MR. MANGELSDORF: That's very true of black walnuts. Pecans have to be carried throughout the season in our cracking operations under refrigeration, but the black walnuts we can store out in any shed with tin roof. The temperature gets very hot, and it seems to have no effect whatever on the edibility or rancidity of the nut kernel.
MR. STOKE: You spoke of storing the whole nuts in large bins. There you may have an extreme amount of mold, too, if the nuts are damp.
MR. MANGELSDORF: We try to have storage conditions such that air has free passage through the bulk of nuts. The mold and the yeast are there and when they start to grow, their metabolism throws off quite a large amount of heat. As a result the molding process is speeded up like a chain reaction, and before long the nuts will be worthless for shelling.
MR. MANGELSDORF: We had nuts until just a few weeks ago from our last season's gatherings. That's almost a whole year.
MR. SALZER: Can you tell me if the farmer is paid by the weight of the nuts, or does he receive his pay after the kernels are shelled out? Does he receive more money if it contains a higher percent of kernels?
MR. MANGELSDORF: He receives his pay on the basis of the whole nut that he delivers to the plant, and we try to exercise some control over the quality of the delivery. Samples are taken and cracked, and if most of the nuts are rotten or the quality is very low, we may reject buying that entire lot, or we may discount the lot of nuts a certain amount, depending upon the percentage of the nut meats that are salvaged.
MR. MURPHY: Do you pay a premium for cultivated nuts?
MR. MANGELSDORF: That I can't answer, but I don't believe that they have this past season. I wouldn't want to go on record as to that. There is a tremendous difference in the flavor of what we call the "eastern" black walnut in comparison with the California or western black walnut. We think that the flavor of the California walnut is not at all comparable to the eastern black walnut.
MR. MCDANIEL: You don't notice any difference, do you, between the
Missouri and the Kentucky nuts?
MR. MANGELSDORF: No, not in my experience, but there is a tremendous difference in flavor between the eastern and western.