e all agree with Professor Smith in a way. Something ought to be
done to the surface to prevent the land from washing, and there is no
better way of doing that than by planting trees. Then the roots will
prevent washing and they can take care of themselves better than a
surface crop. Especially is this true on the hillsides, so there is a
good deal in Professor Smith's argument. And yet there is the danger
that those trees will be infected with disease and insects. On plants
and trees that are attended to and cultivated we find those pests will
be kept in check. So there are two sides to that argument.

PROFESSOR SMITH: The point I raised was this, that it is possible in
some places to attain by fertilization the advantage that comes by
cultivation in other places. Great things have been done without
fertilization. There are chestnut orchards in Corsica of grafted trees,
ranging from the size of my wrist to eighteen to twenty feet in
circumference. They have not been fertilized in centuries, and they
yield enough to support the entire population.

THE PRESIDENT: We would like to hear from Col. Van Duzee, and I want to
say that, as President of the National Nut Growers Association, he is
well acquainted with these things. I commend him to you and promise that
whatever he may have to say to you is worthy of your very careful
consideration. I have the honor to belong to the association of which he
is the president, and know it is seldom we have an opportunity to hear
men like him.

COL. VAN DUZEE: Gentlemen, I am going to side step this argument for I
do not think it worth while taking up the time. We are here for other
purposes. Personal experiences are not the general rule because each
one's experience differs from that of others. We might all tell our
personal experiences and after we were all through we would not have
accomplished anything. I want to take you back to the point from which
we started this, in order to know what we are talking about. To
illustrate what I want to say to you, we can take the root pasture of a
tree and analyze it in every possible way so as to bring to bear upon it
the best judgment we have from all sources. The tree grown upon a
hillside has a root pasture which is entirely different in many ways
from the root pasture in the river bottoms. If we have a tree growing on
a hillside in a soil that easily transmits moisture and it gives that
tree constantly a stream of pure water going through