completely, and the other tree has been badly damaged.

* * * * *

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