Word: lumbermen
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...More important, the Forest Service in recent years has radically changed its aims and methods. Less than 20 years ago its mission was to snuff out fires and preserve the noble woods intact as leafy museums. Nowadays the Forest Service runs a thriving business, selling prime wood to private lumbermen, reforesting cutover or burnt-out areas, farming the nation's trees on a longterm, big-business basis. In 1953 the Treasury banked $70 million in cash receipts from national forest sales...
...days lumbermen had a harsh motto-"Cut and get out"-as they marched across U.S. forests leaving them stumped and stripped. The result was that by the late 1930s the U.S. was in danger of becoming timber-poor, and the lumber industry was under heavy fire from conservationists. Today, lumbermen have a new approach and a new program that promises to produce more trees than ever before. The project: tree farming, under which U.S. forests are as carefully planted, managed and harvested as lettuce and tomatoes. When loggers fell a tree, they make sure a new one grows...
Credit for the idea goes largely to the Weyerhaeusers. As far back as the turn of the century enlightened lumbermen talked of timber as a steady crop instead of something to be mined like gold. But no one did much in an organized way until 1941, when dwindling U.S. lumber reserves, new wood-using industries, and the increased needs of World War II gave the idea a boost. For a starter, Weyerhaeuser planted the first 120,000 acres of logged-over ground near Montesano, Wash, with Douglas fir seedlings, and sat back to watch them grow to logging size...
...seeds over the cut areas. At five years the seedlings are Christmas-tree size and at 20 about the height of a two-story house, and growing about 300 to the acre. When the crop is 30 years old, the lumberman's harvest begins. With power saws the lumbermen thin out the weakest trees, use the wood for pulp and poles, leave the best trees to mature in another 50 to 70 years into huge, 150-ft. giants for the building industry...
...uses for wood, U.S. lumber production last year hit a near record of 36 billion board feet. Yet the loggers promise that there will be more timber in the U.S. in the future than there is now. "Our big problem," says Arthur W. Priaulx of the West Coast Lumbermen's Association, "is to get the idea across to the little guys. They can realize $25 an acre every year by tree farming, more than they can make by putting the same land into pasture." Those who have tried it agree. Says one timber-wise farmer, who tree-farms...