DR. BRITTON: You will be interested in knowing that we have with us the very distinguished Curator of the British Botanical Herbarium of the Royal Society. Dr. Stapf has been traveling in Canada, attending the meetings of the Royal Society there.
THE PRESIDENT: We shall very much appreciate the opportunity of meeting him.
We will now adjourn to the lecture hall, to hear Dr. J. Russell Smith.
NUT TREE CROPS AS A PART OF PERMANENT AGRICULTURE WITHOUT PLOWING
Dr. J. Russell Smith, Professor of Economic Geography, Columbia University, New York
My first experience with nut culture was gained on the farm of a man I knew more than 30 years ago. It was a truck farm not far from Philadelphia near a boarding school which I infested and the farmer complained that I infested the farm. The farm had its fence rows and driveways lined with grafted chestnut trees bearing abundantly of large fine nuts of European origin. It was remarkable how quickly they filled my pockets. I usually succeeded in gathering them on the hundred per cent basis.
I am interested in this subject today because of an innate love of trees and because the development of a tree crop agriculture offers a way to stop soil erosion. To me the worst of all economic sins is the destruction of resources, and the worst of all resource destructions is the destruction of the soil, our one great and ultimate resource. "After man the desert" has been truly said too often of many old lands.
Soil cover is after all about the only thing that man has as a basis for the support of his life on earth. All of our food depends directly or indirectly upon plants.
In hilly countries there is usually but a thin layer of earth and rotton rock between the surface of the field and the bed rock. It is a very difficult problem to maintain this cover of earth and it is very easy to lose it. Sometimes it is lost through over-pasturing and destruction of turf; but more largely through plowing.
The nut tree is particularly effective as a part of a plowless agriculture which can use the soil permanently where annual crops ruin it quickly because the plow prepares the land for erosion.