The northern nut grower is not yet bothered with northern nut promotions. At most he is called on to discount the statements of sellers of trees, and that a little, not too expensive, experience will teach him. The West is apparently too busy selling fruit and fruit lands to lay out nuts to trap eastern nibblers. But the allurements of pecan growing in the South are spread before us with our bread and butter and morning coffee. The orange and pomelo properties have been banished from the stage, or made to play second fiddle, and now we see in the limelight the pecan plantation, with a vista of provision for old age and insurance for our children. And there shall be no work nor care nor trouble about it at all. Only something down and about ten dollars a month for ninety-six months. And the intercropping is to more than pay for that. It is indeed an enticing presentation.
Although we have as yet no northern nut promotions we may expect the time when the sandy barrens of the shore and the boulder pastures of the rock ribbed hills will be cut up into five acre plots and promoted as the natural home of the chestnut and the hickory, holding potential fortunes for their developers. I hope it will be so for it will postulate a foundation in fact. But the chestnut blight and the unresponsiveness of the hickory to propagation as yet hold up these future camp followers of the northern nut growing pioneers. So that for the present there is only the sword of the southern pecan promoter to parry.
It would be a work of supererogation and effrontery for me to attempt to treat this subject in particular since it has been so clearly and ably done by Col. C. A. Van Duzee of St. Paul, Minn., and Viking, Fla., from the standpoint of long experience and full knowledge. His paper should be read by all interested persons. I am permitted to make the following quotations from it:
"The pecan as an orchard tree has recently been discovered and its history has not been written. The record at present is largely based on scattered individual trees growing under abnormal conditions which, as a rule, are favorable....
"Calculations and deductions based upon these results have been made which are fascinating, but they are utterly unreliable when applied to orchards of other trees in different localities growing under totally different conditions?...
"No one knows what a pecan orchard grown under such conditions is going to do."
Col. Van Duzee, however, expresses firm belief in the success of pecan growing under proper personal supervision.
It all comes down to the question, "Can you or I hire our business done for us, never go near it ourselves and expect others to make a success of it for us?"
And yet, when all is said, I confess that I have been tempted by my faith in the present and future of pecan growing in the South. I might have invested were it not for my firm belief that, in nut growing, the North is but a few years behind the South, and that I wish to devote my resources and my energies to having a hand in a development which, I share with you the belief, is to be of inestimable benefit to the human race. We can picture the day when our dooryards, our roadsides, our fields and hills shall be shaded by grand nut trees, showering sustenance and wealth on our descendants, and all people, and bearing the names of their originators; when the housewife of the future shall send her wireless call to the grocer for a kilo of Hales' Papershells, the Rush, the Jones, the Pomeroy Persian walnuts, the Black Ben Deming butternut, the Craig Corean chestnut, the Morris Hybrid hickory, the Close black-walnut or the Littlepage pecan.