t this time. Col. Van Duzee.

COL. VAN DUZEE: There is a longing on the part of a large percentage of
men and women that I meet to escape from conditions which do not seem to
be especially favorable in the large cities, and to get away into the
safety of the country. I believe that nut tree growing offers one of the
safest of those outlets. I believe that a nut orchard should be a part
of a general farming operation. I want to give you my ideas about
inter-crops. Fifteen years ago the doctors gave me three months to live,
drove me out of my business, and away from my home to prolong the agony
for a few weeks or months, and I found, among my orchard trees, a
reasonable amount of health which, to me, repays a greater value than I
could reckon in dollars and cents. It has given me the privilege and the
opportunity of removing myself from the turmoil of the city and the
conflict of the business world to a peaceful, quiet existence, that, to
me, is very much more satisfactory. Now, that is an inter-crop.

Down in Florida, when we used to get together in our citrus seminars and
in our horticultural and agricultural meetings we used to try and make a
man say on what class of soil his home or orchard was located, so that
we might get his viewpoint. For the successful nut orchardist, in a
small way, must, of necessity, be a successful agriculturist. He must
understand soils. You can't have successful inter-cropping without
understanding soils, and, therefore, I can't tell you definitely what
would be good for your northern soils. But I can tell you this, that the
first thing to do when you have an orchard problem to consider is to
make an exhaustive survey of the character of the soil. If it is a
fresh, recently cleared piece of fertile soil, under favorable
conditions, I am satisfied you don't need very much in the way of
inter-cropping. On the other hand, if you select for your orchard site a
piece of land that has been worked to death, I believe it would be well
to inaugurate a system of inter-cropping that would have for its object
the building up of that soil and the improvement of the environment for
the roots of those trees. In the South, we are favored with twelve
months of growing weather. We plant our crops throughout the year. I am
just about beginning now to plow for my oat planting. I am going to
pasture those oats all winter with hogs and cattle. We will harvest our
oats in May. We then follow them with a legume wh