Well, these seedling trees—I must get on with my story—are cultivated and sprayed. We are sometimes accused of producing wild nuts at no cost. This is not the situation distinctly. It costs just as much to produce these native seedling nuts as it does to produce the varieties, the advantage being that we start with a large tree which is capable of producing from 50 to 200 or 300 or even 400 pounds of nuts within four or five years after the operation is started instead of waiting 20 or 25 years to get good commercial production.
As I said, a selection is made of the trees at the beginning. The selection is continued with each succeeding year as the trees grow larger and additional trees are thinned out so that they stand eventually a hundred or 150 feet apart, giving to each tree adequate room.
Throughout the state we have a great deal of interest in propagation by topworking of varieties of pecans. The experiment station made the serious error for 15 or 20 years in the early development of the interest in the work in centering on the idea of changing these natives over to varieties. We now are swinging back to a proper evaluation of the native nuts, and nobody is satisfied with the present varieties, our interest of developing and the exploration and discovery of new varieties being such that the Northeast Oklahoma Pecan Growers Association arranged two years ago to finance a contest for the discovery of seedling nuts which could be utilized in that territory and be more profitable than any variety that we now have.
We don't like the Stuart because of its low quality. We don't like the Stuart because it doesn't come into production until it reaches a considerable age. We just simply will not have the Mahan, because it doesn't fill. We do not like the Success because it has a tendency to over-bear every other year and does not fill. We cannot use the Squirrel's Delight which for ten years or so we had at the top of our list, because a special strain of scab fungus came in and completely wiped them out, and so on throughout the list of varieties that we have.
Well, these growers decided to take the matter into their hands and in cooperation with the experiment station have been, during the past two years, attempting to find some nuts which would be more desirable, and I thought those of you who are in the walnut exploration work would be interested in learning how this is worked out.
I don't suppose you can see this. It Is an entry blank for the grower. Annual prizes of $50, $25, $15 and $10 are awarded. Ten awards are made each year, and the ten winning growers this year will have their particular nut automatically entered in a grand prize contest hoping that some of those nuts will be worth naming, and if any should be worth naming, after further study, naming and introducing, the grower will be awarded a prize of $1,000.
Four of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, crackers are financing this work by putting in $75 each annually. The college is cooperating in this respect, and when I say the college, I also mean the Extension Division. The Extension Director is pushing the matter and tells the county agents to pay attention to these entry blanks when they come, and get as many growers in each county to send in samples as possible.
The contest closes on November 25th. Those samples are sent to the college, and in three or four days—and those of you in colleges will recognize the Thanksgiving holiday—in three or four days' time those nuts are cracked and evaluated and placed. Last year, the second year of the contest, there were over 200 entries, and it was no small job to finish in time to get them on display at the annual meeting and show of the Oklahoma Pecan Growers Association in early December.
We are not content with the evaluation of the nut. It is just one phase of successful production to have a nut which is satisfactory for cracking and consumption; unless those trees are free from disease and productive and otherwise satisfactory we could never think of introducing a variety. And so the staff at the college, as soon, as the show is over, goes out and locates each of these trees individually and puts a tag on it. We visit each of those trees a sufficient number of times during the year to properly evaluate the tree.
The things that we are looking for, of course, are productiveness, freedom from disease and other characteristics of that type. If, after five years of observation, the tree characteristics are satisfactory, then the nut will be certified as worthy of propagation.