The silence that the farm journals of the country have maintained on the question can be explained only by their ignorance of the question and its important bearing on the agricultural interests of the entire country. And as it is the purpose of this magazine to discuss all questions of vital importance as well as those that will be of passing interest to the farmers of the whole country it is well to begin with an understanding of what forestry is, and to advance a few reasons why the farmer should be the most ardent advocate of forestry.
Dr. W. H. Schlich, the noted English forester, says the task with which “forestry has to deal is to ascertain the principles according to which forests shall be managed and to apply these principles to the treatment of the forests.”
Dr. B. E. Fernow, formerly chief of the Division of Forestry, defines it as “The rational treatment of forests for forest purposes.”
Dr. C. A. Schenck, of the Biltmore Forest School, gives the following very broad and terse definition: “Forestry is the proper handling of forest investments.”
We see from these definitions that the forestry is purely a matter of business differing only from other investments in the time element. A forestry venture cannot be undertaken with a view of getting immediate returns, but contemplates the continuity of the investment which makes it the first duty of the forester to determine what is the best use the forest can be put to in order to obtain the greatest annual return upon the investment without drawing upon his capital invested. This does not necessarily mean that his forest must be devoted entirely to the production of timber, it may be maintained as a game preserve, or as a watershed, in which case the returns to be obtained from the sale of timber will be a secondary consideration.
Consequently we see that the forester is not merely a botanist or a tree planter, but in the fullest sense of the term is a technically educated man, with the knowledge of the forest trees and their history and of all that pertains to their production, combines further knowledge which enables him to manage forest property so as to produce certain conditions resulting in the highest attainable revenue from the soil by wood-crops.
The effect of forest cover and water-flow has been so persistently and constantly proclaimed as the one great need for forest preservation that the more important one of supply has been neglected.
In a series of articles by Dr. Fernow, on “The Outlook of the Timber Supply in the United States” (Quarterly, 1903), after carefully considering the data compiled by the Chief Geographer, together with his personal investigations, he summarizes the situation, which justifies the urgent need of the forester’s art in the United States, from the point of view of supplies, as follows:
1. The consumption of forest supplies, larger than in any other country in the world, promises not only to increase with the natural increase of the population, but in excess of this increase per capita, similar to that of other civilized, industrial nations, annually by a rate of not less than three to five per cent.
2. The most sanguine estimate of timber standing predicates an exhaustion of supplies in less than thirty years if this rate of consumption continues, and of the most important timber supplies in a much shorter time.