Charles Lathrop Pack, President, The American Forestry Association
On every hand we hear the call for power and more power. Every scientific genius in the world directs his attention to increasing power units in the struggle for world trade on which we are entering following a World War. Business calls for quicker transportation and the motor world answers with master motors; railroads are being or have been electrified; water power developments are being pushed in many parts of the country. The business world calls for more power and the aeroplanes answer with the delivery of mail and soon we are told it will enter the strictly commercial field. But what of man? What is being done to make him stand up under this terrific strain; this keener competition? What of the food that must keep him going? What of products that must be put before him with the middle man standing between?
A nut bearing tree is the most powerful engine in the world if its fruits be properly used. If the people of the United States could have nut bearing trees for their "middlemen" in the fight to bring down the High Cost of Living it would come down quickly.
Nuts are the most important of all tree crops because they are the richest natural food substance known. A nut is Nature's supreme effort to pack as much nourishment as she can into the smallest possible space for the nourishment of the future young plant. That some people are aware of these food values is evidenced in the nationwide tree balloting now being conducted by the American Forestry Association for the selection of a national tree. In this voting nut bearing trees are in the lead. Many nuts contain as much musclebuilding food as rich cheese, a third more than beef steak, twice as much fat as cheese, five times as much as eggs. Chestnuts contain 70 per cent of starch, nearly as much as the best wheat flour and four times as much as potatoes. Peanuts and hickory nuts are three times as nourishing as beefsteak. When you think of it that way it hardly seems to be the thing to casually munch triple extract of beefsteak from a street nut stand or after a hearty dinner. Say a fifty-pound bushel of black walnuts costs two dollars. It yields 12½ pounds of meats whose fuel, or food value is 37,500 calories. The same number of calories in beefsteak at fifty cents a pound would cost more than fifteen dollars. A bushel of hickory nuts at three dollars yields as many calories as sixteen dollars' worth of round steak.
Out in Kansas the other day a single walnut tree stump, grubbed out on the banks of a creek in Geary County brought the farmer $250. When the call of war came we found we had to hunt for black walnut to make gun stocks and aeroplane propellers. In some towns in Ohio, citizens cut the walnut from their streets so high was the price offered for this wood. So let us make trees, particularly nut bearing trees, the memorials or the proper setting for memorials to the men who offered their lives to their country in the World War. Let us line our highways with trees and make them Roads of Remembrance. In this way the trees will impress their value upon millions of our people. Put these trees where they can spread the message of production and beautification combined. Take their seeds and pass them on to other places where the message will be spread still further.
Michigan is planting apple trees along a Victory Highway. Tourists will pick those apples some day. That is just what Michigan wants them to do. Michigan wants the tourists to carry the fame of Michigan's apples to the southern tip of Florida and to the northern tip of Montana. Why do not your members of this Association of nut growers follow the example of Michigan by planting nut trees along the highways of the state they represent. The American Forestry Association is glad to co-operate with anyone who wants to spread the message of the tree. The people of this country have a responsive ear to campaigns of education. The American Forestry Association's call for memorial tree planting has demonstrated this. Trees are being planted by the American Legion, the Service Star Legion, schools, church congregations, all sorts of organizations and individuals throughout the country. The tree is the one thing with its ever renewing life symbol that meets the requirements of a memorial. The tree is the memorial the individual can erect, care for and protect. Then just consider what the tree gives the planter in return—an affection that only comes from the bosom of the earth, to which the loved one for whom the tree was planted, has returned.
You gentlemen are missing a great opportunity if you do not get squarely behind the American Forestry Association and help it spread the message of the tree, Nature's masterpiece and greatest gift to man, and in doing so urge the value of planting trees that produce food wherever such trees can give better service than those which do not produce food.
The President: The next number on our program is A Nursery of Improved Filberts, by Conrad Vollertsen, of Rochester, N. Y.