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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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