[To MI Barron or vs• ''Srrctsrori.'7 Sra,—Everyone interested in forestry
will be grateful to the Duke of Northumberland for the calculations regarding the Novar woods which he contributed to your columns last week. He has stated the case with perfect fairness, and the figures which he has assumed for the cost of planting and rent are also quite fair. The Duke writes on the assumption that no profit was made earlier than the final felling. As a matter of fact, large sums must have been realized from the woods at an earlier period, since the Scots pine which formed a large pro- portion of the crop cut during the thirty years under dis- cussion did not contain more than thirty stems to the acre. This does not vitiate the Duke's argument, but it proves that the return eluting the last thirty years has been below the normal. The owner of the woods, in the speech from which my figures were taken, estimated the profit of those years (2100,000) to be no more than one-fourth of the profit which fully stocked woods would have yielded. The profit has been further cut into by heavy expenditure in replanting, experi- ments having been made on a largo scale in under-planting and in plantations of the newer exotic conifers. These have in some cases cost as much as £10 an acre. Had the replanting been of the ordinary straightforward type which at Novar now costs 40s. an acre, the net profit would have been considerably higher. A large part of the profit has, in other words, been invested in the forest. I do not wish to overstate the case, but the foot that under- stocked woods can pay for their own improvement and for costly experiments without reducing the return on the original capital below 2i per cent. shows that afforestation, if well managed and well placed, is not a risky speculation. Can it be said that money invested in agricultural improvements brings in as good. a return P In case your readers should question the value of expensive experiments such as those mentioned above, I may refer them to a wood in Argyllshire composed of Douglas fir mixed with Thuya gigantea and a very few larch. Three acres of this wood were blown down by the gales of 1911 and 1912 at the age of thirty-five. The timber, sold at the low price of 5d. a foot, has realized a net profit of over 24 per acre per annum. The adjoining land is let for agricultural purposes at Is. an acre, but the ground on which the plantation stands is steep and rocky. The plantation was fully stocked. This wood actually yielded eight hundred cubic feet of marketable timber per acre, rather more than the estimate given in the current number of the Royal Scottish Arboricultural Society's Transactions, where the wood is fully described.—I am, Sir, d.c.,
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