Mr. Mullins: No, that's dry shell. Our walnuts in the hull we paid a dollar and a quarter a hundred for, and if we had had good success we'd have made some money on it at that angle.
There is one question I'd like to put before you gentlemen. Maybe some of you know a little something about it. I was reading an article not long ago in Popular Mechanics Magazine about some plant on the West Coast that is developing the Vitamin C content of the walnut hull itself. It is very high, the Vitamin C content in the walnut hull.
Another thing we did last year. After we hulled all of these walnuts we had a mess of hulls on hand, and our farmers were a little reluctant to come and get them. We tried to talk them into using them for fertilizer. They are kind of like some of the boys, they have got to be shown. They have to see somebody else do it before they tackle it.
Out of curiosity I laid my garden off and divided it in half, and on one half I put a top dressing of these dried-out, pulverized walnut hulls, and I firmly believe that the side that had the walnut hulls on it produced twice as much. And some of the boys in the neighborhood kind of noticed what kind of garden I had, and we don't have any hull problem anymore. They carried them all off.
Same way with the shells. We tried to get them to haul the shells off to use them on the fields for tobacco land and to grow blue grass, and they found out that was pretty good, so they are bothering us now about our shells.
We have another by-product. It is too small a granule kernel to go through, and we can't remove the shell from it. We have tried that out on chickens and hogs and some other farm animals, turkeys, ducks and geese. One boy that works for me there in the cracking plant had 28 hens. He had them in a pen, and he was getting six and eight eggs a day. So I talked him into taking some of these granules home and feeding them to his chickens, and in two weeks his 28 hens were producing 20 to 24 eggs a day. That kind of settled that problem, too. Some of the boys kind of got an idea they'd like to have some of that.
A lot of you folks are here from the North, and you possibly would be going back along Highway 25 going home, and I'd like to extend an invitation now to stop off tomorrow or the next day and look over our plant. It's quite interesting, quite a complicated piece of machinery. Mr. McCauley at Chicago is the gentleman who designed the machine, and he will have something to say about it.
One of the local farmers came in to see that machine one day, and it was operating, just batting the kernels out right and left. He looked up at it, gandered it all over, and I asked him what he thought it was. He said, "It's a damn lie. That thing can't do it."
So come see us.
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