Putting these facts together with the Census fig ures, according to which there is one man for every forty acres of improved farm land, the inference may be drawn that in agriculture the labor of one man is instrumen tal in raising annually 40,000 to 60,000 pounds of useful vegetable substance ; the same amount of labor expended in growing wood crops could pro dace under forest management of similar intensity, between 400,000 and 600.000 pounds of useful vegetable substance, or ten times as much. These figures, of course, must not be consid ered, even for a moment, as absolute. To begin with, the average acreage of farm land cultivated by one man, as given by the Census, is altogether too large, since not all land that has been reported as improved farm land is actually cultivated,—a great part of it remains idle. These figures are merely brought forward to illustrate approximately the relative role which labor plays in the production of wood and of agri cultural products.
Capital.
Wood-cropping, to be done continuously, needs investment of capital, and, in a certain sense, of a larger capital than is re quired for farming. The form in which most of the capital is tied up in wood cropping is very charac teristic of forestry as an industry. It is not the land that claims most of the investment, since land devoted to forest growth is, as a rule, poorer and therefore has a considerably lower value than farm land. Nor do buildings, tools, machinery or labor absorb much capital, be cause all these items are a source of considerably less expenditure in for estry than in farming.
The forest crops do not need buildings to house them ; the tools used in harvesting or caring for the harvest are very simple and inexpensive ; the application of machinery, with its concentration and division of labor, is very circumscribed because of the bulkiness of the product, and because variety in the size and shape of trees requires the constant exercise of judgment on the part of the wood-cutter ; there are no seeds nor manure to buy ; very little wages need be paid. In other words, the capital needed for defraying the current expenses of growing wood-crops is small as compared to that needed for raising agricultural crops. Thus, while in Europe the current expenditure per acre of forest land managed most intensively does not exceed two dollars on the average, according to the figures of the United States De partment of Agriculture for 1893, the cost of raising wheat and corn crops in this country was $8.88 and $5.68, respectively,
not including the rent for land and the cost for superintendence.
Tha chief demand for capital in continuous wood-cropping is the necessity of keeping a large supply of growing, immature trees on hand. Here in is the most essential difference between forestry and agriculture : while farm crops mature in one year, and all that has grown during the year is harvested at the end of the season, trees must be left to grow for many years before sufficient wood of the desired kind accumulates. A tree is not born old ; starting from the seed or stump, it grows in height and thickness year after year until it reaches the size required for the market. If the most marketable size is attained at the age of eighty years, then to secure the best returns it must be on the ground for eighty years to accumulate the requisite amount of wood. If one eighty-year-old tree is to be cut each year, there must be on hand seventy-nine trees of ages varying from one to seventy-nine years. When one eighty-year-old tree is cut down, seventy-nine trees must be left standing, because they are all needed to produce annually that one mature tree. Continuous wood-cropping requires, therefore, an accumulation of a large amount of immature, growing timber, which forms as essential an ele ment in continuous wood-production as machinery does in a factory. While the farmer may dispose of the products of his annual harvest, the grower of timber crops is compelled to leave the annual growth made by the trees for a number of years, and in this way must tie up in growing trees a capital equal to the aggregate value of the unsold annual crops of the whole period. That the grow ing, still immature timber is a real capital and not an imaginary one, is only too well shown by the temptation to which so many owners of small timber tracts succumb, to realize on it prematurely by selling it at the first opportunity.
The larger the required sizes of trees, or the longer the period needed for their maturing, the larger must be the stock of young, growing trees on hand, and consequently the larger must be the capital tied up for continuous production of wood, and vice versa. Thus, to supply continually an annual demand for the product of one acre of eighty-year-old trees, a total area of eighty acres is needed ; while one-fourth of the area would be sufficient to grow every year one acre of twenty year-old trees, such as would make fence-posts.