Col. Sober: I cannot say whether my chestnuts are different from the other paragon chestnuts or not, or whether they are as resistant to the blight. I know it is a very sweet chestnut. In regard to keeping my groves clean—from 1901 to 1910, we had three broods of locusts and two hailstorms that opened the bark in almost every tree and branch. The limbs were stung by the locusts thousands of times, so that I didn't have a crop of chestnuts. Professor Davis was cutting off limbs for a couple of months so you see my trees were open, if any ever were, to receive the blight. The hailstorms destroyed the leaves and I didn't have any chestnuts that year in one part of my grove and with all that—you people come and see how clean it is, that's all there is to it. I know what I've done and what I can do.
The Chairman: The next paper in order is that of Professor Smith.
NUT GROWING AND TREE BREEDING AND THEIR RELATION TO CONSERVATION
Professor J. Russell Smith, Pennsylvania
Prof. Smith: Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen; I am going to ask your indulgence for including in my subject a matter that perhaps goes a little beyond the scope of this organization, for I wish to speak of fruit as well as nut-bearing trees. Conservation, whose object is the preservation of our resources for future generations, as well as for ourselves, finds its greatest problem in the preservation of the soil. The forests can come again if the soil be left. It is probable that we can find substitutes for coal, and for nearly everything else, but once the soil is gone, all is gone; and the greatest danger to the soil is not robbery by ill cropping, because no matter how man may abuse the soil, scientific agriculture can bring it back with astonishing speed. But the greatest enemy of conservation is erosion, the best checks for erosion are roots.
Thus far, the only man who has been telling us anything about planting roots upon the hillsides is the forester. But he usually sets nothing but wood trees, which at the end of fifty or a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, we can cut down, and which, during the intervening time, have done nothing but cast shade, drop leaves and retain the soil. My doctrine is that the potentially greatest crop-producing plants are not those on which we now depend for our food, but are the trees,; that the greatest engines for production are not the grasses, but the trees. Our agriculture is an inheritance from the savage, and the savage found that he could do better with annual grains than he could with nut trees, because he didn't know how to improve the nut crop by selection of the trees, while there came involuntarily an improvement in the other crops. No man today knows the parentage of some of the cultivated plants and grains on which we now depend. Thus we came down to the present day of science, with the purely chance discoveries of savages as the main dependence of mankind for the basis of agriculture.
We have within a decade discovered the laws of plant breeding. We know a good deal more about it now than ever before and are in a position to start about it very deliberately and with a reasonable certainty that we are going to get certain combinations of qualities if we keep at it long enough. Thus the hickory and walnut offer perfect marvels of possibilities. Look around on these tables and see the size of some of these things. There are hickory nuts 1¼ inch long and there are shagbarks as full of meat as pecans and probably quite as good. There are in Kentucky, I am told, hickory nuts that you can take in your fingers and crush. Here we have the pecan, this great big shellbark from Indiana, the shagbark from the North, and the thin shell nuts from Kentucky. Now hybridize these and I think, if you work at it long enough, you will get a tree that will have all those good qualities.
The wonderful black walnut is a tree of hardiness, and the delicious Persian or English walnut is a nut of acceptable form. The pair offers splendid possibilities in their hybrid progeny.
We have fruits thus far recognized as of little value which offer great possibilities as forage producers. The mulberry bears from June to September and the persimmon from September till March and the pig harvests them himself.