It is almost a law that farmers must rise early, work late, receive little return for their labor. If the prediction of Dr. Ralph McKee of Columbia University, made last week before The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, comes true, this routine will be upset.
Dr. McKee, financed by Oxford Paper Co., has worked for four years on new hybrid poplar trees which will mature rapidly, be suitable for paper manufacture. Aided by New York Botanical Garden experts, he has developed 101 hybrids from the 21 species of poplar. Fourteen of the hybrids are specially suited to papermaking by virtue of their precocity: in eight years they attain a growth which takes normal poplars 45 years to reach. A crop of this kind would allow a farmer eight years between harvests, would yield him a crop far more valuable than similar crops of wheat or corn. The cost of McKee poplar seedlings is about $5 per acre. In eight years the crop is worth $600 per acre. Over a like period, $240 per acre would be a fair return for wheat crops. Poplars can also be grown on barren soil that now produces nothing. In addition to being valuable for papermaking, tree harvests could be sold as cellulose for rayon manufacture.*
When trees become crops, forest conservation will cease to be a problem. And in the February issue of Cellulose, a new trade magazine, the late Dr. Edwin Emery Slosson of Science Service gives the answer of the Woodman who was asked to spare-that-tree. "Sure," says Woodman, "I can spare them all, for I can grow wood quicker in weeds and shrubs. Trees are not the only means of producing cellulose."
Dr. Slosson predicted that crop trees, which grow at the rate of 10% per year for the first 15 years and at the rate of 4% as they approach maturity, will never be allowed to reach their full growth. When they are allowed to mature, only 50% of them is used at the sawmill. Sapling forests will be harvested—perhaps by Paul Bunyanesque mowing machines—and put through a process which will reduce their fibres to a mossy mat; then remolded, remade into wood, of any dimension, any hardness. This process is now being used in Mississippi to manufacture "Masonite" from sawdust, chips and other refuse lumber.