MR. SNYDER: I better tell you where the Iowa trees are. They are approximately 300 miles from here. We are 150 miles north. We are also 180 miles west. We have temperatures up there too that we have to figure on. The temperature in most years gets to minus 20 and the coldest we ever had was minus 42, but that was only for an hour, but temperature is only one factor. An old professor of the University of Iowa, regarded wind as more important than temperature. The more I see of wind killing, the more I believe he is right. Wind is more important than temperature. If you have your trees surrounded, you don't get wind injury. The trees I am reporting on were planted from 1920 to 1930. Some of them now are 16 to 18 inches in diameter and 30 feet high and the varieties are such as we got from Mr. Wilkinson. Indiana, Busseron, and one other which Mr. White—he is a wholesale druggist interested in horticulture—selected and he knows the nut trees probably better than any other one man. He kept in contact with these river rats and they would always bring anything to him they thought was of interest. We have a bunch of seedling trees about the same age and size which never bloom at all and of course they are ready for cutting out. I don't know why there would be a number of seedling trees that would never bloom.
DR. CRANE: In extensive breeding work, Mr. Clarence A. Reed started in at Albany, Georgia, with 4,000 seedlings and out of 4,000 about half that many came into production and bore fruit enough so we could tell what the fruit was like in about 15 years. The other half just never did bear. Those trees had grown and made large trees and in a lot of cases they carried large leaves but there was no way we could predict anything about fruiting. It was discouraging for that reason. We quit, in our breeding work, growing the seedlings beyond one year. We make our crosses now and grow them one year in the nursery. We plant nuts at harvest and grow them until they form leaf buds and graft from the seedlings on old trees cut back. We can save anywhere from one to three, four, or five years. There are a great per cent that will not bear.
MR. MAGILL: In Iowa, out there, what varieties are making good?
MR. SNYDER: There aren't any. As nut producers they aren't worth anything. Why not plant the hicans? They ripen better but don't bear. The hicans make one of the prettiest trees but they don't bear.
We make no plans for pecans unless we have a season with no freezing until the middle of November. So that is where the pecans are that far north, except as shade trees.
MR. H. W. GUENGERICH: I feel that I am out of my territory in talking about nut growing to this Association, but I have had a few things forced on my attention that may be of interest.
When I first joined Stark Brothers Nursery, Paul Stark asked me to look into the possibilities of locating a pecan variety that would be satisfactory north of the southern pecan belt. I talked to our Missouri extension horticulturist, Bill Martin, and he informed me that a lot of pecans are being grown around Brunswick, Missouri, on the Missouri River. The Missouri flows northeast from Kansas City for about 75 miles and then swings toward the south again. Brunswick is located at the northernmost point on the river, between Kansas City and St. Louis. It is about 150 miles west of Louisiana, and in general the weather becomes more severe as you travel West. So pecans that thrive and mature at Brunswick are pretty rugged.
I went over to Brunswick to see a friend who introduced me to some pecan growers. One of these men has an interesting story and I wish he were here. I tried to bring him along but he could not get away from his farming operations. He operates several hundred acres of farm land in the Missouri River bottoms and his house stands in a grove of native pecans. When he went into his house he pointed to a hook on the door post where he tied his boat the previous spring when he moved his family out because of high water. That year, 1947, all his grain crops were destroyed by the flood but that fall he harvested 50,000 lbs. of pecans. They sold for 25¢ a pound and the total expense was for picking them, off the ground. In a year like that, $12,000.00 would come in handy. It rained again in Kansas this year and I called him and asked about the flood. He said he had a couple of inches of land that wasn't covered with water, but he expects to gather 40,000 lbs. of pecans this fall. That is interesting because there are thousands of acres in the middle west where crops have been destroyed by floods. Yet here is a crop that grows on native trees with very little care, that will pay off despite high water.
I asked my friend what effect the high water would have on the pecan foliage and he replied that the leaves would fall, but that the trees will produce new leaves and the nuts will mature. He has been through this before and knows what he is talking about.
Reference was made a short while ago to the pecan as a shade tree. I think this is one of the big opportunities in pecan growing. Recently I drove from Louisiana, Missouri, to central Ohio and saw a string of dead elms along the entire route. Now the oaks are threatened in the same way. We don't know what to do about shade trees. Some scientists from Holland visited us several weeks ago and they weren't very enthusiastic about their disease resistant elm selections. We had hoped that these selections might provide the answer to the elm tree problem.