of these men has an interesting story and I wish he were
here. I tried to bring him along but he could not get away from his
farming operations. He operates several hundred acres of farm land in
the Missouri River bottoms and his house stands in a grove of native
pecans. When he went into his house he pointed to a hook on the door
post where he tied his boat the previous spring when he moved his family
out because of high water. That year, 1947, all his grain crops were
destroyed by the flood but that fall he harvested 50,000 lbs. of pecans.
They sold for 25c a pound and the total expense was for picking them,
off the ground. In a year like that, $12,000.00 would come in handy. It
rained again in Kansas this year and I called him and asked about the
flood. He said he had a couple of inches of land that wasn't covered
with water, but he expects to gather 40,000 lbs. of pecans this fall.
That is interesting because there are thousands of acres in the middle
west where crops have been destroyed by floods. Yet here is a crop that
grows on native trees with very little care, that will pay off despite
high water.

I asked my friend what effect the high water would have on the pecan
foliage and he replied that the leaves would fall, but that the trees
will produce new leaves and the nuts will mature. He has been through
this before and knows what he is talking about.

Reference was made a short while ago to the pecan as a shade tree. I
think this is one of the big opportunities in pecan growing. Recently I
drove from Louisiana, Missouri, to central Ohio and saw a string of dead
elms along the entire route. Now the oaks are threatened in the same
way. We don't know what to do about shade trees. Some scientists from
Holland visited us several weeks ago and they weren't very enthusiastic
about their disease resistant elm selections. We had hoped that these
selections might provide the answer to the elm tree problem.

Now pecans make very attractive shade trees. I used to live near Kansas
City on a place where someone had planted 18 or 20 pecans right along
the side of a golf course. When the trees were about 20 years old a
fairway was laid out through this pecan grove and now blue grass grows
right up to the tree trunks. A lot of other shade trees are shallow
rooted and lawns do not grow well under them. I think there is a
tremendous opportunity to plant pecans as shade trees.

There is just one other point I want to make. Un