but the pecan market situation
has apparently reached a condition of saturation. It was very difficult
to sell pecans last fall, not because there is over-production, no, but
because there is under-consumption.

There are two things which will remedy the situation. The pecan is
unquestionably the finest nut that is produced in the United States. If
the people of the North can be acquainted with the pecan, there is no
question in my mind but that it will be possible to vastly increase
consumption. The Oklahoma growers and buyers hope to put before the
legislature a proposition to assess a tax of a quarter of a cent or
something like that per pound, which will be used in an advertising
campaign to advertise pecans outside of the state, so maybe you folks in
New York and elsewhere, if the campaign is successful, will hear more
about Oklahoma pecans in the future.

Well, these seedling trees--I must get on with my story--are cultivated
and sprayed. We are sometimes accused of producing wild nuts at no cost.
This is not the situation distinctly. It costs just as much to produce
these native seedling nuts as it does to produce the varieties, the
advantage being that we start with a large tree which is capable of
producing from 50 to 200 or 300 or even 400 pounds of nuts within four
or five years after the operation is started instead of waiting 20 or 25
years to get good commercial production.

As I said, a selection is made of the trees at the beginning. The
selection is continued with each succeeding year as the trees grow
larger and additional trees are thinned out so that they stand
eventually a hundred or 150 feet apart, giving to each tree adequate
room.

Throughout the state we have a great deal of interest in propagation by
topworking of varieties of pecans. The experiment station made the
serious error for 15 or 20 years in the early development of the
interest in the work in centering on the idea of changing these natives
over to varieties. We now are swinging back to a proper evaluation of
the native nuts, and nobody is satisfied with the present varieties, our
interest of developing and the exploration and discovery of new
varieties being such that the Northeast Oklahoma Pecan Growers
Association arranged two years ago to finance a contest for the
discovery of seedling nuts which could be utilized in that territory and
be more profitable than any variety that we now have.

We don't like the Stuart because o