UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE DEPARTMENT BULLETIN No. 1402 Washington, D. C. May, 1926 TIMBER GROWING AND LOGGING PRACTICE IN THE CALIFORNIA PINE REGION MEASURES NECESSARY TO KEEP By S. B. SHOW, Silviculturist, Forest Service Introduction by W.-B. GREELEY, Forester, Forest Service FOREST SERVICE US ATMENT OF AGRICUL WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE Forestry in the United States is no longer merely a theory or a subject for discussion; it has gotten down to concrete things in the woods. Nor is the growing of timber confined to public lands; it is gradually making headway on land in private ownership. It is 1 becoming an art of land management, expressed in practical measures for protecting forest growth from fire and other destructive agencies, for logging timber so as to produce a new crop of wood, and for planting forest trees on cut-over areas. The value of timber, along with other economic considerations, is causing landowners more and more widely to study the possibility of profitable reforestation. These developments have created a general demand for information on the timber-growing methods adapted to the various types of forest growth in the United States and on what these methods will cost. Timber culture, like the growing of farm crops, is necessarily governed in any country by the soil and climate, by the requirements of the native forest trees, and by the national economic circumstances. Lessons may be drawn from the experience of other countries, as the United States has drawn upon the forestry practice of Europe; but profitable methods of growing timber, particularly under the wide range of forest types and economic conditions in the United States, can be evolved only from our own experience and investigation, region by region. Hence, to meet the demand for information on practical ways and means of growing timber profitably in the various parts of the United States, it is important that the results of our own experience and investigation to date be brought together and set forth in the clearest possible way. This the Forest Service has attempted to do in a series of publications dealing with the 12 principal forest regions of the United States. The information presented has been gathered from many different sources, including the experience, as far as it was obtainable, of landowners who have engaged in reforestation. An effort has been made to bring together all that any agency has yet learned or demonstrated about the growing of timber in the United States; and the results have been verified as far as possible by consultation with the forest industries, State foresters, and forest schools. These publications thus undertake to set forth, in a simple form, what are believed to be the soundest methods of reforestation as yet developed in our common experience and study in the United States. Necessarily, the Forest Service claims no finality for the measures proposed. Timber growing in every country has come about through a gradual evolution in industrial methods and the use of land. All too little is yet known of the best methods of growing timber under American conditions. As time goes on, research and practical experience will add greatly to the success and certainty of the measures carried out in our woods, just as American agriculture has steadily become more highly developed or just as our manufacturing processes have been perfected through experience and study. But we know enough about growing timber now, in the forest regions of the United States, to go right ahead. Believing that the forest-landowners of the United States are now ready to engage in timber growing on a large scale, the Forest Service has endeavored to place before them in concise terms the best suggestions and guides which the experience of this country to date affords. In these publications the measures proposed for a particular forest region have been arranged in two general groups. The first includes the first steps, or the minimum measures based on local physical con |