So I think this is a way out, or at least I suggested the plan we could go along with of putting the vice-presidents to work and setting up a committee under the title of judging and standards and try to bring out a report at the next session. It seems to me that would be right practical.
Where we go from there in production of new varieties I think should be a subject for a round table discussion sometime. I think the gentleman in forestry has a good idea. I think we will get a long way if you have proper control of the first elements of the first varieties, and from them we can build up. But it seems to me we have to be practical about things that we can do, then go ahead and do them.
DR. CRANE: Thank you, thank you.
DR. COLBY: I would like to add one point, that we must "zone" all these varieties. In a state as long as Illinois, over 400 miles long, growing conditions are different in the south than in the north. In the north we don't find that Thomas fills out very well and that's true also at Urbana in the central section of the state. Beck and Booth and some of the smaller nuts do fill out. The zones I mentioned may well run across several states where environmental conditions are similar.
I recall a little survey I made when I was honored by being president of your association several years ago, in which I tried to list all of the work that was in progress at the different national and state experiment stations, and most of those stations were carrying on some work in nut growing. I am sure that if you check that matter now, several years later, you would find that many more are carrying on investigations of that nature. They have expanded as much as their facilities will permit. For example, just the other day I visited the station at the University of New Hampshire, and there they were growing chestnut trees from seed that had been brought in from Korea. Little trees just two years from the seed were full of burs this year. Whether they are going to fill a place in New Hampshire remains to be seen. They were not as yet attacked by blight, but, of course, the trees were small, and there were no cracks in the bark as yet.
I am sure that most of the station workers know that you at Beltsville are extremely interested in testing new nuts as they become available. In cooperation with other workers it may be found that this variety is good in ~this~ zone and that variety is good in ~that~ zone. Nurserymen might well include maps of such zones in their catalogs.
DR. ANTHONY: Now that the experiences of the Northern Ohio growers has been brought up and you have mentioned many times your own experience as the Northern Nut Growers, I think the Northern Ohio group, a closely knit group, rather closely geographically related, has worked for almost twenty years, and hasn't gotten too far, and this organization has worked for 41 years and hasn't gotten too far. So that if we want to get anywhere, we must have a more closely knit organization with a better financial backing back of it and a better sense of responsibility back of it.
DR. CRANE: That's right.
DR. ANTHONY: You have mentioned the New Jersey Peach Council. We have been talking to our own Pennsylvania nut growers just as we have been talking to you today, telling them that they had a marvelous opportunity in all of these seedlings that we have been finding around the state. I think we have got them quite stirred up. But now they are considering the possibilities of organizing along the line of New Jersey Peach Council, a nut tester's council, which will be an off-shoot and part of the Pennsylvania Nut Growers Association.
Now, why have such a thing? Why have it in Pennsylvania? Why not have it as an organization of the Northern Nut Growers. The problem of varieties actually in its final analysis is a local problem. We have one area in Pennsylvania where on one side of the river it's McIntosh and the other side of the river it's Stayman. There are meteorological differences on each side of the Susquehanna River at Scranton-Wilkes Barre where the varieties shift. In the northern area we go from the northern hardwood with the beech-birch-sugar maple, into the oaks right in the state, with a third of the state in the northern hardwoods and the rest of the state in the oaks. We have no idea that any one variety of black walnuts or English walnuts or chestnuts will fill our needs any more than we know that any one apple will fill our needs, that one grape or one cherry will fill our needs, even one peach, not even the Elberta.