Part 21
Since the first year's work we have made a few purchases, and planted a few more nut seeds. At the present time we have planted five pairs of named varieties of filberts, four Chinese chestnuts, of which three survive, four Persian walnuts, three of which survive, and two Japanese walnuts. We also have a few seedlings of Turkish tree hazel obtained from nuts sent to us by one of our friends in the state of Washington and a few butternut seedlings grown from nuts of a tree on the college campus.
Future plans include an orchard with many of the named varieties of black walnuts and also, we hope, some of the new hardy strains and selections of the Persian walnut being introduced by the United States Department of Agriculture. Representative specimens of a wide range of nut species will be collected. Some further work on chestnuts and filberts may be attempted if they prove to be hardy here. Plans for the more distant future include studies in soil fertilization and in spraying for disease and insect control.
+Cold Injury in 1947-48+
This past winter has been very hard on nut trees, and on some other trees as well. In the first place, the cold weather of the autumn began very suddenly after six weeks of uninterrupted warm weather without any cool nights to harden the wood. In late September a few days of cool weather came, and then three nights in five with temperatures near 20°. The walnut foliage and some of the youngest wood turned black. Next came a winter with extremely low temperatures, with the minima ranging from 18 to 23 degrees below zero over our orchard land. Our four Persian walnut trees were killed back to the ground; three of them have sprouted this summer from the roots. Considerable leaf bud killing occurred on Chinese chestnut. One Japanese walnut died back to the ground and has sprouted from the roots. The other tree lost most of its younger wood, but some buds near the base of last season's growth have sprouted out to make a new top. Several specimens of the golden chinkapin (_Castanopsis_) of the Pacific Coast, which had made one year's growth here, were killed outright.
Most of the terminal buds and youngest wood of our nursery trees of black walnut were killed, but the trees have grown well this year from the lateral buds. In the woods some black walnuts which had been cut down about four or five years ago, and which had made sprout growth now about fifteen feet high, were killed back from two to four feet by the winter. A twenty-year-old Stabler black walnut on our lawn lost many of its top limbs, though the lower limbs survived the winter all right. Some other types of trees were also badly damaged: some locust trees were killed to the ground, and many others were killed to very old wood. A ginkgo tree on our lawn was killed back to the main trunk. This was one of the few times that I have ever seen injury on this species.
One of the five named varieties of filberts, Pal, escaped winter injury. DuChilly and Italian Red each have one good tree and one that was killed back to the ground, but is now sprouting from the roots. Of Medium Long, both trees have been killed way back. One tree of Cosford was killed completely, and the other tree has been badly damaged.
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President Davidson: Thank you, Mr. Clarke. Our family stopped on the way at a shelling plant where they were handling nuts by the ton, not the bushel, just the ton. I am not exaggerating. You have all heard the hill-billy program from Renfro Valley, no doubt, and we have with us today the man who is running that cracking plant and also this hill-billy chorus, Tom Mullins, who will tell us about what he is doing down at Renfro Valley.
Black Walnuts: A New Specialty at Renfro Valley
TOM MULLINS, Renfro Valley, Kentucky
Mr. Mullins: As Mr. Davidson said, I come from a little hill-billy section up in Kentucky known as Renfro Valley. Up until about a year ago the main commodity there was hill-billy music and a lot of noise on Saturday night. About last August our boss there kind of got interested in black walnuts. There were a lot of them going to waste all over the county due to the fact that most of our locals up there are kind of lazy. They don't like to get up there and stomp them out.
His original idea was to set up a hulling plant and hull the nuts and then buy the walnuts from the locals after they were dried. One thing led to another, and we talked to Mr. McCauley there, and Dad bought a big walnut plant to process black walnuts all the way through. He was new to it and so was I. He said, "Let's buy a million pounds of black walnuts." I didn't any more know what a million pounds of black walnuts was than I know how many grains of sand is in three or four buckets. It didn't take me very long, I think it was 31 days, and I bought 1,030,000 pounds. That's a whole lot of walnuts in anybody's language.
One of the local boys on our radio program came up with the bright idea that before in Renfro Valley we used to be just half nuts; now we are walnuts.
We started cracking these things along about the 15th of October, and last Saturday we cracked our last 10,000 pounds. Our machine is capable of cracking approximately 10,000 pounds in an 8-hour shift, and we carry the walnut all the way through to remove any of the field litter that it may have when it is picked up, and through cleaning air blasts and into a cracking machine that does darn near all the work. The only thing we haven't been able to figure out yet is how to get this machine to tell a bad kernel from a good one. We have to leave that to some of the girls who do the work on the picking belts.
Our future plan for this fall is to buy a million and a half pounds this year and process them. I believe one of these gentlemen a while ago mentioned something about the pure food laws. They are pretty rough on us. We have to pasteurize our walnuts. The state law of Kentucky requires 190 degrees of heat for an hour and a half. That's a lot of heat.
We package our nuts in two-ounce packages and in 35 and 50-pound cartons for the wholesale trade.
That has created quite a little industry there in our county. We have one county there, Clark County--Winchester, Kentucky, is the county seat of it--and out of that one county last year alone I bought 800,000 pounds of walnuts. That was, walnuts in the hull that the farmer had picked up and brought to us in trucks.
Our success was not too great in this method of hulling green walnuts to get our supply. We weren't adequately fixed up to dry the walnuts and take care of them in storage. We lost a few of them that way, but I think this year we have a little better sense and will let the farmer stomp them out.
We are working now on an educational program, both newspaper and radio, to persuade the farmers in our locality to let their walnut trees grow. We tell them nearly all the walnut trees will produce enough kernels or shelled walnuts to bring in as much money as they would if cut down and taken to the mill and used for saw logs. That is our main problem now, to try to keep the black walnut industry working there in our community. And our future plans call for plantings of black walnut seedlings and convincing the farmer and the 4-H Club members and all the boys in the Future Farmers of America and organizations like that to protect and cultivate their black walnut trees.
I am kind of on the fence this year. I stuck my neck away out the other day and bought a farm. After checking the farm I found I had about 600 walnut trees. Now, then, I am hollering on one hand for an increase in prices of raw material, and as a sheller I am hollering on the other hand to get the prices down. But I believe as a producer for next year I am going to try to forget about the shelling and let the prices go to the devil.
Mr. McDaniel: Would you mind telling us what you had to pay for the walnuts in the shell?
Mr. Mullins: Our average last year was $4.33. We went as high as $4.80. Some of those we bought hurriedly--
President Davidson: In the hull?
Mr. Mullins: No, that's dry shell. Our walnuts in the hull we paid a dollar and a quarter a hundred for, and if we had had good success we'd have made some money on it at that angle.
There is one question I'd like to put before you gentlemen. Maybe some of you know a little something about it. I was reading an article not long ago in Popular Mechanics Magazine about some plant on the West Coast that is developing the Vitamin C content of the walnut hull itself. It is very high, the Vitamin C content in the walnut hull.
Another thing we did last year. After we hulled all of these walnuts we had a mess of hulls on hand, and our farmers were a little reluctant to come and get them. We tried to talk them into using them for fertilizer. They are kind of like some of the boys, they have got to be shown. They have to see somebody else do it before they tackle it.
Out of curiosity I laid my garden off and divided it in half, and on one half I put a top dressing of these dried-out, pulverized walnut hulls, and I firmly believe that the side that had the walnut hulls on it produced twice as much. And some of the boys in the neighborhood kind of noticed what kind of garden I had, and we don't have any hull problem anymore. They carried them all off.
Same way with the shells. We tried to get them to haul the shells off to use them on the fields for tobacco land and to grow blue grass, and they found out that was pretty good, so they are bothering us now about our shells.
We have another by-product. It is too small a granule kernel to go through, and we can't remove the shell from it. We have tried that out on chickens and hogs and some other farm animals, turkeys, ducks and geese. One boy that works for me there in the cracking plant had 28 hens. He had them in a pen, and he was getting six and eight eggs a day. So I talked him into taking some of these granules home and feeding them to his chickens, and in two weeks his 28 hens were producing 20 to 24 eggs a day. That kind of settled that problem, too. Some of the boys kind of got an idea they'd like to have some of that.
A lot of you folks are here from the North, and you possibly would be going back along Highway 25 going home, and I'd like to extend an invitation now to stop off tomorrow or the next day and look over our plant. It's quite interesting, quite a complicated piece of machinery. Mr. McCauley at Chicago is the gentleman who designed the machine, and he will have something to say about it.
One of the local farmers came in to see that machine one day, and it was operating, just batting the kernels out right and left. He looked up at it, gandered it all over, and I asked him what he thought it was. He said, "It's a damn lie. That thing can't do it."
So come see us.
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President Davidson: Thank you, Mr. Mullins. Next, Marketing Black Walnut Kernels. This fits in with what Mr. Mullins has said. Mr. McCauley from Chicago will tell us about it. Mr. McCauley.
Marketing Black Walnut Kernels
F. J. McCAULEY, McCauley Company, Chicago, Illinois
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Tom has got me on the spot here. I came here to speak to you about the marketing of black walnuts. Machinery is a hobby of mine, and that thing there was just one of those off-shoots of an infertile brain. But Tom is having a lot of trouble, and a lot of fun with it, so if you people would like to see that machine, that particular machine, I am glad that he invited you up there. It may give you a little different idea of what the sheller is up against in the salvaging of black walnut kernels.
You are interested in growing the black walnuts and other nuts in the shell, but they do have to be prepared for the public, and Tom's job, and other people's that are in the shelling business, is getting them out. The machines are made at Knoxville, Tennessee, and you can get a fairly decent idea about the shelling of black walnuts from the machine Smalley has. Tom's is a much larger size.
Now we will get down to this thing I came here to talk to you about, the marketing of black walnuts. My speech is divided into three parts; the first is about nuts, the second is about nuts and the third is about nuts, and I am nuts. Yes, that's more true than you think. My nickname throughout the United States is "Nuts" McCauley, and I am proud of it. It is a good nickname to have for a man that's in the nut business. And I most certainly am in the nut business, machinery on one hand and the selling of various types of nut kernels on the other.
You people probably don't know it, but you have the best advertised nut in the United States that you are working with, black walnuts. There are very few people in the United States that don't know what a black walnut kernel is, or a black walnut. In fact, I would say that 75 per cent of them at some time or other have gathered black walnuts, have hulled them. You know those pretty stained hands you have, and I can remember back in those days when I was a kid when I used to get those hands of mine just so brown and black from the hulling of black walnuts that my mother would almost want to turn me over her knee and spank me. But when wintertime came I always had a bunch of black walnuts that we could sit down and crack and put in those cookies or in that fudge.
I have talked to a good many of you people here, and I have a prepared speech, but I am going to ramble a little bit and I am going to ask you to ask me questions, because I found out that I don't know so many things, or the speech that I was going to make to you might not be as interesting as your asking me questions. I do want to say a few things, and I will go through quickly.
The first is the marketing of black walnuts in the shell. We find in the marketing of any product that there is a tremendous amount of waste due to poor sacking, due to a little dishonesty on the part of the people who are selling merchandise. You know, if there is a brick in a bag, the brick weighs a pound, that costs the man who buys the black walnuts money. In other words, out of that pound of brick he intended to get a small quantity of meats to sell, so his cost immediately goes up. You'd be surprised at how many bricks and how much iron there is in black walnuts and pecans! It's universal throughout the United States. There is a lot of chiseling that goes on. Your bags should be good. Black walnuts must be held for some time before they are processed, and one black walnut bag used one year can't be used another. If you can get by with one year's use of a bag to hold a hundred pounds, or whatever is put in it, of black walnuts, you are very fortunate. Usually they break out before the year is over, and that causes waste. So start out with a decent bag.
I made a little note here to talk to you about California black walnuts. The standard throughout the United States to people who actually buy black walnut kernels is what we call in the brokerage field Eastern black walnuts. That means Kentucky and Tennessee. Those are Eastern blacks, they are the blacks with the flavor, the blacks that stand up. From my home state they have Missouri blacks, but the quality isn't there. The flavor doesn't hold up. But you people down here grow the finest blacks in the world. California, yes, California grows and shells a lot of black walnuts, but they don't have a black walnut flavor. The flavor is gone. Where it went, I don't know. But there isn't any black walnut flavor in California blacks. [A different species, _Juglans hindsi_--Ed.]
So some unscrupulous people buy California blacks and mix them with Eastern black walnuts. Then they can't call them Eastern blacks. They are just black walnut kernels. But black walnut kernels that are 100 per cent Eastern black walnut kernels should be the standard of black walnuts through the country.
Now, Tom has told you something about the process of shelling. I am just going on to say that the average sheller gets about 10 to 11.7 pounds of black walnut kernels to the hundred pounds. So you can realize there again what a problem he has.
Well, the marketing of black walnuts is the selling of black walnuts in the shell or shelled. We have very little demand in the Chicago markets for in-the-shell black walnuts. I probably sell, oh, maybe 5,000 pounds a year on South Water Market, and they go out to the various stores, and they, in turn, sell them to the homes that like to crack black walnuts instead of buying the kernels.
The American public buy with their eyes. Consequently, the packaging of black walnut kernels or the packaging of any merchandise is very important. I made a statement this morning that has always been interesting to me. You know, Chicago is the biggest candy center in the world, and we do a lot of experimenting with candy. Now, your industry is tied very closely to candy, because a lot of the black walnuts, hickory nuts, and the like, go into the making of candy. But to prove my point, a number of times friends of mine who are interested in the sale of merchandise have taken quality candy and packed it in a common box, and they have taken an inferior quality of candy and packed it in a fancy box and set it on the floor and put the same price on both products. The American public, remember, buys with their eyes. So they buy something that is well dressed and they buy that inferior product, twice or three times as fast as they would that quality product in the common box.
I am bringing this out to illustrate a point. _Well packaged merchandise, sightly merchandise, always pays._ Quality to you people who actually crack black walnuts in your homes is something that will pay dividends. Separate your big kernels. Offer them to the public and they will pay for them.
I was talking to Dr. Jones of Pennsylvania about the sale of black walnut halves. He says that he gets a good many of them. Well, there are throughout these United States of ours a good many very fancy stores that will buy merchandise of this type. But the quantity that anyone gets is very small, so the suggestion that I made to Dr. Jones is that he take his quarters and mix them with his halves. That's not cheating or anything like it. It is making a product that is superior. And you know they say if a man makes a better mousetrap the world will come to his door. And that is generally true. Sometimes it takes a long time to bring it to the American public or to your buyers, to make them realize that you have a superior product, but that's the thing that it takes.
Now, there are a number of ways they sell blacks in this country. They sell them in two-ounce cellophane bags, they sell them in six-ounce cellophane, they sell them in eight-ounce cellophane, but the greater quantity of the blacks are sold in bulk, as Tom told you, in 35- and 50-pound cases, and they go to the candy manufacturer, they go to the ice cream manufacturer, and chiefly throughout the southern part of the United States for ice cream, believe it or not. The Southern States buy more black walnut ice cream than any other division of the United States. In the Central West, too, black walnuts are quite popular for use in ice cream.
Now, if there is anyone that has any questions, I'd like for you to ask them, and I will try to answer them, I won't promise that I can, about the marketing of black walnuts.
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A Member: What's the retail sale on those cellophane bags?
Mr. McCauley: What would be the retail sale price?
A Member: Yes.
Mr. McCauley: Well, the cellophaning of walnuts is quite an expensive proposition. We will say right now the kernels are worth 70 cents a pound. The cellophaner has to add a dime a pound to that price, so he figures his cost at 80 cents and the cost of cellophane, and he sells that merchandise so that he makes a 15 per cent profit. Let me see if I can tell you, a two-ounce bag--
Mr. Mullins: It sells for from 18 cents to 25 cents.
Mr. McCauley: Yes, 18 cents in the chain stores. An 8-ounce package at A & P in Chicago will sell for 59 or 69 cents. I have forgotten now just what it is. I can't keep these prices in my mind, although I will tell you this now. If any of you ever come to Chicago, I have an experimental plant in Chicago. If you could remember McCauley, it's "McCauley Company," or "McCauley Machinery Company," and in that plant I also have a new machine for bagging nuts, cellophane bagging. It makes the bag, fills it and seals it in one operation, and we have operated that machine at the rate of 100 bags per minute, 2-ounce or 6-ounce, it doesn't make any difference. The only trouble is the people couldn't handle the bags that fast, so we had to cut it down to 58 a minute. It's quite an operation, and at this time it is an experimental operation. But I would be more than pleased to have any of you drop in on me in Chicago. If I am not there someone in my organization will be glad to show you, if you tell them what you came for.