A capital mistake, it seems to me, is being made by some of the dairy farmers of our own State. One who has a hundred acres of good soil, whereof twenty or thirty are wooded, cuts off his timber entirely, calculating that the additional grass that he may grow in its stead will pay for all the coal he needs for fuel, so that he will make a net gain of the time he has hitherto devoted each Winter to cutting and hauling wood. He does not consider how much his soil will lose in Summer moisture, how his springs and runnels will be dried up, nor how the sweep of harsh winds will be intensified, by baring his hill-tops and ravines to sun and breeze so utterly. In my deliberate judgment, a farm of one hundred acres will yield more feed, with far greater uniformity of product from year to year, if twenty acres of its ridge-crests, ravine-sides, and rocky places, are thickly covered with timber, than if it be swept clean of trees and all devoted to grass. Hence, I insist that the farmer who sweeps off his wood and resolves to depend on coal for fuel, hoping to increase permanently the product of his dairy, makes a sad miscalculation.
Spain, Italy, and portions of France, are now suffering from the improvidence that devoured their forests, leaving the future to take care of itself. I presume the great empires of antiquity suffered from the same folly, though to a much greater extent. The remains of now extinct races who formerly peopled and tilled the central valleys of this continent, and especially the Territory of Arizona, probably bear witness to a similar recklessness, which is paralleled by our fathers' and our own extermination of the magnificent forests of White Pine which, barely a century ago, covered so large a portion of the soil of our Northern States. Vermont sold White Pine abundantly to England through Canada within my day: she is now supplying her own wants from Canada at a cost of not less than five times the price she sold for; and she will be paying still higher rates before the close of this century. I entreat our farmers not to preserve every tree, good, bad, or indifferent, that may happen to be growing on their lands—but, outside of the limited districts wherein the primitive forest must still be cut away in order that land may be obtained for cultivation, to plant and rear at least two better trees for every one they may be impelled to cut down. How this may, in the average, be most judiciously done, I will try to indicate in the succeeding chapter.
VIII.
GROWING TIMBER—TREE-PLANTING.
In my judgment, the proportion of a small farm that should be constantly devoted to trees (other than fruit) is not less than one-fourth; while, of farms exceeding one hundred acres in area, that proportion should be not less than one-third, and may often be profitably increased to one-half. I am thinking of such as are in good part superficially rugged and rocky, or sandy and sterile, such as New-England, eastern New-York, northern New-Jersey, with both slopes of the Alleghenies, as well as the western third of our continent, abound in. It may be that it is advisable to be content with a smaller proportion of timber in the Prairie States and the broad, fertile intervales which embosom most of our great rivers for at least a part of their course; but I doubt it. And there is scarcely a farm in the whole country, outside of the great primitive forests in which openings have but recently been made, in which some tree-planting is not urgently required.
"Too much land," you will hear assigned on every side as a reason for poor farming and meager crops. Ask an average farmer in New-England, in Virginia, in Kentucky, or in Alabama, why the crops of his section are in the average no better, and the answer, three times in four, will be, "Our farmers have too much land"—that is, not too much absolutely, but too much relatively to their capital, stock, and general ability to till effectively. The habitual grower of poor crops will proffer this explanation quite as freely and frequently as his more thrifty neighbor. And what every one asserts must have a basis of truth.
Now, I do not mean to quarrel with the instinct which prompts my countrymen to buy and hold too much land. They feel, as I do, that land is still cheap almost anywhere in this country—cheap, if not in view of the income now derived from it, certainly in contemplation of the price it must soon command and the income it might, under better management, be made to yield. Under this conviction—or, if you please, impression—every one is intent on holding on to more land than he can profitably till, if not more than he can promptly pay for.
What I do object to is simply this—that thousands, who have more land than they have capital to work profitably, will persist in half-tilling many acres, instead of thoroughly farming one-half or one third so many, and getting the rest into wood so fast as may be. I am confident that two-thirds of all our farmers would improve their circumstances and increase their incomes by concentrating their efforts, their means, their fertilizers, upon half to two-thirds of the area they now skim and skin, and giving the residue back to timber-growing.