Just to show how a small tract of trees will grow into money if allowed to mature, the case of a three-acre side-hill pasture in New England is interesting.  Forty-four years ago the farmer who owned this waste land dug up fourteen hundred seedling pines which were growing in a clump and set them out on the sidehill.  Twenty years later the farmer died.  His widow sold the three acres of young pine for $300.  Fifteen years later the woodlot again changed hands for a consideration of $1,000, a lumber company buying it.  Today, this small body of pine woods contains 90,000 board feet of lumber worth at least $1,500 on the stump.  The farmer who set out the trees devoted about $35 worth of land and labor to the miniature forest.  Within a generation this expenditure has grown into a valuable asset which yielded a return of $34.09 a year on the investment.

[Illustration:  On poor soil trees such as these are more profitable than farm crops ]

A New York farmer who plays square with his woodland realizes a continuous profit of $1 a day from a 115-acre timber tract.  The annual growth of this well-managed farm forest is .65 cords of wood per acre, equivalent to 75 cords of wood—­mostly tulip poplar—­a year.  The farmer’s profit amounts to $4.68 a cord, or a total of $364.50 from the entire timber tract.  Over in New Hampshire, an associate sold a two-acre stand of white pine—­this was before the inflated war prices were in force—­for $2,000 on the stump.  The total cut of this farm forest amounted to 254 cords equivalent to 170,000 board feet of lumber.  This was an average of about 85,000 feet an acre.  The trees were between eighty and eighty-five years old when felled.  This indicates an annual growth on each acre of about 1,000 feet of lumber.  The gross returns from the sale of the woodland crops amounted to $12.20 an acre a year.  These, of course, are not average instances.

Farmers should prize their woodlands because they provide building material for fences and farm outbuildings as well as for general repairs.  The farm woodland also supplies fuel for the farm house.  Any surplus materials can be sold in the form of standing timber, sawlogs, posts, poles, crossties, pulpwood, blocks or bolts.  The farm forest also serves as a good windbreak for the farm buildings.  It supplies shelter for the livestock during stormy weather and protects the soil against erosion.  During slack times, it provides profitable work for the farm hands.

There are approximately one-fifth of a billion acres of farm woodlands in the United States.  In the eastern United States there are about 169,000,000 acres of farmland forests.  If these woodlands could be joined together in a solid strip one hundred miles wide, they would reach from New York to San Francisco.  They would amount to an area almost eight times as large as the combined forests of France which furnished the bulk of the timber used by the Allies during the World War.