Whether your wood lot pays a profit or not, like the profit from the rest of your land, depends largely on how it is taxed.  The higher it is taxed the harder it is to make it pay.  In most states timberland is assessed on the basis of its value, timber and land together.  Woodland assessed on this basis is overtaxed as compared with land assessed on the basis of what it produces each year.  The value of plowland for farm purposes is established by what it will earn.  If the owner can make $10 an acre a year over all expenses by growing say wheat, corn, cotton or alfalfa on it, his land will have a value of perhaps $150 an acre.  If it took two years to grow a crop, the land would be worth only half as much.  Its owner in that case would kick vigorously if he could not get his assessment lowered.  He would kick still more vigorously if he had to pay a tax also on the value of the standing crop, after having to pay too much on the land.  “The Lord loveth a cheerful kicker.”

With woodland the case is still worse.  Each year the owner may have to pay a tax on the merchantable crops of many past years.  It is as though the owner of plowland had to pay a tax on the value of his field crops twice a week throughout the growing season.  When a full-grown tree is cut down or burned up in a forest fire, it may have been taxed 40 or 50 times over.  Each year the land on which it grew has been valued not on the basis of its earning power, but on the basis of what it would bring if sold, timber and all.  A tax levied on the income-earning value of the land would be much more equitable.

Certain states have applied this principle by legislation under which land to be used for growing timber can be classified so that the timber can be taxed separately from the land.  The land there is taxed annually on its value, without timber.  The tax on the timber is not paid until the crop is harvested.  It is therefore a tax on the yield.  In New York this yield tax is 5 per cent of the value of the crop harvested; Michigan 5 per cent of it; Massachusetts 6 per cent; and Vermont, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania 10 per cent, with different provisions for forests already established.

Such a method is much better than that adopted by a number of states which exempt, under certain conditions, reforested or reforesting lands for a term of years, or allow rebates or bounties on such lands.

The profit of a growing forest crop will depend largely on relief from excessive taxation.  It is unthrifty public policy to discourage putting waste land to work. ("The Farm Woodlot Problem,” by Herbert A. Smith, Editor Forest Service—­from Yearbook of Department of Agriculture for 1914.)

CHAPTER XXIII

SOME PRACTICAL EXPERIMENTS

The Department of Agriculture at Washington, also Cornell University and various other schools publish special studies and monographs of different branches.  For some a small charge is made, but they are mostly distributed free.  Many of them are very valuable.  The United States Department’s pamphlet on the Diseases of the Violet is a notable example.  The average person does not know how these can be obtained or even that they exist.