We need more forest experiment stations to promote the production of more timber.  Twenty of our leading industries utilize lumber as their most important raw material.  Fifty-five different industries use specialized grades and quality of lumber in the manufacture of many products.  This use of lumber includes general mill work and planing mill products, such as building crates and boxes, vehicles, railroad cars, furniture, agricultural implements and wooden ware.

Our manufacturers make and use more than two hundred and seventy-five different kinds of paper, including newsprint, boxboard, building papers, book papers and many kinds of specialty papers.  The forest experiment stations would help solve the practical problems of these many industries.  They could work out methods by which to maintain our forests and still turn out the thirty-five to forty billion board feet of lumber used each year.  They are needed to determine methods of increasing our annual cut for pulp and paper.  They are necessary so that we can increase our annual output of poles, pilings, cooperage and veneer.

A forest experiment station is needed in the southern pine belt.  The large pine forests of Dixieland have been shaved down from 130,000,000 acres to 23,500,000 acres.  In that region there are more than 30,000,000 acres of waste forest lands which should be reclaimed and devoted to the growing of trees.  Eastern and middle western manufacturing and lumbering centres are interested in the restoring of the southern pine forests.  During the last score of years, they have used two-thirds of the annual output of those forests.  In another ten to fifteen years home demand will use most of the pine cut in the South.  The East and Middle West will then have to rely mostly on the Pacific Coast forests for their pine lumber.

The Lake States need a forest experiment station to work out methods by which the white pine, hemlock, spruce, beech, birch and maple forests of that section can be renewed.  The Lake States are now producing only one-ninth as much white pine as they were thirty years ago.  These states now cut only 3,500,000,000 feet of all kinds of lumber annually.  Their output is growing smaller each year.  Wisconsin led the United States in lumber production in 1900.  Now she cuts less than the second-growth yield of Maine.  Michigan, which led in lumber production before Wisconsin, now harvests a crop of white pine that is 50 per cent. smaller than that of Massachusetts.  Experts believe that a forest experiment station in the Lake States would stimulate production so that enough lumber could be produced to satisfy the local demands.

Not least in importance among the forest regions requiring an experiment station are the New England States and northern and eastern New York.  In that section there are approximately 25,000,000 acres of forest lands.  Five and one-half million acres consist of waste and idle land.  Eight million acres grow nothing but fuel-wood.  The rest of the timber tracts are not producing anywhere near their capacity.  New England produces 30 per cent. and New York 50 per cent. of our newsprint.  Maine is the leading state in pulp production.  New England imports 50 per cent. of her lumber, while New York cuts less than one-half the timber she annually consumes.