ich will restore the
fertility to that soil. In the present condition of the market for
commercial fertilizers, I believe we have gone beyond the point where
any man can afford to use commercial fertilizers to any great extent on
ordinary crops. I believe it is possible to go too far in the
stimulation of a growing orchard. My opinion is that a series of
inter-crops that results eventually in a large deposit of nitrogen, such
as we get from several leguminous crops plowed under, will have a
tendency to bring that orchard into a condition--I am speaking now, you
understand, of the pecan---where it will be susceptible to disease and
winter-killing.
If you have followed me as far as I have gone in this, you will begin to
see at once that the men who are going to be successful in solving these
problems are the men who are going to learn the game. Among the human
family, you know, we have a stock phrase that we use sometimes when a
man dies and we don't understand the cause of his death. We say "He died
of heart failure." That is a convenient thing to hide behind.
"Winter-killing," to my mind, is another such term. It is used, for
instance, in a case where an individual tree, for some reason or other
not quite understood, "passed away." (Laughter.)
I have been fifteen years in the growing of pecan trees in the South,
and I am free to confess that the most disturbing element in my life at
the present time is the fact that we "have known so many things that
weren't true." We have gone ahead fully believing that our course was
justified, that it was well digested, desirable in every way, and
suddenly waked up to find that we were radically wrong, or, at least,
that there was a very open question as to whether we were not absolutely
wrong.
To the person of limited means the idea of being able to produce a nut
orchard at very little expense is very attractive, and my heart goes out
to people in that condition because I have been in that condition myself
and passed through it. Ten years ago I bought a piece of land for forty
dollars an acre, and planted seventeen pecan trees on each acre. It cost
me twenty-five dollars an acre to lay off the land, dig the holes, and
plant the trees nicely, with about a half pound of bone meal mixed in
the soil in each hole. I carried that nut orchard on, using some
inter-crops, up to one year ago, when it finished its eighth year of
growth, and, without burdening you with the minute figures,
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