Nut growing

Front matter

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS AIUINTA • SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO.. Limited

Preface

Here is a book intended to serve as a general guide for leading the reader into a new field of agriculture. When the subject has captured the imagination of amateurs lust of the chase will then do the rest. Many hands will make light work of research and experiment. Tree nuts are the only ones described and not many kinds of these — just enough to cover the principles and main points of nut growing. It is necessary to omit notes on hundreds of varieties and species of nut bearing trees and shrubs. Tropical nut trees bearing crops of nuts for -which there is a large established market are interesting to people of the tropics, but this book does not go so far toward the equator. Nut bearing annual plants, including water plants which furnish a basic food supply for many people in distant countries, belong to a large volume not yet written.

One of the objects in publishing these pages at this time is to present a certain simple new method of grafting as promptly as possible because the obstacle of difficult grafting has stood in the way of development of the subject. A clever youth guided by the instructions here given may to-day do better nut tree grafting or fruit tree grafting than could vl PREFACE

have been done by any one excepting the most expert horticulturist two years ago. The simplest methods of propagation known to the author have been described, the idea being to show one way for doing things successfully.

The subject of nuts leaped into the firing line as a twentieth century movement along with development of the automobile, wireless telegraphy, and the aeroplane.

America has suddenly become aware of the food value of nuts and their relation to the shortage of labor question. A tree works while the farmer sleeps and his hired man goes to town. Men who know most about nuts are afraid to present their ideas in book form at this moment of rapidly changing knowledge of the subject. The Georgia pecan grower would not accept all of the California walnut grower's conclusions of to-day and neither one of them would feel comfortable with information coming from Pennsylvania chestnut growers. There is need right now for a little book that will press a button and turn the light on the essentials of the subject. The general farmer is asking for such a guide and so is the amateur garden lover. The professional nut grower says that he would like to look that sort of book over in order to check up some of the things that he has forgotten about.

In order to keep abreast of the times the reader who finds that he is developing a brotherly feeling toward the red squirrel will observe that he needs to have access to a good deal of reading material.

PREFACE vii

Literature on the subject of nuts and nut culture has now become so voluminous that no one excepting the student with library faciHties at hand could fairly hope to know what is being done in this rapidly expanding new field of interest and activity. The amateur may do practical work with the aid of this small brochure but he should in addition subscribe to the American Nut Journal, published at Rochester, New York. Membership in the National Nut Growers' Association and the Northern Nut Growers' Association will allow him to come in contact with the experts and to receive copies of reports upon annual transactions of the associations.

In California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania the incomes of nut growers frequently rank with the larger incomes of men in the learned professions. Such was not the case previous to the year 1900 in this country, although in the Old World nut crops have furnished the chief income from large districts for centuries.

According to a Department of Commerce Report the total value of all nut importations into the United States for the year 191 9 w^as $57,499,044. We might, as well as not, have produced the larger part of the various nuts going into this valuation. Walnut and pecan growers have made an excellent start. The everyday farmer and gardener will find a new interest, one that will help to keep the boys on the farm, when he adds nut culture to his older routine work.

Part I

Our next great meat supply stands all ready to be released whenever man chooses to dispose of the natural enemies of the reindeer, musk ox, and northem bison. Having applied his intelligence to the removal of natural checks to increase of these animals he may then complacently view the rapid expansion of new and beautiful fat herds over the boundless pasturage of circumpolar lichens and grasses.

An irresistible fish supply will come sliding out from the waters and over our tables when man wishes to unlock the floodgates and say go to the fish breeder and fish protector. The seas and rivers are now awaiting the call for them to do their part.

In this twentieth century of ours extensive studies have shown that nut trees of many kinds are capable of furnishing all of the proteins, oils, and vitamines belonging to the meat group of foods. This does not mean that we are to substitute nut cakes for lamb chops. It means only that practically limitless additions are to be made to that particular group of foods.

What is a food supply? In relation to man it signifies the kind of food that men of any one part of the world have become accustomed to eating.

Furthermore, it includes the idea of acquiring that sort of food in accordance with the way of living. An American Indian required several square miles of land in order to thrive by his way of living. He could not exist at the Chinaman's rate of three to the acre on land cultivated intensively. A Chinaman suddenly deposited upon an Indian's square mile would not know how to get his breakfast. All of this relates to the adult Indian and Chinaman and to what psychologists call his thought-habit. Adults ought to be quarantined largely because of their attitude toward economic questions in general. An Indian child or a Chinese child may easily be taught to live like the adults of each other or in some better way altogether. New thought-habit in relation to foods is now the order of the day because of rapidly increasing population. Thought-habit is desirable for daily working purposes until it reaches its limitations. Limitations are reached when any man imagines that the world is really faced by questions of shortage of food supply. Were wheat, corn, rice, and other grains to be suddenly stricken from the Earth, man might then live better than ever before. Nut crops with their large average yield per acre at less expenditure of labor would furnish more of the food essentials than are to be obtained from grain crops. Famine occurs in grain regions rather than in tree regions. Primitive man depended upon wild plants and animals for his food supply. In a second stage of development man has come to depend upon cultivated plants and domesticated animals. In a third stage he will depend upon crops which require less labor and cost in general, but this stage will presumably not be reached until he has fought many wars in the interest of his thought-habit grain crops. The wild turkey following a line of grains of corn through an opening beneath a log pen holds his proud head erect after disposing of the food that was in sight. Looking upward toward Heaven for ways of escape he sees no outlet from his predicament. His pen is already over-populated and he would favor restriction of the birth rate. The turkey might be out of the pen and in the midst of an abundance of delicious beechnuts and wild grapes in two minutes excepting for his thought-habit. As a highly intelligent bird he is too nearly human to attend to that matter.

The author asked Professor Knight Dunlap if psychologists had an explanation for the fact that men have so many resources for resisting the introduction of knowledge into themselves. Professor Dunlap answered as follows :

*T do not believe that there is any specific 'mechanism by means of which men resist the introduction of knowledge into themselves.' I think the resistance to introduction is just one phase of the general tendency of the mechanism to function in the ways established by instinct and habit. If you consider the organism as a machine, which has certain specific lines of action through heredity, which lines are developed and modified through experience (habit formation), we should expect to find that an organism too easily modified would be illy adapted to survival in the world of varying influences playing upon it. A certain sturdiness, that is to say, a certain resistance to modification, seems essential for the whole range of processes controlled by the nervous system. Is not this, after all, the fundamental law of habit? On the other hand, an organism which is not susceptible of modification, that is, which cannot form new habits, is also inefficient. The organism which has just the proper balance between its tendency to function along the lines of habits already formed, and the tendency to modify these habits where necessary, is, of course, the most efficient."

Huxley said that, in comparison with the ravages of that terrible monster over-population, all other problems are effaced, insignificant. Some of us do not believe that any such monster is more real than is the hoop snake.

If the increase of population in any locality is accompanied by large improvements in the arts of providing, distributing, and making use of food the effects of over-crowding are not injurious to a race in so far as the food supply question may be involved. Nut trees which may be grown upon almost every habitable acre in the temperate or tropical world introduce a new, large improvement in the art of production. Distribution is facilitated by the fact that nuts are not perishable like meats and vegetables and we have plenty of time for gathering the crop and spreading it about over various markets. Improvement in ways for making use of nut foods is coming from laboratories and kitchens so rapidly that we now employ nut products by the ton where they were used in small lots at the beginning of the century.

Malthus in 1798 published his famous essay on Principles of Population, before the days of steam transportation. He placed stress upon the idea that human beings if allowed to multiply without check would increase beyond the food supply. This assumption, if correct, would have to include the idea that man is to remain stupid. Up to the days of Malthus history had recorded checks to over-population by way of pestilence, war, and famine. By pestilence we now mean the microbe. Medical science with its new knowledge of the microbe has taken charge of the question of epidemics to such an extent that we have lost our feeling of helplessness in the matter. War, the second check described by Malthus, will be diminished when sociologists make as thorough a study of politicians as the doctor makes of microbes, and when a league of nations then made possible will exercise police control over the varieties of capitalists who are responsible for infecting diplomats harmfully. Famine, the third check, may be lessened in the natural course of educational advancement as rapidly as men are willing to be taught the principles and practice of effective agriculture.

The most important and persistent check to overpopulation was not understood in the day of Malthus. I refer to cultural limitation or what is known to farmers as the "running out" of any given variety of cultivated plant or animal. Civilized man is a cultivated animal, and his varieties in nations run out. This particular fact allows us to look with equinimity upon the food supply question, knowing as we do that all men whom this earth is capable of producing may be well fed for all time, while one nation after another is running out.

The question of food supply will relate only to the way of living — something quite remediable when found to be unsatisfactory for any large group of people.

Dr. OHver Wendell Holmes commenting upon the Malthusian doctrine spoke of the time when we would all be sitting in each other's laps because of the lack of room. He did not know about the apsedion index to the decline of nations, or in simpler words, the dropping of the birth rate. Professor J. Russell Smith in the humor of Dr. Holmes has introduced the idea of his three-story garden for congested population areas. There are to be nut and fruit trees over the garden. The ground floor will be devoted to ordinary annual crops and in the cellar underneath the garden there is to be a bed of mushrooms. We need not become unduly uncomfortable concerning the question of over-population because the law of cultural limitation will attend to the matter thoroughly. Nations will come and go as they have come and gone in previous cultural periods.

The way of living of each nation determines not only the degree of intimate need in the way of food supply but also the degree of help which any one nation can give toward establishing better economic equilibrium between countries of the world. Over-populated areas are crowded because of the way of living and not because ways for giving relief are unknown. Distribution of knowledge is quite as important as distribution of food products. We have experts enough in every field of human activity but man does not know how to use the experts which he has. A congested area is surrounded by land capable of being widely opened by experts in agriculture.

The New York Times for December 20, 1920, published the following note in a box column.

BOSTON, Dec. 19. — The United States will have a population of 197,- 000,000 people, the maximum which its continental territory can sustain, about the year 2100, Professor Raymond Pearl of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health estimated in a Lowell Institute lecture last night.

To support such a population, he said, 260 trillion calories of food a year would be needed, and judging from the production of the last seven years, when the maximum population was reached, it would be necessary to import about half the calories necessary for sustenance.

One spring the author was undecided about the number of shrimps to be purchased from a dealer for the purpose of stocking his stream at Merribrooke with natural trout food. Taking into consideration the known breeding habits of Gammarus puleXj a part of the problem could be reduced to figures. It was found mathematically after the manner of population statisticians tliat at the end of three years or so the progeny from one thousand shrimps would fill the bed of the stream completely and oblige the water to run out upon the bank in order to get around them. Four thousand shrimps were ordered and the trout now have to be lively in order to get their share of unearned increment away from other fish and from the larvse of helgramites, dragon flies and the ephemeridae.

Population estimates which do not take into account the apsedion* index in its relation to cultural limitations of man and of his domesticated animals will be as misleading for us as they presumably were for the sociologists of Rome, Greece and Egypt.

Biologists and chicken breeders have their own views concerning the fall of Rome.

Japan appears to be crowded because of agricultural thought-habit. Japanese chestnuts, heartnuts and pine nuts would furnish a better balanced food jration and at less cost than the customary food ration now belonging in the rice category. Physical strength of the people would be increased in the course of a single generation on a nut diet. North American nut trees and nut bearing annual plants would thrive in Japan, furnishing a luxurious range in qualities of food beside supporting a population

* Alpha privative, paedion.

many times that of Japan to-day. That Httle country might increase its national weahh quickly by exporting to other countries nut crops to the value of battleships. Politicians now take away the earnings of useful people and put the money into armamentarium for their gunmen of armies and navies.

Japanese scientists ranking among the highest in the world know very well how Japan might set an example for all civilization if battleship money were to be turned over to agricultural educational institutions. Thus would a proud people have justification for a pride based upon pragmatic results of application of keen intelligence to the food question. There is small likelihood of any one civilized country taking any such advanced position while human nature is abroad during our cultural period. One may at least speculate upon that sort of possibility for some of to-morrow's nations.

The naturalist may fairly assume that the imperialistic oligarchy of Japan will be more interested in quietly gaining control of India, China, Eastern Siberia, the Philippines and other strategic points in preparation for hurling Asia against the white man's countries. This political process appears to be well under way at the present time while the Anglo-Saxon is declining and is committing suicide in his profitless civil wars.

Asia might make another sort of revolution by showing that its land is not ''occupied" and that limitless new kinds of food supply would take charge of the expansion question.

"Every nation can and ought to colonize for the sake of its own expansion and, all of the territory of Europe being occupied, we must attempt to get possession of colonies in foreign countries," said Nicolai.

Is all of the territory in Europe occupied? By no means. Occupation in this sense relates simply to methods of living up to the present time. The land cannot fairly be said to be occupied in Europe when wolves are still a pest in the forests of France and when almost every acre traversed by these wolves would produce hundreds of pounds of nut products for man and his domesticated animals every year.

It is said that a machinery victory is the only pos^ sible victory over the land in these days when there is increasing tendency for men to leave the land and go to the cities, but the tree is a machine. So is the annual plant a machine for that matter, but the tree is a machine that is working day and night with less attention required from man than the annual plant requires. The struggle for existence is basically a struggle for sustenance. All commercial life depends upon plants because plants alone are capable of extracting potential energy from the earth. The cause for war is fundamentally acquisition of property, but if property may be acquired through warfare upon nature it is more desirable than warfare by man upon man. The latter has often been called a business, but from my point of view it is a sport of rulers and one which is destructive in all of its final phases. Sociologists tell us that the food supply question is basic in relation to warfare movements. People who feel that they have land enough to supply food enough do not wish to fight excepting when they are misled by their politicians; the latter belonging to the non-producing social element.

War is not brought about in civilized countries by the useful people. It is brought about by the politician and tariffist who cannot think internationally and whose mind represents a reversal to the primitive or clan type. Take away from that kind of politician his argument about food supply and he will find ever-increasing difficulty in persuading fathers and mothers to send their fine sons to play his ruthless game and to pay his bills.

Agricultural experts in our state colleges can make people feel that we have land enough to supply food enough. The question is one of distribution of knowledge among the people, a function of the state. Not only may abandoned farms be made more profitable to-morrow than they were when at their best yesterday, but many of the so-called -waste lands may be made to produce more food than has been commonly produced by soil of first choice up to this date in our own history. Even the swamp lands hold out an attractive feature for the producer who finds joy in new fields calling for a wider range of his keen interest and knowledge. Doubtless there are some swamps and wet lands which may be drained to advantage but legislators must carefully avoid granting privileges carelessly in the matter.

In some of the older countries of the world incomes for large districts depend upon water plants, fish, and other products of -wet lands artificially made for the purpose. In this country we have already caused irreparable damage by draining lands of the sort which peoples with greater experience are today engaged in constructing.

Government estimates of wet lands in the United States capable of being drained and made ready for tilling, place the figure at sixty millions of acres. Reclamation of this wet land would be little short of criminal in localities where the wet lands at lesser expense could be made ready for crops belonging to such lands and sometimes bringing in larger income than tilled land crops. We have already thrown away much of our own rich heritage in wet lands. What would people do for bread in countries in which bread is made from the water chestnut, if the American drainage idea were to strike these countries like a blight? The water chestnut is already acclimated in America as far north as the Merrimac River in New Hampshire. Hundreds of square miles of Oriental wet land are devoted to the raising of the lotus — a plant of which every part is eaten. We have not as yet made use of a nut which was employed by the Indians — the wankapin or -water chinkapin — but the time is coming when we may regret the loss of lands upon which this food supply may be freely grown.

Fish breeders and crawfish breeders of northern

Europe often support their families from shallow, artificial ponds of ridiculously small dimensions.

How many tillable acres have we in America that can compare favorably as to income with Maryland musquash leaseholds with delicious musquash meat now selling at thirty cents per pound and skins at more than three dollars each? Some one will reply that the present market price for musquash meat and fur is a war price, but so is the present cost of beef and wheat. How many tillable acres bring returns like the shallow waters of terrapin breeders ? Wild-fowl breeders are already entering their protests against reclamation projects. The very word "reclamation" is a joke when we have so many millions of acres of tillable land that is wasted or improperly employed and when two or three kinds of wet land products can be profitably raised at one time upon one wet acre — -water nut crops already being standard food crops abroad.

Irrigation projects in some localities may be quite as untimely as drainage projects in this period of our own history. Irrigated land will wear out precisely like other land and we are simply postponing the day when first rate agriculture will prevail. First rate agriculture will consist in raising forty bushels of wheat to the acre upon eight-acre land as is done at Rothamsted in England. Crops grown upon irrigated or drained land belong to second-class agriculture and first-class engineering. The farmer who boasts of his great crops raised so easily is the rooster that crows when a hen has laid an egg. The engineer laid the egg. The large immediate returns are the large immediate returns of a man who puts his hand into another man's pocket.

An unfortunate part of irrigation projects often lies in the fact that beautiful tracts of land are destroyed unnecessarily. So long as good land may be purchased at less than a dollar per acre in some parts of the south it is not yet time for us to carry drainage projects and irrigation projects into territory where the result will simply extend second-rate farming and first-rate engineering.

Individuals and governments loan money for drainage and irrigation projects. If the same amount of money were to be devoted to the work of our agricultural colleges the world of to-morrow would be benefited. Individuals in particular and the present generation in general profit by our wasteful promotion of second-class agriculture. In the words of the poet they ask, "What has posterity done for me that I should do anything for posterity?" They are to shift the cost of engineering plants to a later generation when the time comes for plants of farmers to need more fertilizer. On the whole, to-morrow's population is to be the loser from such drainage and irrigation projects of to-day as are untimely.

According to the 191 4 report from our Department of Agriculture forty per cent of the land in the United States is non-tillable. Aside from the non-tillable land which consists of swamps in which food might be raised profitably a very large percentage of the entire acreage on higher ground already carries tree or bush crops for which we may substitute food-bearing nut trees and shrubs. There is but a small percentage of this untillable land excepting that on bleak, barren mountain tops which cannot be made to carry food crops equal in value to those of the sixty per cent of tillable land of the United States. For example, nearly one-half of the land in Connecticut is considered to be non-tillable land. To my personal knowledge there is little of such land in that State which cannot be made to raise nut crops more valuable than most of the crops which are now raised upon the tillable land in the State. Only twenty-seven per cent of the tillable land in the United States is actually under cultivation, but if we follow the same methods of plant and stock raising in the future it will not be long before one hundred per cent is occupied. As a matter of fact, intensive cultivation of twenty per cent of the tillable land now occupied could be made to produce so much more than it does under present methods that we need have very little anxiety about the need for bringing one more acre of tillable land under cultivation with ordinary crops for some time to come.

One may ride for mile after mile upon the railroads through old settled parts of New York and New England and see on every side worn out sheep pastures supporting many woodchucks and grasshoppers, that could be made to yield good income. On some of the western prairies one may look clear to the horizon and see only French weed, thistles, and wild mustard where once was corn and waving grain — the land now practically abandoned because farmers would not change their crops or do subsoil plowing. While this state of things remains it is all wrong to open up more unimproved land. We are simply increasing competition between men engaged in the lower planes of agriculture.

Is there a deserted hillside sheep pasture in the east or a mustard prairie in the middle west that cannot be made to grow one hundred dollars worth of nuts per acre annually? Probably not.

The attempt to raise corn and other grain crops on the Appalachian hillsides has been extremely destructive because of soil erosion following in localities in which nut tree crops would have given much larger incomes from the same land with the avoidance of erosion and exhaustion of the soil. The deserted farmlands of the eastern states would not be deserted but would be yielding large permanent incomes if tree crops of grafted acorns, hickories, beeches, hazels, and black walnuts had been planted where now the ground is occupied by chipmunks and sumac.

When bird shooting in North Carolina and obliged to jump over deep erosion gullies in the fields all day long, I said to a farmer that his land was running away from him. He replied that he was well aware of the fact but did not know what to do about it. His fields yielded less than ten bushels of wheat to the acre, and the tobacco crop in some years failed to return a profit. My suggestion was to put the best of his land into grafted hickories and black walnuts, and the poorest land into grafted seedless persimmons. One acre treated in this way would yield more income per year than he could get from several acres treated laboriously and with loss of soil in gullies. The trees and grass would hold his land and there would be no trouble from night riders.

Thousands of square miles of hilly land that are now being gullied as a result of raising meagre crops of annual plants may be put into tree crops and saved. Lands that are level or moderately rolling are the only ones in this country that we can afford to devote to crops of annual plants. The loss of land in hilly districts relates not only to the people of to-day but to the gerrerations of to-morrow.

Professor F. K. Moulton in a paper read at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1920 is quoted as saying that the intelligence of man to-day compared with •what it will probably be in future years is in the same ratio as that of a toad when compared with our present development. He is doubtless right. We are toads in our management of land and we cannot hop over our gullies because there is no one in authority to oblige us to make larger incomes and to desist from running our soil down stream.