Court Opinion

ID: 9666020
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:02:24.177695+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:22.317401
License: Public Domain

*403Hall, J.,
dissenting.
I am impelled to register my dissent from the views expressed in the controlling opinion in this case. Appellants own the unexpired portion of a ninety-nine year lease on the lands in question. This lease was granted under Article 12, Chapter 9, Hutchinson’s Mississippi Code of 1848, which specifically provides that when the consideration for such lease has been paid “if shall be the duty of the trustees ... to convey the right, title, use, interest and occupation” of the leased lands “for and during, and until the full end and term of ninety-nine years.” It is my view that under the quoted statute the holder of such a lease has the unlimited use of the land for the stated period-. The statute does not limit the use to agricultural purposes only. The lessee may use the land for any purpose. He may build a home or a factory on it. Many towns and cities in Mississippi are built on sixteenth section lands which are under ninety-nine year leases. On these lands are found residences, mercantile establishments, filling stations, power plants and factories of various kinds, with not one square foot of an entire section being devoted to agricultural purposes.
In the case at bar the record shows by agreement that the virgin timber on the land in question had all been removed long before the ancestor of appellants acquired the unexpired portion of the lease in 1913. Instead of using the land for the planting and growing of annual crops the owners of the lease preferred to use it for the growing of timber, and the timber now on it has grown since that date. During all these intervening forty years the appellants and their ancestor have paid the taxes on the land with not one dime of return from the land if they are to be deprived of the right to remove the timber. The State, the county, and the schools of the county have reaped the benefit of the taxes thus paid for the sole purpose of preserving the lease while the *404land was producing the timber in question. Having paid the taxes for,this long period it does not appeal to my sense of right or justice to say that appellants can have nothing from the land simply because they used it for growing timber instead of cotton or corn or other annual crops.
The authorities cited in the majority opinion with reference to timber growing on sixteenth section lands apply only to virgin timber — timber that was on the land when the lease was granted — -and we have uniformly held that the holder of a lease has no right to sell such timber for commercial purposes. But that is not the situation presented in the instant case. Here we are dealing with a crop of timber which was produced during the term of the leasehold and it wholly begs the question to say that timber is not a crop. Our statute on reforesta^ tion specifically refers to timber as a “wood crop.” Paragraph 3, Section 6023, Code of 1942. Up and down any highway in South Mississippi numerous tracts of second growth timber will be seen with painted signs designating such tracts as “Tree Farm.” These trees were not produced by the labor of man but by the hand of nature. It is utterly unrealistic to say that in this section of the country under present day conditions the growing of timber is not agriculture in its broader sense as commonly understood. In the case of United States v. Turner Turpentine Co., Ill F. 2d 400, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said: “Definitions of agriculture in standard texts and treaties and in decisions in these latter years have had the widest content. . . . Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 1935, declares that in a broader sense, agriculture includes farming, horticulture, forestry, dairying, sugar making, etc. The Encyclopedia Brittanica, 14th Edition, Forestry as a Science, declares: ‘the science underlying the growing of timber crops is therefore nothing but a branch of general plant,, science,’ while the Cyclopedia of American Agriculture *405says of forests ‘if agriculture is the raising of products from, the land, then forestry is a part of agriculture’.” The opinion in that case cites Sancho v. Bowie (1 Cir.) 93 F. 2d 323 which holds that in the broad sense agriculture includes forestry, and Forsythe v. Tillage of Cooksville, 356 Ill. 289, 190 N. E. 421, which also holds that agriculture is an indefinite word and in its broad sense includes forestry. The Turner Turpentine case was cited with approval by the Supreme Court of Florida in the case of Florida Industrial Commission v. Growers Equipment Co., 12 So. 2d 889.
The majority opinion proceeds upon the statement that to permit the removal of timber which has grown upon sixteenth section lands during the tenancy will have a disastrous effect upon the resources from which sixteenth section funds aré derived. I cannot agree with such a position. Again we must be realistic. There are thousands and thousands of acres of sixteenth section lands in this State which are not suitable for any purpose except the growing of timber. Most of the ninety-nine year leases have expired and these thousands of acres are lying idle and producing nothing. The sixteenth section school funds would benefit by permitting these lands to be leased for the growing of timber; they would obtain a rental from such lease as well as taxes on the land while the timber is growing. Timber today does not mean what it did fifty years ago. As this Court said in the case of Great Southern Lumber Co. v. Newsom Bros., 129 Miss. 158, 166, 91 So. 864: “Tears ago, when practically the only use made of timber was to manufacture it into lumber, it was then held that merchantable timber was only those large sticks of wood squared or capable of being squared for building houses or vessels. Since that time, however, the uses of timber have multiplied; among other things is now that of manufacturing small timber into paper. • We have these paper mills scattered over the country, and in their vi*406cinity there is always a market price for this small timber which can be manufactured into paper.”
As a matter of fact there are four large mills in South Mississippi which use small timber, down to three inches in diameter, for the manufacture of paper, cardboard, and wallboard. The owners of these mills already own vast expanses of land on which they are growing timber for pulpwood purposes and which are not suitable for any other purpose. They are buying more and more of such lands every day. In many places they own lands all the way around sixteenth sections and they would gladly lease sixteenth section lands for the production of wood crops and thereby yield an income to the sixteenth section school funds, but under the holding of the majority in this case those lands will have to lie idle and bring no income to the schools. While in the present case the schools will reap' the benefit from the timber grown on the lands in question under the care of appellants who have paid taxes on it and who have watched over it and prevented its removal by trespassers or its destruction by fire, nevertheless in the long run the schools over the State are going to lose rather than gain under this decision.