Last year I went up into New York State with a prominent public man, who was to make a speech. This man was delayed, and in order to get there he had to jump on the last platform of the last car. He had eaten no lunch, and only a light breakfast. He said he should surely fail in his speech because he was faint from lack of food. I asked him what he would eat if he had the chance. He said soup, half a chicken, potatoes and asparagus, and apple pie. I told the train boy to bring samples of everything he had, and we finally selected an apple from Oregon, a banana from Mexico, a box of figs from California, some pop corn from Massachusetts, chocolate from Venezuela, and salted nuts from Louisiana. The air and the sunshine and the water seemed to be produced in New York, but nothing else. A great dinner for a New York man, but to his surprise it satisfied him, took the place of the chicken, and carried him through his speech with a strong punch. It seems to me that one trouble with our nut propaganda is that we go at it in such a way that the pupils regard us somewhat as "nuts," and why should the man who becomes a specialist on any subject, and airs it on all occasions, be called a nut? We shall have to admit that men are called such names. I think it is because we let our brains work somewhat like the oyster or clam, and secrete a hard shell of formal knowledge around the sweet meat of condensed human nature, for that is what all useful knowledge is. We must crack our shell of formal knowledge and grind it up finer before we can put it into the think works of the plain people.
While I was working up the Apple Consumers' League some years ago, I ran upon the fact that Corbett, the prize-fighter, consumed 3 dishes of apple sauce every day while training. Now, I had used the statement that J. P. Morgan always had a baked apple for his lunch, but I got small results from that story. Few people ever expected to make millions, and Morgan was out of their class. Every man carried a punch, which he wanted to enlarge and make effective. If Corbett used apple sauce to oil his arm for a knock-out blow, every man with red blood wanted apples. Now we must work our nut campaign in some such popular way, if we expect to put a nut on the wheel of progress. The fact that Prof. Johnson, or Dr. Jackson, or the Rev. Thompson, or Judge Dixon, or Senator Harrison, find strength and comfort from eating nuts, is very important and very pleasant, but 99 per cent of our people never expect to enter the learned profession, and they must not get the idea that these professions stand around the full use of nuts like a barbed wire fence. Most men must live and work in the rough and tumble of life, and at present they think red meat is the sustaining power for that sort of stuff. We must change their point of view. Let us find athletes, baseball men, wrestlers, fighters, runners, men who stand well in popular sports and who will publicly state that they substitute nuts for meat in part at least. We must put this thing into the popular imagination of the plain people if it is to be of full importance. When some fellow with a new brand of cigarettes wants to develop a trade among young men, he gets some noted ball player to write a letter stating his love for that brand. I think we should follow that plan somewhat in putting our nut campaign before the people. Two years ago the Oregon Agricultural College sent a football team East. The college was almost unknown here, but I asked one or two football men about it. They laughed at these Pacific Coast athletes. Here was a college they said which had issued a bulletin advising the people to send their children to school with nut sandwiches instead of meat. This man said that such training could only result in puny, half grown men, and he doubted if this team would last half way across the country. Those Oregon boys lined up a team of giants. They simply wiped the earth with most teams of their class, and left behind the cracked shells of a long line of reputation, with the sweet meat well picked out.
Personally I believe that within 25 years, 50 at the latest, our people will be absolutely forced to accept a diet of nuts in place of our present proportion of meat. As I see it, the time is coming when increased population and shortage of available land will make prime, beef nearly as scarce as turkey and venison are today. Not only so, but I think knowledge will slowly but surely lead men to change their diet from choice. My children will live to see the time when the acre nut orchard on the average farm will be considered just as useful and as much of a necessity, and far more profitable, than the present chicken yard. In that day I think the nut industry will rank in food importance second only to that of corn, and I believe that the greatest change will be found here in New England, for I believe that nut culture is to change history, and readjust population and industry to some extent. Frankly, I expect my children to live to see the time when the hickory nut in New England will rank far above the walnut industry in California or in France. I think this nut culture will, in time, bring a greater income to the New England States than all its fruits and grain combined today. Out in the wild woods on some New England hillside there are growing today strains or varieties of nuts which will do far more for this section than the Baldwin apple, or the Bartlett pear have ever done. They will be found, tamed and propagated.
You may, if you like, call me a dreamer, or what is the same thing, a "nut." I can stand that, for have I not in my short span of life seen dreams come true. Suppose the wandering hunter, or the farmer's boy, who discovered the Baldwin apple in the woods of Massachusetts, had gone back to his home and stated that the time would come when this beautiful red fruit would grow wherever it found a suitable climate, that it would revolutionize horticulture, bring millions of dollars to New England, and find its way throughout the world wherever the sails of commerce are blown. They might have hung him as a witch or dreamer, and yet, his dream would be no more improbable than what I say of nut culture in New England. I have seen the telephone, the flying machine, the gasoline engine, all grow from the vain dream of a crazy inventor to public necessities, and as surely as fate the nut industry is to bring back to the old hillsides of New England much of the profit and the glory of old days.
THE PROPER PLACE OF NUT TREES IN THE PLANTING PROGRAM.
By C. A. Reed, Nut Culturist,
U. S. Department of Agriculture.
In the planting of trees for most purposes, it is now possible to exercise practically the same degree of choice with regard to special fitness as is employed in the selection of men for positions or tools for a piece of work. The fruit grower in every part of the country has his special species and pomological varieties from which to choose. The foresters and landscape gardeners have their species and botanical varieties or improved strains to pick from.
Among the important purposes for which trees are planted the production of native nuts is singularly behind. The leading species of native nut-bearing trees include the hickories, the walnuts, the chestnuts, the pines, and the beech. Of these, one of the hickories, the pecan, is the only species which has so far been developed by cultivation as to become of importance for the production of an orchard product.