The naval stores belt extends across the Coastal Plain from the Savannah River to the Mississippi. It is a favored section for growing forest crops. Each acre of pineland can produce wood products, gum naval stores, and forage. Although the soils in most of the area are relatively poor for field crops, the long growing season insures growth of trees. The level topography makes almost every acre of dry land accessible for the easy removal of products. Tree planting is cheaper and easier than elsewhere in the country.

Forests occupy nearly three-fourths of the land area in the belt. Forest activities dominate the lives of scores of counties and towns, especially in the continuous forest areas of the "flat-woods," or lower Coastal Plain near the coast. Rail and road traffic runs heavily to pulpwood, logs, poles, gum barrels, rosin drums, and stump wood. Agricultural crops mostly are of minor importance. A large proportion of the rural people work in the woods, and get much of their fuel and meat from them.

People in the area are especially aware of the importance of forests to the future of the South. Residents who have watched slash pine stands or plantations spring up under protection are convinced of the importance of pine forests to the future of their communities. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that these pine forests are producing less than half as much as they could. It is obvious that doubling the size of the forest industries is the biggest thing that could happen in sections where forests already provide the greatest source of income.

The first steps in doubling the forest production in the naval stores belt are the rather elementary ones of fire protection and tree planting. The size of that task is shown in figures for Florida, which contains half of the 44 million acres of forest land in the naval stores belt. In Florida, one-half of the land is still without fire protection and some 3 million acres are in need of planting. Fire protection and stocking are somewhat better in the naval stores section of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Forest management in the region is of great complexity. The forester does not merely harvest ripe trees; he maintains the flow of a wide variety of products—naval stores, pulpwood, ties, logs, poles, piling, cattle. For localized areas in the southern pine region, particularly in the heavy rough of Florida, to get protection he usually must burn the underbrush every few years, and the burning, turpentining, timber cutting, and grazing all must be scheduled as to time and location so that the owner will realize the maximum net income from his forest property.

FOREST MANAGEMENT in the area is still dominated by naval stores but less than before. The first efforts at turpentining second-growth trees several decades ago were often ruinous. A description of an operation in 1911 says that trees as small as 5 inches in diameter were turpentined, as many "faces" were placed on each tree as the space would allow and the faces were started high enough to avoid any bending over, and the wounds or "streaks" were an inch in depth and height. After 5 years about half the trees were dead. The timber was cut and the area was abandoned.

Foresters and leaders of the naval stores industry, seriously alarmed over the threat to future timber supplies caused by the premature and careless turpentining, in 1924 sent a commission to France and Spain to study the methods used there.

This constructive attitude and technical improvements developed by early research workers brought considerable progress in conservation. Substitution of the cup for the "box" chopped in the base of the tree reduced windthrow and damage to the trees by surface fires. It also reduced waste of gum and improved its quality. Conversion of the industry to more conservative chipping practices gave higher sustained production of gum, lowered mortality and windthrow, and increased the working life of the surviving trees. The practices were demonstrated on a large scale in national forests in Florida, where provisions written into the leases required producers to use methods that reduced damage to the trees and also gave the highest yields of gum over a period of several years.

The Naval Stores Conservation Program established in 1936 provided for a conservation payment per face to producers who meet the standards of good practice established by foresters and representatives of the industry. It has been an effective instrument for the introduction of improved methods of turpentining, among them a provision to prohibit tapping of trees under 9 inches. Now only a small fraction of all trees tapped are smaller than the recommended size.

The improvements in woods practice went a long way toward remedying unnecessary wastefulness and destruction of individual trees. But one improvement only paves the way for others. There remain at least two major opportunities for improvement in turpentining practices—raising the low output per man in harvesting of crude gum and better integration of turpentining with timber production through systems of selective cupping in place of the diameter-limit system.

The output per man is considerably less than it was a century ago. In today's scattered stands, which average about 20 or 30 working trees to the acre, the turpentine laborer spends nearly two-thirds of his time walking from tree to tree and only one-third of his time in productive work. Each chipper now tends fewer faces than his predecessors did in the more fully stocked virgin forest. Furthermore, the average turpentined tree is only 10 or 11 inches in diameter; and the yield per tree is consequently much lower than from the larger, old-growth trees.

During the decades in which production per tree, per acre, and per man were declining in the turpentine woods, efficiency in the use of labor and introduction of mechanical devices were advancing steadily in the industries that compete with naval stores for markets and manpower. Those industries captured more and more of the gum naval stores market. Gum naval stores producers were unable to keep enough workers in the woods to meet production goals during the war and the industry may continue to lose ground in the postwar competition unless improvements in technique and equipment are successful in raising the efficiency of production. Since most of the labor is expended in producing raw gum in the woods and little is needed in processing it, more efficient methods of gum extraction and harvesting are obviously needed. For example, it is necessary in the traditional methods of turpentining to visit each tree 40 times a season to produce a yield of 8 or 9 pounds of crude gum or oleoresin.

Recent research has centered on several improvements that give promise of correcting as rapidly as possible the inefficiency of gum harvesting.

APPLICATION OF ACID to the streak to stimulate the flow of gum is the most promising new technique that has been developed since the introduction of the cup several decades ago. Experiments at the Lake City Branch of the Southeastern Forest Experiment Station have demonstrated that streaks sprayed with sulfuric acid yield 50 to 100 percent more gum than untreated streaks.

Treatment with sulfuric acid also extends the normal period of gum flow after chipping. As a result, the streaks chipped every 2 weeks and sprayed with acid produce as much gum per season as untreated streaks applied at the usual weekly interval. Although the additional work of spraying acid slows down the chipper to about 90 percent of his usual speed, the longer chipping interval permits him to work up to 80 percent more timber with no sacrifice in yield per tree. In that way a chipper can increase his production for the season by 80 percent. If the interval of chipping and acid treatment is increased to 3 weeks, the yield per tree is somewhat less, but the greater number of trees that are worked under this system enables a chipper approximately to double his output of gum for the year.

Chemical stimulation may also help to save a portion of the butt log for timber production. Doubling the customary chipping interval and applying acid provides approximately normal annual gum yields while proceeding only a little more than one-half as high up the tree. Or, in trees designated for thinning or harvest cutting, the usual total yield for the normal 5- or 6-year life of a face can be obtained in a shorter period of years by chipping at the customary interval but applying acid in addition. Although sulfuric acid has a greater effect on prolongation of gum flow than any chemical that has yet been tried, it is corrosive and must be handled with caution. Research men are bending every effort to find a gum-flow stimulant that will be nearly as easy to handle as water.

A NEW SYSTEM OF CHIPPING involves cutting to the usual height of one-half inch but only to the depth of the outer surface of the wood. If acid is applied, the method gives just as much gum as does application of acid with the traditional method of chipping one-half inch into the wood. The new technique of "bark chipping" is now in its fifth year of use by selected cooperators in the industry. It requires less physical effort than the standard method, is easier to teach to new workers, and leaves the butt of the tree in better condition for utilization. The spread of this new method depends on the acceptance of chemical stimulation, for, without application of acid, the yield is less than for the traditional chipping.

A new type of tool, or hack, has been developed for bark chipping. This new method of taking off only the bark provides an excellent opportunity for equipment research to develop a mechanical hack. Although there is always room for improving the equipment used in bark chipping and acid treatment, the major drawback to use of the new techniques by untrained laborers is the shortage of men to show them how. Leaders of the industry are receptive, but the solitary chipper in the turpentine woods is the man who must be trained in the new methods of work.

RESEARCH ON THE EQUIPMENT and mechanization has been started in response to a plea from industry. The mechanization of competing industries, such as the harvesting of pulpwood and of pine stumps for wood naval stores, has left the gum naval stores industry behind. Except for the introduction of bark chipping and acid treatment, the hand methods used in producing crude gum have been unchanged for decades.

The first step in the research was to meet the rather rigorous needs for a shatterproof, acidproof, one-hand spray device for applying sulfuric acid. This need appears to have been met for the present by the introduction of a sprayer having a bottle made of rubberlike plastic. A simple squeeze on the bottle delivers a spray with a minimum of manipulation. Research has been started on a combined chipping and spraying device that will add further to the simplicity of acid treatment of the faces.

The development of strains of pine of superior gum-yielding capacity, grown in adequately stocked plantations, is expected to bring the greatest improvement in the long run in efficiency of gum harvesting. The parallel between the possibilities of such plantations of southern pines and existing plantations of superior strains of rubber and fruit trees is evident.

Research on the selection, vegetative propagation, and selective breeding of high-yielding naval stores pines was started several years ago. Select strains thus far isolated promise to provide at least two times the present yield per tree; they could be grown in plantations containing 200 or more workable trees to the acre in place of the present average of 20 or 30 faces to the acre in wild stands. Improvements in growth rate and other tree characteristics can also be expected from research in this field.

In respect to the timber supplies and methods of processing and marketing, the industry is now in a favorable position to progress. The chief problems in the production phase are to raise the efficiency of gum harvesting by improvements of techniques, to grow adequately stocked forests, and to fit turpentining into its proper place in good forest management.

PROGRESS IN TIMBER MANAGEMENT has been spotty. By far the largest part of the original 58 million acres in the naval stores belt was covered with stands of longleaf pine, intermingled with slash pine in the ponds and low places. After the exploitation of the old growth, new stands in the eastern part of the belt had a great deal more slash pine and will have more and more as fire protection is extended. On the driest soils, where longleaf pine occurred with low-quality oaks, the oaks are now taking over. The longleaf pine was culled out of these stands, and often did not reproduce itself. On the better soils in the western part, longleaf pine is most at home and will continue to be the major crop.

The first logging, in the northeastern part of the belt, was not very close, and enough seed trees were usually left to provide for restocking. The western and southern parts were logged later with large equipment. They were cut much closer, were often burned, and vast areas did not reseed. They still present a tremendous planting job.

However, it is the wise management of the crop of second growth that is the major topic of this discussion.

Where fires are controlled and a seed source is present, slash pine seeds in at a surprisingly rapid rate. A dense young stand of slash pine usually benefits from early thinning when the trees are just an inch or two in diameter. If the stand is thinned to 600 to 800 trees an acre, the trees will reach cordwood size more rapidly, and entrance into the stand with trucks or pulpwood saws for thinning will be greatly facilitated. Thinning such stands mechanically with a heavy brush-cutting roller has been tried by the National Turpentine & Pulpwood Corp., of Jacksonville, Fla., but it is too early to assess the results.

Longleaf pine ordinarily seeds in less densely than slash pine, and also shows more graduation in size of tree, so that early thinnings are usually unnecessary.

When a good stand of turpentine pines gets to pulpwood size, the struggle for its diversion to one of many uses begins. In former days, when the average stand was perhaps 20 turpentine trees to the acre and there was no market for thinnings, there was not much point in turpentining only selected trees. Hence the custom arose of turpentining all the trees that were large enough to provide a reasonable flow of gum. The custom was also due to the circumstance that most naval stores producers then owned their own turpentine stills, and were chiefly interested in producing enough gum to keep these stills in operation.

The whole pattern of forestry has changed since the diameter-limit system came to be the custom. We now have many plantations and dense natural stands of slash pine. There will be many more in the future. We now have excellent markets for thinnings, so that there is no need to cut all or nothing. Furthermore, the recent conversion from hundreds of small direct-fire stills in the woods to a few dozen large central processing plants has provided a ready market for gum produced by independent operators and gum farmers. The latter usually own the land and have no compulsion to exploit their timber too heavily for naval stores.

All of these changes have made the time ripe for greater emphasis on good timber-management practices in the naval stores region. The most essential change is to get away from the custom of turpentining every tree in the stand as soon as it reaches 9 inches in diameter. Any properly stocked naval stores stand will need thinning or other silvicultural treatment at various times if it is not to be liquidated at an early age. In any such treatment, the trees to be cut are determined on the basis of spacing, form, and size. Diameter-limit cupping overlooks spacing and form and selects on a basis of entirely inadequate information the trees to be cupped and cut.

When a properly stocked naval stores forest is ready for cupping, a decision must be made on the type of management that will best suit the needs of the owner. The decision arrived at will depend on the owner's circumstances, but ordinarily he will be interested in maximum sustained income per acre from the integrated production of wood and gum.

An improvement cut is the first step. If the trees to come out in the improvement cut have already been turpentined, the cut is made immediately, for these "worked-out" trees do not pay their way in timber growth and should be removed.

If the improvement cut is in unturpentined trees, and if there are enough of them per acre, those large enough should be turpentined before they are removed. Crooked, forked, and excess trees to be removed in a thinning will yield just as much gum as the best timber trees that will usually be reserved for later turpentining.

Where the stand is in good condition the first cutting will be a. thinning. The poorest quality trees in all crown classes are removed, plus the additional trees that should come out to provide best spacing of the remaining stand.

Since the trees (at least the larger ones) that are to come out in a thinning are ordinarily to be turpentined before removal, the selection of the trees must be done anywhere from 2 to 10 years in advance of the cutting. The length of this period should depend on the time at which the stand will need thinning. If no thinning will be required for 10 or 20 years, then two or even three faces can be worked one after another on each marked tree. On the other hand, if the stand is overcrowded and needs thinning soon, the trees can be turpentined heavily with the use of acid on one wide or two standard faces for 1 to 3 years before they are removed. The number of well-stocked natural and planted stands is increasing rapidly, and these new techniques for rapid turpentining in advance of thinning in crowded stands should become increasingly applicable.

The best guide to the need for thinning in a southern pine stand is the proportion of the total height of the tree that is occupied by live crown. The stand should be so managed as to keep this proportion between 30 and 40 percent for wood production and perhaps somewhat nearer 50 percent for maximum gum production.

The optimum density to be maintained under management in naval stores stands of different ages and on different soils has not yet been determined. A rule of thumb for selecting trees for cupping 3 to 5 years in advance of thinning is to leave between the reserved trees a space equal in feet to twice the average tree diameter in inches. Thus the space between an 8-and a 12-inch tree would be about 20 feet (10 X 2), which is also equal to the sum of the two diameters in inches.

Where selective cupping results in tapping a smaller number of trees per acre, it results in some increase in current production costs. However, a stand that is dense enough for a thinning will ordinarily provide an acceptable number of trees for turpcntining, just as it would for selective cutting. If a loss of efficiency is occasioned by wider spacing in a given selective cupping, it should be repaid with interest in the second cupping cycle, when the next trees to be tapped will be considerably larger in diameter. A 12-inch tree yields 50 percent more gum than a 9-inch tree, although the increased cost of turpentining per tree is negligible. On the Osceola National Forest in northeastern Florida, the plan of management calls for three successive cycles of turpentining before the stand is removed. In each cycle, those trees are turpentined which a forester has marked to come out in the next thinning or other cutting.

In understocked stands, where thinning is not needed, the owner has a choice of deferring any turpentining until the trees are larger and denser, or cutting off the stand and replanting it, or marking it for a seed-tree cutting to get reproduction. The important precaution is that he should not simply cup every tree over 9 inches without knowing what his next step in stand management is to be.

The regeneration of the even-aged stands of slash pine is no problem as long as there is sufficient seed source. In longleaf pine, regeneration by natural means is a good deal less certain. In Florida the preference is toward leaving longleaf seed trees in groups. Longleaf pine seedlings need sizable openings wherein to become established.

Repeated and untimely fires are the worst enemy of reproduction, and many areas with a seed source restock rapidly as soon as they are brought under protection. Other areas may have so much vegetative growth that reproduction is facilitated by using carefully controlled fire to burn off the accumulated "rough" in advance of seedfall.

Improvements in planting machines and the shift to more intensive forestry will probably result in a great increase in forest planting in the naval stores belt. In the future the problem of "nonrestocking lands" ought to vanish.

BURNING THE WOODS to improve the forage is common practice in the naval stores area. In the open-range sections, where the law allows unrestricted grazing of unfenced land, the landowner either has to burn his land or expect others to burn it for him. If the land does go unburned for 10 or 15 years, the accumulated herbaceous and the shrubby fuels, draped with large quantities of dead pine needles, make an extremely hot and destructive fire.

The cheapest way to control this fire hazard is by carefully controlled or prescribed burning whenever it is needed. Such burning provides the necessary fire protection and forage and makes the area much more accessible and attractive to naval stores and timber operators. Deliberate burning is contrary to everything that foresters taught in the recent past, but the practice of prescribed burning has so many advantages in large portions of the region that a whole technique for it has been perfected and put into use in the past few years, particularly in the national forests of Florida in the flatwoods section. The technique is described in publications of the Southern Forest Experiment Station and in an article by John W. Squires in the Journal of Forestry for November 1947.

The chief purposes of prescribed burning are usually to reduce the fire hazard or to prepare the seedbed for longleaf pine, but it has several other uses. It may control disease (such as brown spot needle blight in longleaf pine), improve the range, or hold back undesirable vegetation.

The first step is to examine the tract and decide which places are to be burned in a given year. The purpose and type of burn should be clearly defined in advance, and, on large areas, maps should be prepared of the part to be burned. On a large tract, the blocks to be burned must be selected in such a way as to protect other areas from wildfires coming in from the outside. The burning should be planned so that it provides fresh forage where it is most needed in range management. It must also be made to fit in as well as possible with current naval stores operation. Burning should be done just before the installation of new faces. Otherwise raking of the litter away from the turpentined trees is usually essential to prevent burning of inflammable faces.

In slash pine areas particularly, it is important to postpone burning on reproducing areas until the young stand becomes well established. Even in larger stands, the interval between burns must be flexible if fire is to be integrated properly with other forest uses. Experience in the Florida flatwoods indicates that perhaps one-seventh of the gross acreage of a large tract will be burned in a given year.

After the selection of areas to be burned, fire lines are plowed at intervals of about 600 or 700 feet at right angles to the particular wind direction that is preferred for burning. The fire is set with a drip torch on the downwind side of the strip, so that the fire backs through the area against the wind. In Florida, the fires are usually set a day or two after a rain when there is a northerly wind of 3 to 10 miles an hour.

Burning always does some damage. The proper technique of prescribed burning results in the lowest sum of costs plus damages. On large areas this sum should amount to about 21 cents an acre for one burn, or perhaps 3 cents an acre a year when prorated to the gross acreage of the property.

Although the techniques of burning have been worked out, there is still much to be learned about fitting the burning into an integrated pattern of timber management, turpentining, and grazing.

CATTLE GRAZING is more important in the rather open stands of the naval stores region than in any other forest region in the East. Florida, which contains most of the forest land in the naval stores region, has more beef cattle than any other southern State east of the Mississippi; many of the cattle graze on forest range. The cattle industry in Florida returns 48 million dollars annually—more than the gum naval stores industry brings to the whole naval stores belt.

It is recognized that cattle grazing ordinarily has no detrimental effects on timber production in the turpentine belt, and actually is helpful in reducing the fire hazard. As a practical matter of fact, if an owner does not graze cattle on his own land in the open range country, someone else will.

But despite the recognized place of grazing in the management of naval stores forests, a great deal remains to be learned about integrating grazing with other uses of the land. Present herd-management practice is rather primitive. The cattle are usually grazed yearlong on the forest range, whereas the forage in winter is not sufficiently nutritious to meet minimum needs of the animals. The results are small calf crops, low calf weights, and high death losses.

Research has shown the nutritive value of the forest range at each season of the year, and has indicated the kind, amount, and timing of supplemental feeding that is necessary for good health of cattle on Coastal Plain ranges. Research has also shown that forest range cattle need yearlong mineral supplements, especially phosphorus. This is provided by a mixture of 2 parts steamed bonemeal to 1 part salt.

Supplemental feeding may be provided in the form of concentrates, such as cottonseed meal, or by making improved pasture available at seasons when the nutrient content of the native forage is low.

Where feasible, good herd-management practices should be instituted to maintain the quality of the herd and to limit calving to the best time of the year. Cross fences are necessary for proper control of the herd and proper use of the range, but on poor land it may be difficult to demonstrate the soundness of such an investment.

THE PRESSURE OF DIFFERENT USES on the forest land here has been heavy. A decade or two ago the mortality and loss of growth resulting from turpentining was as great as the total amount of the pine lumber harvested. In Florida if it had not been for repeated forest fires—usually associated with grazing—which killed out the young growth and perpetuated understocked stands, the State could be producing twice as much timber as it now does.

In northeastern Florida, by far the best-timbered section of the State, the average growing stock is less than 5 cords an acre, and the growth is one-sixth cord an acre a year. The average saw-timber growth is 47 board feet an acre a year, and the saw-timber stand is being cut a good deal faster than it is growing.

The various pressures on the land for wood, grass, and gum cannot simply be removed. They must be integrated in sound systems of forest-land management. Turpentining must be done with a view to stand improvement and timber production. Grazing fires must be converted into systems of prescribed burning for forest protection. The whole complex must be worked into a management pattern that takes advantage of those pressures on the land for profit.

It is the multiple profit from wood, gum, and grass that Capt. I. F. Eldredge, a forester, had in mind when he said: "Nowhere in the United States are silvicultural and economic conditions more favorable for intensive industrial forestry management than in the naval stores belt of the Southeast."

Charles F. Brannan

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