its root system,
and there happens to be enough fertility in that vicinity, that moisture
is impregnated with plant food, and the tree will get all it wants. You
can't speak in the same breath of the tree growing in the river bottoms
whose entire root pasture is entirely different. The root pasture may
become contaminated by various things which may cause, so to speak,
ptomaine poison. Therefore I say that every locality, every soil, every
climatic condition, every variety of tree must be taken as individual.
What would be good for an apple orchard in Virginia might be fatal to an
apple orchard immediately south of Lake Brie in Ohio. The use of
commercial fertilizer that would be good in one locality would be bad in
another. Therefore I disapprove of this kind of a discussion, because we
are not speaking to a definite point. I want to bring your minds to this
point, that every individual tree and its locality, and the man that is
responsible for its welfare, must be analyzed before you can speak
intelligently about what must be done.

I am going to tell you the same story I told the societies at Pharoa,
Alabama. They wanted me to talk on this subject and I said, "You remind
me of a backwoods character I have come in contact with in the woods of
Florida who is ill and doesn't know what is the matter with him. He
knows he needs medicine and he goes down to the general store and buys a
bottle of patent medicine recommended by the groceryman and he takes it
and maybe it helps him and maybe it don't, but if he don't get better he
goes and gets advice from some other man like the grocer." I said, "That
is the way you are demonstrating fertilizer." The first thing I would
advise would be this: to analyze the individual pasture of the
individual tree and take everything that enters into the history of that
tree and everything that bears upon it. All the accumulated wisdom of
others won't help us very much. We have to use common horse sense. We
can't talk about these things generally. In poor soil and under bad
conditions the pecan tree will do nothing. There are trees I know
twenty-six or twenty-seven years old that are not as large as my wrist,
that have never borne a nut and never will. I can also show you trees in
that immediate vicinity, planted at the same time from the same nuts
with favorable conditions, that are seventy or eighty feet high and
bearing good crops of nuts. Those nuts came out of the same bag the same
day