American Tree Farm System
"Wood is a crop. Forestry is Tree Farming." — Gifford Pinchot, First chief of the USDA Forest Service.
The American Tree Farm system is an organized collection of private landowners interested in effectively managing their woodland properties. Founded in 1941, the ATFS consists of more than 27,500,000 acres (111,000 km2) of privately owned forest in 46 states. There are 4,400 volunteers who inspect the forest grounds and there are 87,000 family forest ownwers. The ATFS is primarily known for continuous wood and timber production but it also consists of many programs and committees that work to ensure the protection of wildlife habitats, watersheds, soil quality and recreation for communities. The habitat and resources that tree farms provided differ greatly based on their location and by the species of trees that are planted. Farms in the system attempt to maintain a healthy level of biodiversity by creating natural forest buffers, practicing sustainable harvesting techniques and by minimizing land fragmentation. Tree farm systems in each state is self governing and all work under specific guidelines developed by the ATFS’s National Operating Committee. The term tree farming was introduced in 1940 by linking the terms in an attempt to make it easier for the public to conceptualize that trees are renewable resources.
Read more about this topic: Private Landowner Assistance Program
Famous quotes containing the words american, tree, farm and/or system:
“It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they’re not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)
“On a tree by a river a little tom-tit
Sang “Willow, titwillow, titwillow!”
And I said to him, “Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing, ‘Willow, titwillow, titwillow’?
Is it a weakness of intellect, birdie?” I cried,
“Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?””
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)