Part 12

The high price of meat of which so much complaint has been made in recent years is not likely to recede. The high price is not due to manipulations of the market, but to natural causes, the chief of which is the limitation of pasturage and is the consequence of a decrease in the number of livestock. As the country becomes more and more densely settled, the difficulty of supplying the demand for meat will increase, and in time the necessity for utilizing every foot of ground in the most efficient manner, will necessarily bring about a change in the dietetic habits of the people. Not a single example can be found in the world of a densely populated country dependent upon its own resources in which flesh foods constitute any considerable part of the national bill of fare. Since Germany has been nearly shut off from the outside world by the present war, the government has found it necessary to restrict the consumption of meat to one-half pound per week for each adult. All other European countries are equally dependent on outside sources for their meat supply.

The time will certainly come when nuts and nut trees will become a most important food resource. If a reform in this direction could be effected within the next ten years, the result would be a disappearance to a large extent of the complaint of the high cost of living. Mr. Hill said the basis for complaint was not the high cost of living, but the cost of high living. I should prefer to say that the real cause for complaint was wrong living rather than high living, or necessarily high cost. With right living the cost will be automatically reduced. For example, suppose a person were content to choose the peanut as his source for protein and fat, the elimination of the butcher's bill for meat and the grocer's bill for butter would at once cut out two-thirds of the expense incurred for food.

When a student in college more than forty years ago, I was already making dietetic experiments and lived three months on a diet such as I have suggested, at an average expense of exactly six cents a day. This was the total amount expended for raw foodstuffs. I paid my landlady five times as much for preparing and serving the food, and had reason for believing that some portion of my supplies was utilized by others than myself. As evidence of the fact that the experiment was not dangerous, I may add that I have pursued the same meatless dietary during my entire lifetime since, as I had done for ten years before, and I am still alive and hard at work. Man is naturally a frugivorous animal. According to Cuvier, the great French naturalist, the natural diet of human beings, like that of those other primates, the orangoutang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla, consists of fruits, nuts, tender shoots and cereals. A sturdy Scotch highlander informed me that his diet consisted of brose, bannocks, and potatoes, and that he rarely ever tasted meat. When asked what he fed his dogs, he replied, "The same as I eat myself, sir." The high-bred foxhounds of the southern states are fed on cornmeal, oatmeal and bread, and rarely taste flesh of any sort. Dogs thus fed are hardier, healthier, have more endurance, better wind, keener scent, greater intelligence, and are more easily trained than meat-fed dogs. A diet which is safe for carnivorous animals, must certainly be safe for human beings, who belong to a class of animals all representatives of which, with the exception of man are flesh abstainers.

Some years ago I experimented with various sorts of carnivorous animals for the purpose of ascertaining whether nuts could be made a complete substitute for meat. Among the various animals utilized for the experiment was a young wolf from the northwest that had never eaten anything but fresh raw meat. After giving the animal one day to get accustomed to its new surroundings and to acquire a good appetite, I gave him a breakfast of nuts properly prepared and was delighted to find that he took to the new ration without the slightest hesitation and remained in excellent health during the several months of the experiment. I succeeded perfectly in substituting nuts for meat with all the animals experimented upon, including a fish hawk, with the single exception of an old bald-headed eagle, which refused to be converted.

I have a suspicion that the so-called carnivorous animals were all at some remote time nut eaters; the so-called carnivorous teeth would be as useful in tearing off the husks of cocoanuts and similar fruits, as for tearing and eating flesh.

An economic argument for the general adoption of nuts as a suitable article of food is the enormous increase in food resources which such a change would bring about. Some years ago, an experienced stock-raiser informed the writer that it takes two acres of land and two years to produce a steer weighing 600 pounds when dressed. Fresh meat is three-fourths water; hence the food material actually represented by such an animal would be considerably less than one hundred and fifty pounds, allowing for the weight of the bones. The food value, estimated as dried meat, would be about sixteen hundred calories per pound, or the same as an equal quantity of wheat meal. That is, an acre of land would produce in the form of beef, the food equivalent of seventy-five pounds of wheat in two years, whereas, a single acre of grain would produce on an average, even when poorly cultivated, in two crops not less than thirty-two bushels of more than 1900 pounds of wheat, or more than twenty-five times as much food as the same land would produce in the same length of time in the form of beef. Humboldt showed that the banana would furnish sustenance for twenty-five times as many people as could be nourished by the wheat produced by the same area of land; and according to Hutchinson, the chestnut tree is capable of producing on a given area a still larger amount of nutrient material than the banana. In other words, an acre of ground covered with chestnut trees in full bearing will furnish food for more than six hundred times as many people as could be supported by the same area devoted to meat production.

As a source of protein and fats the nut is vastly superior to the ox and the pig. The nut is sweeter, cleaner, safer, healthier and cheaper than any possible source of animal products.

This choicest product of Nature's laboratory is just beginning to be appreciated. When the Nut Growers' Association celebrates its one hundredth anniversary, it is safe to predict that the descendants of the present generation of nut growers who have followed the example of their forebears, will be living in opulence and will be regarded as the saviors of their country, while the great abattoirs and meat packing establishments will have ceased to exist, and the merry click of the nut cracker will be heard throughout the land.

EXTRACTS FROM A LETTER FROM COLONEL J. C. COOPER, OF McMINNVILLE, OREGON, PRESIDENT OF THE WESTERN WALNUT ASSOCIATION.

(Prepared by W. J. SPILLMAN, Chief of the Office of Farm Management U. S. Dept. of Agr., to be read at the 7th Annual Meeting of the N. N. G. A.)

It is probable that the prominence given the walnut growing industry in Oregon and the Northwest is greater than the finished product will justify at present, yet it is growing all the time in spite of the methods in use. I say in spite of the methods rather than because of the methods in use, for the reason that hundreds of thousands of trees have been set out in the last ten or twelve years, a majority of which have failed to meet the expectations of the would-be growers. These expectations, however, have been based largely on the statements of boom literature of those who have trees and lands for sale. We have much land in Western Oregon that is suited to the growing of walnuts, and some trees and orchards that are doing well, but there are more individual trees that are giving their owners profits than there are orchards.

The industry will continue to grow, I will repeat again, in spite of the cultural methods we use, but we must certainly change our methods or our trees, or both. The excellence of the Oregon walnut is beyond question. The gold and silver medals that we have captured, as well as the testimony of dealers who are bidding for our product for their fancy trade, is evidence of its excellent quality. But there are many things that enter in the making of the perfect nut. Even after the tree has cast down its golden shower of the finest product, the gathering, washing and drying makes for the sweetness of the nut. When I see men who make a success in other lines of horticulture and farming pulling out walnut trees because they have planted a cheap lot or are too impatient for the harvest, and others bringing sackfulls of the finest nuts to market, discolored and dirty from having lain on the wet ground for days and weeks, I sometimes think that it is a long, long way to Tipperary.

But my heart's right there, and our association is doing heroic work, although but two years old; we get our committees together two or three times a year, compare notes and crack the whip for another run. Then when we get together in annual convention there is something doing. We cut out the frills and get at once to business. No welcomes by the mayor and response by Colonel Long Bow with a brass band, but rather like the women at the fish market: "Have yees any nice fish, Mrs. Maloney?" "Indade, I have, Mrs. Flanigan." "They stink." "You lie." And that is the way our fight usually starts, only not so vigorously, of course.

We have one committee that is all important and is doing fine work. The committee on seedling varieties is making a survey of the western states to find a variety or varieties best suited to the soil and climate of the different localities. This committee includes the best men available for that work; H. M. Williamson, secretary of our state board of horticulture, chairman; C. I. Lewis, chief of division of horticulture, Corvallis; Leon D. Batchelor, experiment station, Riverside, California; A. A. Quarnberg, grower and experimenter, Vancouver, Washington; E. W. Mathews, extensive planter, Portland, and Charles L. McNary, planter, Salem. Mr. McNary told me yesterday that he had made a survey of thirty-five very fine trees, on blank cards similar to the one enclosed. We expect to have the record of at least 200 trees by the time of our convention. Only those that approach the standard wanted are listed.

To give the product of the walnut crop of the state would only be a wild guess. The system and machinery that we have for finding out how much we raise is only in embryo. The estimates reach all the way from 100,000 to 500,000 pounds. There is a good crop this year and the output for the market is growing rapidly. We need education more than we do growers. But we are learning.

I want to give you some facts of things that I find. Yesterday at the orchard of Alex Lafollette, State Senator from Marion county, and peach king of the Willamette Valley, I found seven-year-old walnut trees planted in rows among his peach trees, walnut trees planted sixteen feet apart! He said that his trees were full of little walnuts in the spring, but they all dropped off, and he did not think they would do well there. He said there were no catkins on the little trees, which accounts for the failure of his crop. This he did not know. And he did not know that the trees would produce the catkins in a year or so and remedy the failures. In the famous Dundee orchards I picked up handfuls of little fibrous roots, photo of which I sent you, that had been torn up by the plow and harrow when cultivating the walnut trees. Bales of these roots could be gathered up from the ground under the trees. The owner said that it did the trees good to treat them that way. Another black walnut tree that I visited in a cultivated field of good deep, rich soil, I found walnut roots protruding from the plowed ground as far away as 108 feet from the tree. The tree was thirty or forty years old.

It would add greatly to the walnut industry of the future if the Forest Service would plant black walnuts in the hills and mountains between here and the coast. You know in that burnt timber section and various localities in the coast mountains there are many places where eight or ten nut trees to the acre would soon give a good account of themselves. If properly planted, in five or ten years they could be topgrafted to a good English variety and add greatly to the value of the public domain as well as the food products of the nation. We have no native walnuts, but almost every variety under the sun will grow here.

WESTERN WALNUT ASSOCIATION.

SEEDLING WALNUT TREE RECORD.

No....... Made............. 191........ by......................... Owner.............................................................. P. O.................... State.............. Route................. Exact location..................................................... NUT--Origin........................................................ Variety..................................... planted............... TREE--Origin................................ age now............... Transplanted 19................ Dia. trunk......................... Height................................. spread..................... DATES--of budding out.............................................. catkin blooms......................... nut blooms.................. leaves fall........................... nuts fall................... in 1-lb. kernel wt............... oz. shell wt................. oz. NUTS--Per tree........... lbs. In cluster............ in lb....... round,.. oval,.. pointed,.. smooth,.... not well sealed............ KERNEL--light, dark, not easily removed from shell. Tannin--little excessive. Tree vigor............ Blight................ per cent.............

PRESENT AT 1916 MEETING

L. H. Ott, 1746 T St., Washington J. C. Smith, House of Rep. P. O. Fred. L. Fishback, 609 Union Trust Bldg., Washington Mr. and Mrs. W. E. Chamberlin, 44 R St., N. E. Dr. Taylor, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture Dr. True, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture Miss F. Cadel, Shepard St., Chevy Chase, Md. F. S. Holmes, Ag. Ex. Sta., College Park, Md. Dr. Hassall, Bowie, Md. M. P. Reed, Vincennes, Ind. Carl Poll, Danville Harry R. Weber, Cincinnati J. Russell Smith, Round Hill E. B. Crockett, Monroe, Va. R. T. Morris, N. Y. City W. C. Deming, Conn. Mrs. W. C. Deming Jacob L. Rife, Camp Hill, Pa., R. D. 1 Paul White, Bowie, Md. John H. Fisher, Jr. Mrs. John H. Fisher, Jr., Bradshaw, Md. Miss Ellen M. Littlepage Miss Louise Littlepage John Littlepage C. A. Van Duzee W. N. Hutt W. N. Roper R. T. Olcott T. P. Littlepage Dr. Van Fleet, Glendale, Md. A. C. Shepherd, Washington Chas. S. Hayden, Baltimore C. A. Reed, Washington Mrs. Reed W. Bathon, Star reporter Henry Stabler, Washington H. M. Simpson, Vincennes C. S. Ridgway, Lumberton Mrs. Ridgway C. P. Close M. B. Waite R. L. McCoy Dr. Ira Ulman Rev. E. N. Kirby, Ballston, Va. S. M. McMurran, Washington Dr. Augustus Stabler, 45 R St., N. E., Washington C. M. Stearns, 1833 Dumont St., Washington E. C. Pomeroy A. D. Robinson, Washington James Tindaw, Waterbury, Md. Miss Katherine Stuart, Alexandria, Va. Henry T. Finley, Rockville, Md. Mrs. Finley Mrs. F. L. Mulford, Washington, D. C. B. Eyre, Washington Mrs. Eyre J. G. Rush J. F. Jones Dr. Kellermann Dr. Haven Metcalf Miss Martha Rush Miss Sarah Garvin, Lancaster H. A. Stewart, Jeannerette, La. Mr. Bryan, Bowie Miss Edna McNaughton, Middleville, Mich. Mr. C. E. Emig, Washington, D. C. A. C. Brown, Lanham, Md.

Vincennes Nurseries

W. C. REED, Proprietor

VINCENNES, INDIANA, U. S. A.

PROPAGATORS AND INTRODUCERS

_Budded and Grafted Pecans, Hardy Northern Varieties_ _English (Persian) Walnut Grafted on Black Walnut_ _Best Northern and French Varieties_ _Grafted Thomas Black Walnut_ _Grafted Persimmons, best sorts Hardy Almonds_ _Filberts and Hazelnuts_ _Also General Line Nursery Stock_

SPECIAL NUT CATALOGUE ON REQUEST

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JONES' PENNSYLVANIA GROWN

NUT TREES WILL SUCCEED WITH YOU.

WRITE FOR A COPY OF MY 1917 CATALOGUE AND NEW PRICE LIST

_If interested in the propagation of nut trees or top-working seedling trees, ask for a copy of my booklet on propagation and list of tools..._

J. F. JONES, The Nut Tree Specialist

LANCASTER, PA.

_Northern Nut Trees_

_Why Plant Nut Trees?_

_Varieties_:

PECANS. BLACK WALNUTS. ENGLISH WALNUTS. HICKORY NUTS.

WHEN TO SET NUT TREES. HOW TO SET NUT TREES. DISTANCE APART TO SET NUT TREES. SOIL FOR NUT TREES. FERTILIZER FOR NUT TREES. NUT TREES AS ORNAMENTALS. NUT TREES FOR PROFIT.

Do you want to know about all of the above? If so, write for our beautiful illustrated catalogue for 1917.

_Maryland Nut Nurseries_

BOWIE, MARYLAND.

THOMAS P. LITTLEPAGE PAUL WHITE

P. S. We forgot to say that we not only have the answers to the above but we also have the trees. M. N. N.

CHESTER VALLEY NURSERIES

ESTABLISHED 1853

Choice Fruit and Ornamental Trees, Cherry Trees on Mazzard Roots, Hardy Evergreens, Flowering Shrubs, Hedge Plants, etc. Originators of the

THOMAS BLACK WALNUT

JOS. W. THOMAS & SONS, King of Prussia P. O., MONTGOMERY CO., PENNA.

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A GOOD WAY TO KEEP POSTED IS TO READ THE MONTHLY

AMERICAN NUT JOURNAL

OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE NORTHERN ASSOCIATION

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