The relationship between agricultural policy and forestry in the southern region of the United States and the future impacts of agricultural policy on southern forestr

The domination of forestry by agricultural policies is viewed as a major problem in the south. The southern forest land has been directly affected by federal agricultural programs, such as the Soil Bank Program of the 1950's and the more recent Conservation Reserve Program of the 1985 Food Security Act. The purpose of this study was to indicate the likely use of marginal lands in the southern region of the United States under selected crop and timber price scenarios.;The procedure used to indicate the most profitable use of southern marginal lands was to develop enterprise budgets for crop and timber in each state of the study area. The basis for crop budgets was to use three alternative levels of crop prices, i.e., low, medium, and high. The low crop prices were assumed to be the outcome of a free market without government intervention. The medium crop prices reflected reasonable expectations of current market conditions. The high crop prices were set at 70 percent of parity prices to reflect high levels of government support. The timber budgets used two alternative price levels; i.e., medium and high. The medium timber prices were obtained from "Timber Mart South" file and reflected current conditions. The high timber prices represented a 20 percent increase over the medium prices. An additional scenario included discounting Conservation Reserve Payments (CRPs) at real rates of four, seven, and ten percent and adding to timber's equivalent annual income. Crop net returns were then compared to timber's equivalent annual income (EAI) with and without the CRPs under two alternative scenarios, i.e., Scenario A utilized medium timber prices and low, medium, and high crop prices with and without the CRPs; Scenario B utilized high timber prices and medium crop prices with and without the CRPs. Timber emerged as the major potential use of marginal lands of the study area at low and medium crop prices with and without the CRPs for Scenario A. In Scenario B, timber emerged a strong competitor on marginal lands in most of the states considered.