LUMBER: Woodman, Spare That Tree

The U.S. has lost 90% of its virgin commercial timber to fires, insects and the woodman’s ax, and trees are still falling about as fast as they are growing. Big U.S. lumber companies have been given most of the blame for this drastic, and usually wasteful leveling of the nation’s tall timber. Last week the biggest lumber company in the U.S. took another big step to build the forests up again. In a stand of Douglas fir near Oregon’s misty Coos Bay, John Philip Weyerhaeuser Jr., Yale-educated president of the $273 million Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., unveiled a plaque to mark 203,000 acres of second-growth timber set aside as a “tree farm.” On this tract, as on the other 1,979,568 acres of Weyerhaeuser tree farms, timber will be treated as a crop just like corn, cotton and cucumbers, be harvested over an 80-year cycle.

Islands of Trees. The tree farm ideas, although standard practice in Europe for years, did not take hold in the U.S. until the late ’30s, after most of the nation’s virgin timber had been cut. In 1941, the Weyerhaeuser Co. took the first big step; it laid out the first tree farm in Grays Harbor County, Wash.

Weyerhaeuser wanted to show that loggers could make money by farming trees steadily from the same acreage, instead of stripping stands of timber clean, then moving on to another part of the forest. The company, which had once done its share of destructive timber cutting, began to preach and practice “selective cutting,” ordered its lumberjacks to fell only mature trees. It had one great advantage over many others: it controls so many woodland acres in the northwest that it could divide them into big plots, cut each in sequence, thus assure itself a steady crop of trees every year. An alternate method: “clear cutting,” where entire blocks of timber are cut out, leaving islands of trees on hilltops (see cut) to reseed the surrounding cut-over area.

The system made sound business sense to most lumbermen. By 1951 there were 23,500,000 acres of tree farms in the U.S., and 3,109 tree farmers. Many own only 70 to 80 acres of woodland, get a steady return year after year by following Weyerhaeuser’s methods. But most tree farming is big business and ties up plenty of capital. Weyerhaeuser and other big lumber companies (e.g., Crown Zellerbach) spend about $37 an acre for such permanent improvements as roads and wide firebreaks, shell out another 35-60¢ an acre every year for taxes and to maintain fire patrols and clear brush.

Ironbound Patience. Almost as much as money and skill, a tree farmer must have patience. “We’ve got a long-range crop that summer after summer is exposed to fire,” said a Weyerhaeuser man last week, “and we’ve got to face it for 80 years before we can do any harvesting.” Some small operators do not think that they can afford to wait; they cut their lands bare, leave them prey to erosion.

As proof of tree farming’s success, lumbermen point to the big improvement in U.S. forest growth. In 1918, the U.S. was cutting down 5.8 trees for every new tree that sprouted. This year the ratio has dropped to about i for i. If tree farming continues to spread, lumber companies think that the U.S. may soon be growing more trees than it cuts down.