Vhat and Vhy Is A Tree Farm?

By Emanuel Fritz, Vice-President, Foundation for American Resource Management

The Tree Farm program is only 77 years old. In that short time it accomplished more than any other program designed to promote forestry on private forest lands.

It all started in the state of Washington when, in 794I, the Clemons Tree Farm was set up. It was admittedly a public relations move intended to direct attention to several important facts. Among these were:

1. Trees grow and can be managed as a crop.

2. It takes a long time to mature the crop.

3. During that time fire, insects, disease and taxes may destroy the crop.

4. The growing of commercial crops of forest trees is not the job of the land owner alone. There must be local interest and cooperation so that ths crop can be permitted to mature.

5. The growing of forests for future harvests of logs must be made a business that is attractive to a land owner.

From its inception, the Tree Farm program was, and still is, an industry sponsored movement. Industry itself thought it up and promoted it at no expense to the taxpayer. In its infant years it was ridiculed by opponents of the private enterprise system as "window dressing" or as a "cloak" to cover up malpractices.

What the ridiculers overlooked was the marked change that was taking place in our nationwide economic situation, particularly as to timber. The day of being able to move from one forest region to another to operate in old-growth .stands was gone. The population was doubling every few decades ; the demands for lumber were holding their own; the paper industry was growing by leaps and bounds; investments in sawmill, paper and other forest products plants became so great that their continuity gave their owners concern. The one answer was a continuous and certain sup- ply of trees for logs and fiber. That such a supply could be grown was evidenced by the many thousands of acres of volunteer stands of so-called second growth that had sprung up on cutover lands.

"Front offices" of affected industries took steos to investigate the possibilities and found they were rial. But big handicaps remained-the chance of losing all in a forest fire or in epidemics of pests; and the long-timber harassment by socialistic public and quasi-public conservation agencies that engendered public misapprehension. What the forest industries wanted to do was clearly in the public interest as well as in their own.

To win public interest and understanding the Tree Farm program u'as conceived and launched. It has been successful in accomplishing an understanding of the facts it set out to clarify. In addition, it has proven that economics, not man-made regulatory laws, determine what an industry can or cannot do, and that where a public interest is involved, the public itself has certain responsibilities. In addition, the example set by industrial tree farmers has caused small owners to become interested and take up tree farming.

So much for the program. Now, what is a tree farm? In simplest terms it is an area of privately owned, tax-paying forest land on which the owner desires to grow forests primarily for repeated harvests of forest products on a business basis.

Being an industry undertaking it is natural that industry itself should have set up the standards and to see that they are maintained. Regional lumber manufacturing or timber owning associations are designated as the certifying agencies, the central agency being the A.F.P.L in Washington, D. C.

Certification of a Tree Farm is not unlike the labeling of a