear the land for farming purposes. The only reason settlers did not go to the great prairie lands of the Middle West where such wanton destruction was unnecessary, was the lack of means for rapid transportation, and communication.
Even the loggers and lumbermen were often isolated from all civilization except their own party or neighboring parties of like kind, with no roads but the trails of their own making. The highways of commerce were the streams and rivers to which the logs were rolled or snaked by oxen, mules, or horses, and down which they were floated in the spring when the flow was sufficient to carry them. When they reached the larger rivers they were often bound into rafts and floated hundreds of miles to the mills for sawing, a cheap means of transportation.
As the timber was cut off near the streams it was necessary to go farther back for logs. Then developed the logging railways. Usually narrow gauge lines with small locomotives which brought logs down from the forests to the streams or to other lines of railway. But as yet scientific means of lumbering had not been adopted. Not until the government by making large forest reserves and by insisting that loggers should clean up and burn the slashes in such a manner as not to injure standing timber, and leave the ground in such a condition that new trees of good varieties would spring up to take the places of those cut, did there come any real advancement along these lines.
© Underwood and Underwood
A MILK TRUCK
Equipped with both Cans and Tank