FIGURE 28.—The Eldorado County foothill country. Grass, woodland, and brush.
What the Plan Provides
FARMING, Forestry, and Industry Profit from Land-Use Planning in California
In California the most critical conflicts between major land uses occur in the foothill belts of the Sierra Nevada and other mountains. A recent comparative study in a typical mountain and foothill county by the California Forest and Range Experiment Station of the United States Forest Service and the Giannini Foundation of the University of California has brought out some very significant facts and led to conclusions which may be of use in similar difficulties elsewhere.
Eldorado County, in the elbow of California, has a total area of about a million acres, of which the eastern half and a little more is within the mountainous virgin-timber belt, the division nearly coinciding with the boundary of the Eldorado National Forest at 3,500 feet elevation—about the upper climatic limit of agriculture. In the early mining days this was the most populous county in the State. Agriculture flourished with mining. Peaches cost $3 apiece in gold. But mining declined, and agriculture with it. Then came lumbering. Last has come the specialization of agriculture in fruit orchards, which in its turn has fallen upon evil days. Population is dwindling. On a declining tax base, tax costs are rising, even without the influence of a world-wide depression. What can be done about it?
The lower, or western and southern portion of the county, which was mainly grassland from the beginning, is occupied by large livestock ranches that rely mainly on the high mountain ranges within the national forest for summer feed. The areas of agriculturally good soil are always scattered, in small patches. The larger part of those at suitable elevations for agriculture are devoted to fruit raising, mainly of pears. But all this cultivated land is less than 2 percent of the county area. Upward from Placerville, ranches are more and more scattered and isolated, and income is more precarious and dependent upon supplemental employment.
Pine timber once extended down to the 1,000-foot level. It was largely cut off in the early mining days, but more than 125,000 acres have come back to second-growth timber, fairly even-aged at an average of 60 years and varying in density and thrift according to the quality of the soil and extent to which 1t has been burned over. The rest of the once-timbered area is now mainly covered by brush or scrubby oak woodland.
This second-growth timber of the western part of the county already amounts to 1% billion feet board measure. If protected from fire and allowed to grow another 60 years, it could produce 4 billion feet, worth by that time probably $20,000,000. The commercial timber area, largely between 3,500 and 6,000 feet elevation, contains a remarkable volume of fine timber constituting the largest single item of present wealth in the county. Above the 6,000-foot level the timber becomes less valuable for lumber production, and the chief value of the land is for wildlife conservation and recreation, which is growing more rapidly in volume and monetary return than any other land use of the county.
A thorough survey of the physical lay-out resulted in a classification of the county into land classes based upon soil, topography (roughness), altitude, and climate, also a map of the vegetation cover of the county including virgin timber, second growth, woodland, brush, grass, and crop land, and of the area which once bore forest but is now without it, together with detailed data on the rate of growth of the timber on the different soils. This was followed by economic surveys of sample farms of every major class in the county; also of the irrigation districts, the industries, the power situation, with present and prospective reservoir development; of recreational use and of the county government, including roads, schools, and taxation; and the relation to all these of the national forests. The survey covered about half of the area and volume of virgin timber in the eastern half of the county and most of the higher land (fig. 28).
The result of this work was a division of the county into five use zones, each with a definite character of present use, and individual possibilities of improvement of its private and public returns.
Fruit raising is recommended to be held at its present expansion until better market prospects develop. The efficiency of livestock raising, it is pointed out, may be improved by larger home production of supplemental feed and by group organization to make possible a larger and more coordinated use of mountain range, progressively by elevation with the advance of the season.
One of the findings which affects widely the prospective best use of lands is that the second-growth timber area, by reason of its high timber-growing capacity, is much more valuable for timber crops than for grazing. It is shown that the ranchers, instead of continuing their long-tried efforts to improve this range by slashing and burning the young timber, will reap greater ultimate profits by protecting the second-growth timber. This will provide a home supply of box material for the fruit ranchers and will stabilize farming by giving the ranchers profitable supplemental employment (fig. 29).
In the areas of scattered occupancy toward the upper limit of agriculture, where the land is increasingly occupied by second-growth timber, it was often found that the settlers could not make enough money to live save by working on the county roads which were put in so that they could live there. And the maintenance of their little schools of 5 to 10 pupils cost as much as $300 per pupil, as against $70 per pupil in schools of 25 or more pupils in better populated districts. It seemed clear that the whole county would profit by devoting this district to forest-crop production and gradually depopulating it—not by arbitrary dispossession, but by providing better opportunities for making a living elsewhere in connection with the sawmills and other small industrial centers.
A definite part of the plan for the county is the stimulation of localized industrial development, under the guidance of a competent survey of opportunities and needs, so as to avoid misdirected promotion. Coupled with this will be an endeavor to assure the maintenance of renewable land resources, such as forests and grazing forage by getting the industries which use them to take from the land no more than its growth can supply. As the most profitable use to which they can be put, it is plannedy to devote the higher mountain lands to recreation, as is already the practice in the Eldorado National Forest.
The path to these ends is the coordination of private management with that already in practice upon the national forests. Such coordination in the interest of the whole county community will, it is hoped, result in soundness of economic and social structure. The leaders of the county have accepted the plan and through a strong committee are moving toward its consummation.