The Forest Service needed information as to prices for standing timber and logs for use in a study of distribution costs and margins in the pine lumber industry of the Southeast. The study was conducted under the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 (RMA, Title II). As North Carolina, the chosen site for the study, has 4,600 sawmills and hundreds of thousands of wooded properties, some method of sampling had to be devised. Whom to sample, what kind and how large a sample to take, and how to assure a representative sample were some of the questions that arose. For this reason, and because it seemed an excellent opportunity for a test of price-survey techniques, the study that is reported in the following paper was designed to permit comparisons of several more or less obvious methods of obtaining price data.