Land Clearing in the Lower Mississippi Valley

LAND CLEARING IN THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY Herbert S. Sternitzke and Joe F. Christopher" The 12 Southern States, including Virginia, customarily provide more than half of the hardwood timber harvested annually in the United States. Within the South, the forests of the lower Mississippi Valley—or Delta as it is popularly called—are generally regarded as the most productive hardwood lands of any size in the entire nation. Extensive land clearing during the past few years, however, has caused widespread concern over the future of the Delta's forests. Counties ofthe Delta region ofArkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi (Fig.l ) encompass more than 90 per cent of the remaining woodland acreage in the lower valley of the Mississippi River. (1, 2, 3) Forest area statistics in these States have been accumulated over several decades during the periodic timber resource inventories conducted by the Forest Survey, a research unit of the USDA Forest Service. These data provide one of the few official sources of compatible information on the subject of land development in the Mississippi Valley. A description of inventory procedures used by the Forest Survey will be found in the Forest Service bulletins cited in the bibliographical footnotes. Since World War II, the inventory cycle has been about 10 years. In the mid-1930's, when the first statistics were collected by the Forest Survey, 11.8 million Delta acres were classified as forest. By date of the last survey in each state, some 3.7 million acres had been converted to other uses. Of this total, more than half was in Arkansas; the rest was about equally distributed in Louisiana and Mississippi (Table 1). It is highly significant that the rate of clearing is rising rapidly. In Arkansas and Mississippi, the two most recently inventoried states, Delta forests declined by 170,000 acres annually during the 10 years preceding the latest survey. For the earlier decade, the decrease averaged only 37,000 acres annually . During the latest inventory of the predominantly Delta counties in Mississippi , the Forest Survey directed special attention to sample plots that had been cleared in the last 10 years. These plots were visited, and date of clearing, former forest cover type, (4 ) and degree of timber utilization were determined. It was found that clearing had been heaviest toward the end of the 195767 intersurvey period. About 70 per cent of it had been done in the last 4 years. Among the forest types in the area, sweetgum-water oak stands were most heavily affected. This highly desirable type had occupied more than one-third ofthe cleared land. The demand for farmland, however, was extend- *Mr. Sternitzke is principal resource analyst and Mr. Christopher is Forest Survey project leader, Southern Forest Experiment Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, New Orleans, Louisiana. The paper was accepted for publication in December 1969. 64 Southeastern Geographer /¿MISS. i=-2it£C»llt«0l(. CLAV GREENE LAWRENCE C RAlOHCAD POINSETT CRlTTE DEN ST FRANCIS LONOKE PHILLIM ÄJUNICA ARKANSAS J-V\S TALLA KATCHIE PHREYSJ HOLMES flfWl·RRE BONNE—>t "== r MARSH Figure 1. Counties of the Mississippi Delta. Vol. X, No. 1 65 ing the work even into less productive timber types. For example, one-fourth of the area cleared since the 1957 survey had been occupied by stands of overcup oak-bitter pecan. The upsurge in forest-land clearing is primarily the result ofworldwide demand for soybeans. Soybean acreage in the United States has increased by about 50 per cent since 1960. It has been reported that soybeans surpassed corn and cotton in 1966 and become the number one agricultural cash crop in the Nation. (5) In the Delta counties of Mississippi, soybeans have been planted on approximately two-thirds of the land cleared since 1957. The razed Mississippi forests contained 150 million cubic feet of timber in sound, well-formed trees classed as growing stock. About 45 million cubic feet, or 30 per cent, of the cleared timber was harvested and sold, mainly as saw logs and pulpwood. An undetermined additional amount went into domestic productions, such as fuel and fence posts. The rest was bulldozed into windrows and burned, or simply pushed into ditches. Primary reasons for...