Northern Nut Growers Association, Report Of The Proceedings At The Tenth Annual Meeting. / Battle Creek, Michigan, December 9 and 10, 1919

by Unknown

THE FARMS BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

By Matthew Henry Hoover, Lockport, N. Y.
Formerly New York Conservation Commissioner
President New York State Conservation Association

Horace Greeley is best known for his contribution to the abolition of human slavery in the United States. Yet his service to mankind is not fully appraised by the average American, because many of the younger generation are unaware of his aid to agriculture. His maxim about farmers' failing to till the most valuable part of their farms underneath, opening the eyes of agriculturists to the efficacy of sub-soil plowing, was the preamble to freeing American husbandry from the slavery of antiquated and unscientific methods.

Following the application of science to the cultivation of the soil, came the students of Conservation. They were teaching the farmer the relation of conservation of natural resources to agriculture, the effects of forests on rainfall, moisture, erosion of soil, minimization of floods that annually bury thousands of acres of arable lands in the valleys, under rocky debris and so on.

Greeley discovered the Farm Below. The Conservationists are saving the Farm Above.

Now, in these days of reclamation and reconstruction, it is high time to pay more attention to the Farm by the Side of the Road.

The Northern Nut Growers' Association is to be congratulated upon the fact that it is blazing the trail through the forest of popular ignorance on this vitally important conservation question; leading public thought in the right direction; and providing both the seed and the stock for practical efforts in behalf of the Farm by the Side of the Road. I am going to claim a bond of brotherhood with you in this great work, basing my claim not upon my small activities in nut cultivation, but rather upon the fact that I was one of the conservation pioneers in New York State in the advocacy of planting profitable trees—nut trees and fruit trees—along the public highways.

That eminent conservationist, Gifford Pinchot, addressing the National Council of Farmers' Co-operative Associations in 1915, defined "Conservation" as "the wise use of the earth for the benefit of the people who live on it." That would be a perfect definition, if it did not invite the query: Should it not be enjoined upon the people who live upon the earth today, while enjoying its benefits, to keep faithful stewardship of the interests of the inhabitants of tomorrow?

About the time Mr. Pinchot enunciated this famous definition, the New York State Conservation Department summed up the purposes of practical Conservation as: "The correction of past indiscretion, the perfection of present utilization, and the formation of future accumulation with respect to natural resources."

Conservation activities must repair errors of the past which have left denuded forest lands and empty game covers and waters; they must afford and direct the present use of the forests and the streams; they must safeguard the future supply, if they would meet the requirements of a conservation which shall raise the standards of life and lower the cost of living. That is a conservation embracing both the aesthetic and the economic, the only kind worth while. It is a conservation wherein the arable areas and the so-called waste lands and waters have a very intimate interrelation of interests. And, I submit, Gentlemen, that the American people too long have failed to recognize and to account as in the class of waste lands, "The Farms by the Side of the Road."

The reclamation of waste lands is a compromise between the activities of the Conservationists, who claim that in the more thickly inhabited portions of the United States the cultivated or semi-cultivated areas are out of sane and safe proportion to the wild forest sections, and the advocates of intensive and extensive agriculture. It is not the purpose of this article to take sides in that controversy, but rather to invite attention of both sides to a safe and practical field for their endeavors, namely, the reclamation of the "wasted lands" along the roadsides, the farms along the highways.

During the War Garden campaigns of the past two years, these heretofore largely unused strips of tillable land, forming in the aggregate thousands of along-the-road acres in every state, received considerable attention from the thrifty plow and hoe. But in the main, the results were not encouraging. The public will trespass, unintentionally or otherwise, upon the land cropped along the highway. Then, if the farms by the side of the road are to be conserved—used by present as well as future generations—there remains but one practical recourse: productive trees.

The American people love beautiful trees, possibly the expression of a reaction from the sentiment of the pioneers who regarded trees as their enemies, handicaps to agriculture to be removed as thoroughly and expeditiously as possible. But with virgin soil producing enormous crops, they naturally centered their interest on ornamental trees without reference to their fruits. Hence the horse-chestnut, buck-eye, maple, locust, oak, poplar, along the highways and byways of America, instead of the native nut trees and the Persian or English walnut.

And, speaking of highways, this is the age of concrete. Taking the hint, I am selecting one concrete example of which I have intimate and personal knowledge, well aware that there are numerous others that I might cite were my acquaintance with practical nut culture more extensive than it is. The one that I know about of my own personal knowledge is, a very good example of the plain common sense of productive trees which combine the useful with the ornamental.