int the
food supply subtends all advances in civilization. Now the hour is late
and we all know what Dr. Fairchild has done. Any remarks on my part are
made because they belongs to the form of polite procedure rather than
because of need for telling of things which Dr. Fairchild has
accomplished.

DR. FAIRCHILD: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Northern Nut Growers
Association. When I face men and women who are doing things in
agriculture I feel a peculiar degree of embarrassment. I do not know why
but I suppose it is because what I have done, what little I have done in
bringing in these new things, has never enabled me to get to the bottom
of any of the things that I have brought in. In other words I feel that
I am in the presence of a number of men who know down to the very
smallest minutiae the business that they are engaged in. Now I do not
know these minutiae about plants. I wish I did. There is nothing more
fascinating in the world than to take one crop and learn to know it
"down to the ground." It is coming to be one of the greatest things in
the imagination of man, this grappling with the fundamental problems of
agriculture which are wrapped up in the varieties of the plants that we
grow. I have had a very severe education in that matter of varieties and
I want to congratulate you as a body of men and women who are
individually going to find out what these best varieties are.

I suppose that the talk that Mr. Reed and I had in a bamboo grove out in
Chico., California, when we were trying to find out uses for the bamboo
and Reed said: "Well, the pecan and almond growers want to knock the
nuts off their trees with these bamboo poles," is what led up to this
talk, and I want to thank Mr. Reed for the opportunity to show slides of
a few of the new plants which we are working on in the Department of
Agriculture.

We brought in so many of them, (47,000 different kinds) in these 22
years that the office of Plant Introduction has been in operation that
Mr. Reed suggested that the nut growers would like to have thrown on the
screen pictures of the nuts of foreign countries. I said that we did not
have any. Then I began to dig into our own literature, project reports,
experimenters cards, correspondence and the other recording machinery
that we have and I found that we had a good many. I want to make it
perfectly plain to you that what I am going to do tonight is simply to
open a door and show you the possibilities of some