Administration is building through private contract only low-cost farm houses. Construction has been based on a few simple principles, intended to produce adequate, attractive, but modest homes at the lowest possible cost: Design.-Cubic footage of the house was held to the minimum necessary for health and comfort. Rooms were arranged for both compactness and convenience. Every unnecessary gable, beam, and purely decorative feature was eliminated. Materials. First grade materials were used throughout, so that maintenance and repair costs would be as low as possible. Standard materials, in standard sizes, usually proved most economical. The use of local products often resulted in considerable savings, through lower transportation costs. Construction.-Precutting and prefabrication were highly developed. A small portable sawmill, for example, often was set up on the project, to cut lumber to exact specifications for a large number of houses. Complicated parts, such as window and door frames, and sometimes the entire frame of the house, were prefabricated at the mill, so they could be installed with a minimum of labor. FEDERAL CROP INSURANCE CORPORATION The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, United States Department of Agriculture, utilizes the facilities of the Agricultural Marketing Service in the administration of the Grain Standards Act in connection with the establishment of standards of quality. These standards of quality are specified in the Official Grain Standards of the United States. In accordance with these standards, premiums are computed in the class of wheat specified by the insured in his application, but the basic grade for computing premiums and indemnities with respect to each class is determined by the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation before applications for insurance are solicited. The Corporation has specified No. 1 as the grade for Northern Spring Wheat, and No. 2 as the grade for all of the other classes of wheat to be used as the basis for collecting premiums and paying indemnities. Premiums may be paid in wheat, by cash, or by means of an advance from the Secretary of Agriculture against conservation and parity payments accruing to growers under the program administered by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Indemnities are paid either in wheat, in cash by immediate settlement, or in cash by deferred settlement up to 90 days after approval by the Corporation of the insured's claim for indemnity. The insured may indicate the method by which he desires an indemnity to be paid, but the Corporation reserves the right to make payment in form other than that indicated by the insured. Only an extremely small portion of the premiums have been paid in wheat. The cash received by the Corporation is used by the Corporation to promptly purchase wheat to hold in an insurance reserve to cover future indemnities. When indemnities are paid in cash, wheat is sold from this reserve to provide the necessary funds. The classes and grades of wheat used in all of these transactions are determined in accordance with the Official Grain Standards of the United States. FOREST SERVICE Congress has designated the Forest Service, United States Department of Agriculture, as the agency of the Federal Government specifically responsible for protecting, developing, and administering certain public lands and their living resources. The Forest Service is also authorized to help States and farm, industrial, and other owners to protect and develop such of their lands as are more valuable in forest growth than as plow land. Broadly, responsibilities of the Forest Service are: (1) To initiate and apply, locally and nationally, action programs looking to the best use of forest lands in the interest of public welfare and help with action programs initiated by county, State, and Federal agencies; (2) to protect, develop, and administer in the public interest the national forest system and its resources, products, values, and services; (3) to conduct research in problems involving protection, development, management, renewal, and continuous use of all resources, products, values, and services of forest lands; (4) to make research and administrative findings and results available to individuals, industries, and public and private agencies generally. In research, in national forest administration, and in initiating and applying action programs the Forest Service works in close cooperation with other branches and bureaus of the United States Department of Agriculture; and is guided by the Department's basic purpose of establishing and maintaining such sound land and resource management and use as will help build and maintain communities and local and national social and economic structures. The Forest Service conducts certain research and investigations of interest to the consumer. Although it does not officially promulgate standards, it does a large amount of research work to determine the proper factors, with their evaluations, which become the bases for either official standards or standards adopted by semipublic organizations and extensively used in commercial practice. Within the scope of marketing standards the research work of the Forest Service tends to fall into two general categories: (1) Forestry practice and the first marketing of raw forestry products, and (2) investigations as to the inherent identity and quality and most suitable uses for forestry products which have been at least initially processed, that is, lumber, in the conventional sense. In administering public lands which have growing timber, it frequently is necessary and prudent to dispose, either to Government or private outlets, of that portion which is ready for cutting. While these sales are made in accordance with usual Government requirements applicable to the disposition of governmentally owned property, peculiarities unique to forestry are followed. Sales usually are made upon the basis of price per thousand board feet, log scale. This involves a process of estimating the probable output at the time the sale is advertised, and when the bids are offered the logs are scaled as the basis for monetary settlement. Many rules for measuring logs in board feet developed or were adopted in different parts of the country in the effort to obtain a rule which would give the amount of lumber that could be sawed from a log of a given size under local marketing and sawing customs. Some of these rules, among others, are known as the Scribner rule, the Doyle rule, the Maine rule, the Spaulding rule, and the International rule. To establish a uniform or standard basis upon which to proceed in the sale of national forest timber, a regulation of the Secretary of Agriculture relating thereto was first issued in 1905. Its present form, regulation S-16. was published in the "Federal Register," August 15, 1936, page 1094, and stated that "The cubic volume rules and the Scribner Decimal C log rule, both as used by the Forest Service, are the official rules for scaling national forest timber." Improvement of milling machinery and changing customs in parts of the country made it desirable to have the option of using the International log rule under some circumstances, and the Secretary of Agriculture modified Regulation S-16 5 in 1938 to give this option, which as yet has not been widely exercised except in the Northeast. 45 The uniform use of the Scribner Decimal C rule, under a standard set of instructions 46 for deductions for defect and for its application in other ways has had an intensive and extensive influence on the practice of private owners near the national forests. Company after company joined voluntarily in the use of the standard so established. Logging contractors demanded "Government scale" for the logs they delivered. The Office of Indian Affairs of the United States Department of the Interior later adopted the same rule and issued similar instructions for its use. The influence of this standard has been far reaching. The Forest Service also has attempted to promote more extended use of the standard cord measure. The conventional cord is 8 feet long by 4 feet wide and 4 feet high, or a cubic content measure of 128 cubic feet. In the sale of firewood and pulpwood, the common practice in many localities is to cut it at particular lengths, sometimes for fireplace width and other longer widths such as 52 inches for pulpwood purposes. Where the wood is cut at lengths other than 48 inches, it is necessary to make adjustments either in the height of the pile or the length to compensate for the variation in width. It has been stated that it is somewhat of a current practice in the pulpwood area of the South to sell on what is known as a "long cord" basis. The cubic foot content of this so-called long cord frequently is considerably in excess of the 128 cubic-foot content for the conventional cord. Similar practices prevail in some other areas. To protect the farmer and timber owner from unfair advantage because of such practices, the Forest Service has attempted to make known throughout all forestry areas what the standard cord measurement is, and how to measure for a standard cord, and has attempted to have this measurement adopted in commercial practice. This is mainly an educational program. The Forest Service leads in the development of specifications for nursery stock for application in grading or culling small trees grown 45 "Modification of Regulation S-16," Federal Register, p. 3137, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., December 23, 1938. 10 cents. 48 "Instructions for the Scaling and Measurement of National Forest Timber," 103 pp., U. S. Forest Service, Washington, D. C., 1928. in the nursery of the planting agency or in a cooperating nursery, or purchased from commercial nurserymen.* Cooperating with the Soil Conservation Service, the Forest Service developed standards and specifications, by species, for nursery stock, which may be used in buying stock from commercial nurserymen. The standards and specifications, based on data and experience available to the Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service refer to size of stock, size of root, size of stem, and freedom from disease. Grades 1, 2, and 3 were established. Experience has indicated to the Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service that certain types of nursery stock produced best results under given climatic and land conditions while other types of stock developed best under other conditions.48 The specifications so developed were used not enly in purchases of commercial nursery stock, but also by Governnent bureaus in the interchange of stock between Government nurseries. So far, the standards have dealt chiefly with conifers. The Forest Service also developed a departmental forest seed policy approved by the Secretary of Agriculture on June 21, 1939. This has resulted in a standard procedure for obtaining seed so as to give best results in the area awaiting planting. In substance, it states that the policy of the United States Department of Agriculture shall be (1) to use only tree seed of known locality or origin for nursery stock grown from such seed; (2) to require adequate evidence verifying the place near the origin of all lots of tree seed for nursery stock; (3) to require an accurate record of the origin of all lots of tree seed and nursery stock used in Department activities, and (4) to use local seed from natural stands whenever available. FOREST PRODUCTS LABORATORY, MADISON, WIS. The Forest Products Laboratory is a unit of the research organization of the Forest Service, United States Department of Agricultre. It is the only institution in the United States concerned wholly with the investigation of wood and wood products and their adaptation to diversified fields of use. In the course of its work on the more efficient and diversified utilization of forest materials the Laboratory is daily consulted by consumers, fabricators, producers, and by various Governmental agencies in regard to uniform test methods and standards for forest products and allied materials. So great is the magnitude of the Laboratory's work bearing upon standardization that no attempt can here be made even to catalog such activities. The following, however, may serve as illustrations of the general types of the Laboratory's activities related to forest products standardization. Methods of Test. Strength properties of clear wood.-One of the most important problems of forest products standardization relates to methods of testing the strength of clear wood. When the Forest Products Laboratory was contemplating an extensive research program to determine "Artificial Reforestation in the Southern Pine Region," 113 pp., Technical Bulletin 492, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., November 1935, 15 cents. Ibid., p. 82. the mechanical properties of various species of woods native to the United States it realized the necessity for adopting a uniform procedure so that comparable results would be obtained. Standard methods of testing small, clear pieces of wood were therefore developed to cover tests in bending (beams), compression parallel to the grain (columns), compression perpendicular to the grain (rail on tie). toughness, stiffness, hardness, and the like, as well as the selection of the test material, cutting the logs into specimens, rate of loading. and similar factors. The methods have already been employed at the Laboratory in more than a half million tests made in determining some of the important properties of over 164 native species of wood. They have been adopted as standards by the American Society for Testing Materials, American Standards Association, and other authoritative bodies. The methods are now used not only in the United States but in many foreign countries. Their wide adoption enables the results of tests made in widely scattered laboratories to be compared. Methods for conducting static tests of timbers in structural sizes.Methods of testing timbers in structural sizes have been developed at the Laboratory and adopted as standard 50 by the American Society for Testing Materials, American Standards Association, and other authoritative bodies. The methods cover selection of materials, bending, compression perpendicular to grain, and compression parallel to grain tests of large-sized members. In addition, methods of testing minor specimens, cut from the larger specimens after test, are included. Previous lack of uniformity of testing procedure prevented direct comparison of data from different sources. The general adherence to these methods of tests enable direct comparison of the results of various laboratories. Toughness test. In the selection of lumber for exacting purposes. as, for example, airplane parts, assurance must be had that no pieces low in strength are admitted. Experience showed that visual inspection or specific gravity determinations were not sufficient, and that some mechanical test was desirable. Such a test must be rapid and one which will reject those pieces which are unsuitable. To meet this need the Laboratory developed a toughness machine and set up mininum acceptance requirements 51 for those woods most commonly used in airplane construction. The toughness machine has also been found useful by manufacturers in the selection of wood, such as used in the manufacture of handles, where toughness is an essential property. Hexagonal drum box testing machine.-Actual shipping container work at the Laboratory began with the invention of the box testing drum. This machine combines in a single test practically all the stresses and distortions that containers encounter in service. Upon the six internal faces of the drum are hazards and guides arranged in such a manner that, as the drum revolves, the loaded box or crate slides and falls, striking on its ends, sides, top, bottom, and edges so as to simulate the rough handling of actual transportation. The first drum 49 "Strength and Related Properties of Woods Grown in the United States," p. 78 Technical Bulletin 479, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., September 1935. 25 cents. 50 Idem. "Manual for the Inspection of Aircraft Wood and Glue for the U. S. Navy,” U. S Navy Department, Washington, D. C.. Revised Edition, 1940. (In press.) |